You Make Me Scream (YMMS) was a lot of fun. I now had the attention of Producer Jon Ireson and after a year writing serious songs and protest songs about our country and politics, I just wanted to have fun. It’s June 2020, smack dab in the pandemic and I wanted to funk it up, but it’s hard to write funky songs when you’re alone. So I found if I put my acoustic guitars away and just left the Stratocaster out in the studio, plugged in and ready, I picked it up more often. I felt more band-inspired with the electric guitar strapped on and in the little make believe world called a music studio that’s a fancy way of saying the action is so much faster on the Strat. Scroll down to track 7 here on Bandcamp:
I usually write songs beginning with a guitar riff and a unique vocal riff and then place them together and see where they go. You make me scream was the vocal riff and it pretty much stays right there just having fun with the play of words. It only has nine words in the entire dance song: "You make me (scream, cry, howl, moan) so tenderly”.
I decided that dropping singles was much easier than doing EPs, or LPs, given the Pandemic. One at a time. One after another. In a way it was how we practiced. We just endured long weeks of silence in between takes and went single by single.
YMMS was the first single with this new approach and our first test of collaboration. It was June 2020 and the virus was growing. Everyone was sheltering. The world seemed inside out. So I mailed Chana and Mikaela their own microphone to use and Chana built a home-made voice box and a filter to eliminate mouth noise and household background ). We went through Zoom sound recording 101 and a lot of unusable files in the dropbox.
What saved our butts was that we knew Jon Ireson would come in halfway through the process and rescue us. I recorded the rhythm guitars and vocals with some temporary percussion and bass tracks while Chana and Mikaela sent in their parts. Chana recorded first and Mikaela found time a week or so later — they only ever recorded together on one or two tracks, the rest of the time it was individually.
Jon is a wonderful producer but also a talented musician and he filled in the required funky bass lines and some amazing guitar leads. Most difficulty he worked with a variety of sound files recorded clumsily in different places, on different equipment, at different levels, and he still unified it. His attention to detail gave YMMS such a nice sound. Here’s an email from Jon, typical of email exchange between Producer and Artist:
“Per the drums, I can get a tighter kit and dial the fills way back to just those little funk, “blink and you’ll miss em” fills. You mentioned the drums “never stopping”, are you still cool when the snare drops out when the organ drops happen?? I think some kind of pull back needs to happen when those drops happen or it’s too conflicting. Plus, I think the change there gives the song some good dimension. I can give the hi hat and kick a little more emphasis in that part to propel it through. Keep the beat running just with a different vibe.” Jon Ireson
At one early point in the song-writing process, I had "You make me scream, democracy" and the whole direction was that democracy was exasperating. But the symbiosis between systems of government and Minnesota funk didn't jive, so I went back to "so tenderly" instead of "democracy". And that's as close to serious that I got.
It was released in July 2020 right during the nationwide efforts to get everyone registered to vote. My Twitter motto was: Enjoy. Dance. Vote. YMMS went on to do well on Spotify and several rock/funk radio outlets. On The Virtualistics LP version Jon has gone back and tweaked the levels and the opening organ drop which I discovered one day in Apple’s Logic when playing around with the musical keyboard.
Jon Ireson, Producer, says: “You Make Me Scream was the second track we worked on together. Patrick had a pretty solid framework down already when he sent it to me. The melting organ drops and the cooing backup vocals gave it plenty of personality. My main contribution was weaving a bassline through the track and a little guitar lead to play it out.” (Jon is modest. His guitar soloing was awesome.)
You Make Me Scream
by Patrick Ames ©2021 All Rights Reserved.
You make me Scream
So Tenderly
You make me cry
So Tenderly
You make me moan
So Tenderly
You make me howl
So Tenderly