I noticed this happening on a few songs by various artists. The song starts, plays a few notes of the intro, then stops. You might even hear muffled curses of laughing. Then the song starts up again properly. This is on studio albums, not live albums or anything like that.
What’s the point? Why leave the botched intro in?
Urge Overkill’s Need Some Air and Matthew Sweet’s Thought I Knew You are the tracks that came to mind with this phenomenon. I’m sure I’ve heard others, though.
A recent one: The beginning of “You’re Beautiful” by James Blunt. He starts the song (“My life is brilliant”) and then stops and starts the song again after the next bar. Weird Al did a great pickup of this on “You’re Pitiful”.
I would put out a wild guess that its to make you feel like you’re there in the studio with them. Or something like that.
It gives it all an “unrehearsed” feel.
The Beatles did it on “Revolution No. 1” (and even say “Take Two.”)
There may be another in “I Saw Her Again Last Night” by the Mamas and the Papas. They come in a bit early with “I Saw her” at the last chorus then stop and start again at the right place. It may have been planned, but it also could have been a mistake on the take that sounded good and was left in.
On the album “The Madcap Laughs” Syd Barrett messes up the beginning of “If It’s In You” once or twice.
On their Behind The Music, it was said that that was a mistake.
At the end of Metallica’s “Blitzkreig” they just stop playing and one of the band members belches. Just before it fades out one of the guys says, “I fucked up in one place.” Anyone know who is saying this?
On Clapton’s “Unplugged”, he messes up the start of “Alberta”, stops and says, “Hang on, hang on”, then starts again.
On Ryan Adam’s into to “To Be Young”, he stumbles over his words and stops, and one of the band members (or maybe Adams himself) says, “'e’s got a mouth full of cookies!” Then the band giggles over a bit of (I think) Monty Python, and they start the song again.
Hole’s album* Live Through This* has a song which mocked this: “Rock Star”. She starts by playing a few chords, then says, “Oh”. Plays a few more chords, fumbles and giggles, then launches into the song.
“Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” from Bringing It All Back Home. I’m not sure many people ever heard Dylan laugh before that.
Grandaddy’s Stray Dog and the Chocolate Shake (one of my all-time favorite songs.)
The opening line is “supervisor guy turns off the factory lights.” Jason Lytle tries to sing it falsetto, gets as far as “super,” then drops down an octave and starts over.
Great song.
Yes, that was a mistake of you believe John Phillips on the Anthology Album :dubious: “I’m Looking Through You” by the Beatles has a false beginning. Their song “Rain” as a mistake that caused the tape to run backwards. The Searcher’s song “Needles and Pins” has the words “needles and pinsa”. BeeGees’ “Nights on Broadway” should be “Lights on Broadway”
Shania Twain’s “No One Needs To KNow” has a man saying clearly at the end - “There’s your record Hal.”
Also, Lee Aaron’s “Whatcha Do to My Body” has the drummer counting down with his sticks tapping together and clearly the sound of them dropping, followed by “Hold on.”
On some versions of Revolver, “Taxman” has a false start.
There’s an intentional mistake in “Piggies” - and an unintentional one. After the body of song ends, you can hear George Harrison say “one more time,” which the strings are supposed to ‘accidentally’ interrupt. But if you listen closely, you can hear a second take of George saying “one more time” a little before the first, which I would say is an error.
McCartney laughs in the middle of Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. Coming from an amateur recordist, the jawing and yammering you hear on modern records has to be incredibly intentional. There is so much to be gone through, edited, muted, spliced etc that it wouldn’t go through a engineers mind to leave in a false start on six or eight tracks unless they were specifically told to, or fairly eccentric.
There’s one Baptist Generals track where an alarm of some sort goes off right as the singer is wrapping up the lines, and he breaks into an amazing string of cursing at the interruption. They left the track on the album because the first part is a really good take of the song and the ending part is really funny.
Eagles’ Witchy Woman.
In the guitar solo, the tempo slows dramatically. When the vocals pick up again, you can her the speed up. I can just picture the drummer waving wildly and screaming “Pick it up, guys! C’mon!!!”
In the beginning of Shadows In The Rain, on Sting’s Dream Of The Blue Turtles album, Branford Marsalis can be heard yellling, “What key is this in?”
Also, on Every Little Counts, from the New Order album Brotherhood, Barney sings the first bit:
Every little counts, when I am with you
I think you are a pig, you should be in a zoo
During the second line, he totally cracks up. Apparently the lyric was such shite he lost it.
In Angie Stone’s version of “Rolling Back the Years”, there’s a place where the drummer starts to speed up a little, and you can hear Angie speaking, “It’s a love song, baby…slow it down”.
On one of the Dead Kennedy’s albums, the band starts off at breakneck speed, only to be stopped by Jello Biafra.
“Not fast enough,” sez he, and they start over, playing even faster :eek: