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They take their time with the song and savor its mood. Their version, which will come out on a seven-inch on Friday, runs a minute longer than Solange’s. The other women join her to accent words like “better” and “sadder,” but they never sing “do-do-do-do-do.” There is still some hope in the chorus - the background vocals on the chorus sound almost angelic - but the appeal here is the way the women have tapped into a deeper, more introverted mood and stayed there. The way Stephanie Phillips sings the opening couplet, “I tried to drink it away/I tried to put one in the air,” you know she tried to move past her depression, but you can also picture how hard it was for her just to try from the tone in her voice. The words and melodies are the same, but the deep, echoing drums, dirge-like bass, and sparse, expressionistic guitar feel more dire than Solange’s version of the song, and they hook you in. The cover version by Big Joanie - a London-based trio of black feminists, whose 2018 debut LP, Sistahs, reflected influences that ranged from Joy Division to the Slits - almost feels like a different song.
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When she sings the chorus, “It’s like cranes in the sky/Sometimes, I don’t want to feel those metal clouds,” a choir of female voices sweetly harmonize, “do-do-do-do-do.” You know she’s sad, but something about the music makes you feel she’ll eventually get through it. The music, which she wrote with Raphael Saadiq, felt airy and light the bass does acrobatics when she sings “I tried to dance it away” and a synthesizer trickles out vaguely Eastern-sounding motifs. Solange’s single was so good - Rolling Stone dubbed it one of the 50 Best Songs of 2016 when it came out and, later, one of the 100 Greatest Songs of the Century – So Far - in part because of the way she blended frank confessions about trying to get herself out of a funk with the poetry of “cranes in the sky,” these enormous metal blights obscuring what could be a beautiful day. Spend more time behind the scenes of A Seat at the Table in Solange’s mini-doc below.Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky” was a triumph of melancholia, but Big Joanie’s heavy, fuzzy rendition of the tune makes the original sound positively upbeat by comparison. Solange was recently interviewed by her sister Beyoncé for Interview magazine, talking about Björk and sisterhood.
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Previous guests on the podcast include Grimes on ‘Kill V Maim’, Oneohtrix Point Never on ‘Sticky Drama’ and Kelela on ‘Rewind’. “I’ve had a extremely difficult relationship with meditating and trying to silence my brain, which is what so much of this song is about.” “The fact that the chords do stay the same rings very true to the narrative of the song, it acts as a meditation,” she adds. She talks about how she wrote the track during a transitional time in her life, when she had moved back to Houston from Idaho and just signed a publishing deal as a songwriter: “There were times that I felt like, well, I’m doing what I love to do, what I’ve always wanted to why do things still feel so heavy? What is this weighing on me, what is this that I’m trying to work through?” I went to my hotel room and wrote the lyrics and the melody, immediately coming up with the first four lines: “I tried to drink it away, I tried to put on in the air, I tried to dance it away, I tried to change it with hair.'” “I immediately had this really strong reaction. The Knowles sister talks about how she wrote ‘Cranes in the Sky’ with her producer Raphael Saadiq, based on a sparse “sketch” he’d put together featuring drums, bass and strings. Solange is the latest guest on Song Exploder, the podcast that asks musicians to break down how they made one of their best known tracks. The story behind a standout track from A Seat At The Table.