Why Careless Whisper

This weeks blog post is an ongoing convo about how I chose the songs on my recent release Raising my Voice streaming on major platforms.

We’re going to talk about the song “Careless Whisper” by George Michael and what drew me to the song, and why I chose to include it on the album.

I had been familiar with the song for years, and had long been a George Michael fan, one of my fav songs of his is on the Elton John compilation where he did”Don’t let the Sun go down on me before a live audience “.

I had always liked the song Careless Whisper, but truly never knew what the lyrics were. It has a funny germination story, here we go….I was doing physical therapy at a local facility, and there I was doing endless repetitions of consistent movement and Careless Whisper came on the sound system. I’m lying on a mat, doing the second set of 35 reps of a side knee lift, when, suddenly it hit me, this would be an extraordinary ballad. So I kinda let that take root, and listened to it again on Amazon at home.

Trying to get a funk of a rhythm thing on an acoustic guitar to fill up the place of all the instrumentation on the song was tricky, as I originally was finger picking it, I got great help from a surprise source

We were doing a live show at The Pickleball Room in Pistol River, Oregon with a phenomenal guest artist Andrea Algieri from the extraordinary Portland area group Mbrascatu.

The Pickleball Room in Pistol River, Oregon

During rehearsal I was doing a combination of finger picking and incrementally strumming to establish the rhythm of the song, Andrea just started playing along with me with a kind of funky strum and boom 💥 a light bulb went off. I knew that would lead me to the right groove.

It felt amazing to sing it and give the lyric such power, to hear the sadness of the story, I loved styling the verses and hitting the octave on the chorus. I love singing this song and hope you enjoy listening to it.