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[ Def Leppard X/Ten - Songs 1 ]
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Now :: 1 Joe Elliott: It’s wanton lust dressed up a little less dramatically. "Now" is a perfect title. "I’ve got to have somebody right now. Not tomorrow, not next week. Right now." It’s relationship stuff. Most of the lyrics on the album touch on human emotion. Vivian Campbell: This was the love album. We had to curtail it, actually. We were getting a little too Barry White. Joe Elliott: It was getting too lovey-dovey, so we had to write some hate in there as well. It’s love and hate and jealousy and envy. Anything that people can go, "Yep. I’ve been there and done that myself, or seen that in somebody else’s life." With "Now," it’s two people needing to get together as soon as possible. Phil Collen: We heard "Jaded," the song Aerosmith wrote with Marty Frederiksen, and thought, "Wow, this sounds cool. It sounds contemporary and energetic. But it’s obviously Aerosmith. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Def Leppard version of that?" We got Marty Frederiksen and it was instant. He’s a multi-talented musician with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old boy. It influenced the rest of the album. He came in and said, "It’s got to have conviction. It’s got to be aggressive. It’s got to be like you really mean it." That affected all the other songs we did. Joe: I see ‘Now’ as one of those great examples of meeting of the traditional thing and the contemporary sound that we are introducing on this record. It’s got the elements of like, you know, the real drums, it’s got I wouldn’t say big backing vocals, but it’s got powerful BVs on the chorus. I had the opportunity, vocally, to express it much more in a singing voice than in a screechy voice, which is kind of something that, you know, I enjoy a lot more, to be quite honest.
Unbelievable :: 2 Joe: ‘Unbelievable’ is a song that we did in Sweden with Andreas Carlsson and Per Aldeheim. ‘Unbelievable’ is a romantic song, I suppose, if you want to use that analogy. It comes under the heading of the rock ballad, I suppose. But we did approach it in a different way. We tried to make it sound less syrupy than your average rock ballad. I mean lyrically I think it’s got moments that are really kind of blatant. When you write a line like, you know, "Got your name all tattooed on my heart," sometimes that can be a little too shocking for people. Other people it really makes them, you know, brings a lump out in their throat.
You're So Beautiful :: 3 You’re So Beautiful: ..one of about 5 X song’s that could fit comfortably on ‘Hysteria’(with it’s grooving bass line eerily reminiscent stabs of clean guitar chords it could almost be the offspring of ‘Animal’). It’s here that the influences of Leppard’s producer started to show.
Phil Collen: "We did that on purpose - just that bit," Collen smiles. "Definitely. Marty and I demoed it at my house, I had this chorus idea, and he said: ‘Y’know on ‘Hysteria’ you have a verse, a bridge, a chorus and then you have another bit and it’s a tag? Well I reckon you should have another bit on here.’ "Animal" is a great reference for it - I think that was what he was on about.
Joe: For me, ‘Beautiful’, it’s strange how people’s, you know, instant take on a song can be so different even though we’re both kind of on the same lines. Whenever I hear ‘Beautiful’, I always think of it as a cross between Billy Idol and Eddie and the Hot Rods, even though it sounds nothing like it. It’s just in that field of just the simplicity of this basically drums and bass and a little bit of guitar on the top and the voice, just by not being cluttered up by anything. It just gives room for the lyrics and the melody to come through. Phil: Again, this is Marti Frederickson. He’s always doing a...you know, we had most of the song and he said, "Wouldn’t it be great," he said, "You guys used to do this thing where you have a bridge set in a chorus and then it goes somewhere else." And it’s like we never even realised that. And he pointed it out, he said, "So I think it should have a tag on it." So we had this kind of Beatlesque kind of thing and it went to another level. He actually pushed it.
Everyday :: 4 Joe: I love ‘Everyday’. I really do. It’s probably my second or third favourite on the record. It’s…they’re all like babies it’s hard to pick a favourite! But it’s always got me excited. It’s just…it reminds me of Cheap Trick, it reminds me of all the great pop-rock records that I listened to as a kid that were timeless to me and still are. It’s such a bubbly song, it’s just a great excuse to have a good time. It’s got all the room for the melodies and the harmonies and the guitars. There’s even a twang…what is it? Phil: A Coral Sitar! Joe: Yeah it’s even got a sitar on it. So we were definitely going the whole kinda Beatley Cheap Trick route. You know there’s a bit of George Harrison there and some of the vocal melodies are very familiar without being direct theft. Again we’ve always worn our influences on our sleeves we’ve never been afraid to admit them. But it’s a pop song, it’s a great commercial song. It’s instant that’s the great thing about it. It’s one of those songs when you hear it..I personally just wanna put it on again.
Long Long Way To Go :: 5 Joe: I think "Long, Long Way to Go" is a single; whether it’s first, second or third, I just think it’s that strong that it should be a single. For me, it’s probably the most challenging vocal I’ve done since we did "Love Bites". You know, it’s not in the higher register, it was such an emotive performance I had to be giving on that because of the lyric on that song. I think I must have attempted it a dozen times. I just kept going back to it and redressing it and changing bits and you know, listening to it and thinking, ‘Oh, this can be better, that can be better.’ It was just, it was worth the effort, you know?. Occasionally you have a song where you really get the opportunity to just drive a nail home, you know, fully. That’s why we’ve got the whole string arrangement on it and we got David Campbell (Beck's Father) to do strings and you know, we went the whole hog from strings to Spanish guitar to drum loops to regular drums, the huge vocals to the very bone-dry, in-your-face lead vocal thing. I mean we really went to town on it. Phil: "We heard ‘Long Long Way To Go’, and before I’d even finished hearing the chorus I was like: ‘Fuck, we gotta do this song it’s fantastic’" Collen enthuses. "We’re always like, if anyone’s got great songs, just play them to us. And they happened to be the two that we really liked." "It was one they played for us as a sample of what they could do. We said: ‘You’re joking. Nobody’s recorded this song? What’s the point of writing more, this is great, let’s just do this one".
Four Letter Word :: 6 Joe: Whenever I listen to the vocal of "Four Letter Word" I keep relating it back to Lennon’s "Twist and Shout" when you listen to that and you can feel for him because you can see, in your mind you can see the veins on his temples throbbing because he’s really, he’s going for it so much that his voice is on the verge of cracking. That’s the excitement of it. It’s like is he going to get through this before he falls over? And that’s exactly the kind of danger we were trying to get across in that vocal. It was just in the register where I was right on the cusp of my range and it was, you know, you had to be totally on your metal to get it right, you know? Phil: The song originally was supposed to be like a country, like an Elvis country song, and it was really low. That’s how he was going to do it. And then all of the sudden it kind of took on a life of its own and before we knew it, it sounded like, yeah, it does, it’s straight off "High ‘n Dry" and it’s like, "We can’t sing it down there, so Joe, you’re going to have to sing it in an octave up." And that’s why it was so just really, it’s probably the highest one on the album, right?
Joe: Certainly the most gritty.
Torn To Shreds :: 7 Phil: "Torn to Shreds" again, produced by Pete Woodroffe, and in sharp contrast to "Long, Long Way to Go", is minimalist in its approach in the chorus, for example. I think we would have ruined it if we’d have gone, ‘Alright, here we go, stick the backing vocals, the Def Leppard thing,’ so we didn’t. It was Joe singing. You know, it’s that and we complimented that. I also think it sounds very contemporary. It’s a bit drier. It’s not kind of flooded in echo and reverbs and stuff like that. It kind of hits home and again, a lot of people said, "Oh, I like this one." And we’re well aware that it could be kind of potentially be a single. Joe: Sometimes, especially on a song like "Torn to Shreds", the drums are actually quite laid back in the verse, where you’re actually listening to the part more than the sound of them, so it gives you a bit more room to just kid of relax and you don’t have to get the foghorn out and scream over the top because it was the only way you were going to be heard, you know? This whole record has been challenging in that respect. It’s not been challenging as in like, ‘Oh my God, this is so high, I’m going to have to, you know, get the pinchers out to reach these notes.’ It’s more a case of actually going for the quality and expression and being able to emote the lyrics so people when they hear them they actually, it does tug, as Phil said, you know, it tugs at their heart strings. They’re actually listening to what you’re singing, not how you’re singing it. And I think that was much more important on this record than anything we’ve done in the recent past.
Love Don't Lie :: 8 Phil: "Love Don’t Lie", and I’m not saying this because I wrote it, I felt like I was just a conjugate between a piece of paper and somebody else - Even I was like going, "I can’t believe I’ve just written this!" "Love Don’t Lie, It lifts you up, takes you higher when higher ain’t enough." I was like, "Wow, pretty profound.".
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