On first meeting P!nk and working with her
Around the time I made Rise and Fall…, I met a person who would become one of my best friends in the whole world: Alecia Moore, who is better known by her stage name, Pink. We were first introduced when I was staying at the Chateau Marmont, the storied Hollywood hotel that became my second home; even when I was living and running a studio in Atlanta, I ended up in L.A. half the year anyway. I’d actually wanted to work with Alecia for a long time, because I just thought she was an incredible singer. I knew she would be an amazing performer in the studio, but I didn’t know what kind of person she would be. Obviously, I’d heard many stories: she had this reputation of being a partying, hell-raising wildcat – someone who takes no **** but gives a lot of it. Truthfully, I didn’t know what to expect. I knew she’d had a dramatic success at a very young age, and not everybody handles that situation well. I would find out, however, that Alecia is one of those people who handled it superbly.
I found this out when we met about my possibly writing with her for a new Pink record, which would eventually, be titled I’m Not Dead when it came out in 2006. There was considerable pressure around this collaboration: I’m Not Dead would be Pink’s follow-up to her 2003 album Try This, which, even though it ended up selling six million copies worldwide, was considered a commercial failure after her previous effort, Missundaztood, was such a smash success. She had been working with some other people for her new album and had heard good things about me, but wanted to meet me first; I liked that, because I am a firm believer in meeting with someone before you work with them. I’d had experiences recording where I didn’t know the person before, and halfway through recording I wanted to kill them.
I knew, too, she had been responsible for the industry resurrection of songwriter Linda Perry. Before Perry wrote smashes for Pink, like “Get The Party Started,” she was considered, like me, a ‘90s alt-rock one-hit wonder (for the 4 Non Blondes’ single “What’s Up”); after Alecia chose her as her primary cowriter for Missundaztood, however, Perry ended up working with Kelly Clarkson and Christina Aguilera, and is the person responsible for foisting James Blunt onto pop culture. However, when Alecia and I met, she was on bad terms with Perry.
Our first meeting was at the Chateau Marmont’s restaurant. She was there with a bodyguard and managers, because she was going through a stalker situation at the time, but I’d have never guessed that from how relaxed she was. When I entered the room, I saw she was already seated in my favorite corner, which I took as a very good sign. As I sat down and introduced myself, she kind of squinted at me, then asked if I like to drink. “Oh yeah,” I said. “I love drinking, and I’m good at it.” “Do you like red wine?” she continued. “It’s my favorite,” I responded. “I consider myself to be a wine snob.” “So do you like Chateauneuf-du-Pape?” And I was like, “I love French wines, and that’s one of my favorites.”
Two bottles and a bunch of laughs later, we’d become very fast friends. It was just us at that point: Alecia had shooed away the managers and all that, and we’d taken our drinks down to the pool area. As we were walking, she was holding a glass in each hand when she missed the step going down to the pool: she fell down the stairs, skinned her knees, and landed facedown – and somehow she didn’t spill a drop of our drinks. Instead of having a diva fit, she was just cracking up and laughing hysterically on the ground with a horse giggle that was so cute. I loved that she saw the humor in the moment – and kept her wine from spilling a drop. “You’ve got good priorities,” I told her.
So anyway, after that she came to my room and played me some stuff that she had been working on with other people, like Billy Mann, whom I love; he’d cowritten the biggest hit on Try This, “God Is a DJ.” She played me two new songs she did with Billy, “Dear Mr. President” (which made me cry) and “Stupid Girls” (which made me laugh). It was so important for a hilarious, awesome song like “Stupid Girls” to come out and lacerate the celebrity Paris Hilton bull**** culture of the moment, and Alecia was just the person to do it. Soon enough, I’d be in the middle of that mess myself…
I realized after listening to those songs that Alecia was not just a pop puppet. “Dear Mr. President,” when I heard it, gave me the chills: I teared up a little bit, because I realized my religious, social, and political beliefs definitely lined up with hers to the fullest extent. Hearing that song, I thought, “Man, this is amazing and bold, and it’s important to release this.” I started to feel kind of inadequate and told her so: “What do you need me for? Why am I here? You’ve got already a great start with your songs. You don’t need me.” However, by the end of the night, she went into this worn-out old backpack that was haphazardly taped together, and pulled out all these notebooks. I was worried that they were full of really bad rhymes and horrible adolescent poetry, like a Linkin Park lyric – “I hate my life today/Nothing is going to be okay” – or something. The notebooks looked like they had been around for ten years: they were covered in stickers and scribbles from when she was in junior high. There were Alecia’s songwriting books, full of lyrics. As she was doing this, I thought, “Wow, this is not normal. I’m not used to a pop star actually writing and having books of lyrics.” As she flipped through them, she said, “I don’t really know you, but I can tell that you’re the person I want to share this with.” She handed me one particular notebook and said, “Take this: I want you to see if you can come up with anything for this one songs idea I have that’s in the back of the book.” I found it really odd, and very trusting, for her to just give me, a stranger, this book of private information and confessions. Little did I know how moved I would be by what I’d read in its ink-riddled pages.
I was going on vacation the next day for a week, after which we made plans for me to come back to work with her. I took Alecia’s notebook with me and sat down to read it on the beach. It’s funny – I later wrote a song that Alecia would eventually sing with me, called “Song Without a Chorus,” which I wrote on the beach about writing a song on the beach. IT goes, “Well, there’s sand in my book from writing on the beach/Trying to find a song for you that the ocean can only reach/And this beach is getting wider than my train of thought is long/And each little grain of sand is some other a$$hole poet’s song.” That was me, actually writing my own scribbling while reading her book. Flipping through the pages, I started getting chills as I absorbed her words. Quickly I came up with a chorus, and soon was able to take her musings and retrofit them into a song that would become “Long Way To Happy” off of I’m Not Dead.
Back in my room at the Chateau, I played the music for her while singing over the top of it. As I played, I could see she was getting goose bumps: that was the first thing we ever did together, and it was obvious we had a powerful connection. This was at a time when the relationship she was in was kind of in sink-or-swim mode. This was right before she proposed to her future husband, motocross champ Carey Hart (she actually held up a sign saing WILL YOU MARRY ME? on Carey’s pit board as he competed in a race). For a lot of the time we collaborated, I was on the receiving end of a confessional.
It was all very real, but we had the best time. I ended up writing two songs for I’m Not Dead, and we’ve been writing together ever since. We wrote a lot of songs in that hotel room, where I’d installed a piano and a little mobile recording unit: we cut some vocals and other sutff there that actually ended up on the record, and then we wrote another song that never got released, called “I Hate That I Don’t Love You Anymore,” which was pretty intense. In that hotel room is also where I played her “Song Without a Chorus,” which she really took a liking to. “I’ve got to sing that song with you!” she told me when I finished. I eventually did record that song back home in my Atlanta studio. Alecia came through Atlanta on a promo tour for I’m Not Dead and I had her come by the studio and sing on the song real quick. It was the last song that I had cut for The Rise and Fall of Butch Walker and the Let’s-Go-Out Tonites. Alecia and I remained in close contact because of our weird, strong emotional connection. After she popped the question to Carey, the next thing you knew we were at Alecia and Carey’s wedding in Costa Rica, which was beautiful and fun. We also met some other great people; she’s got friends from all kinds of crazy walks of life – punkers, jocks, athletes, rednecks – who hang out with her. It’s not just anybody; it’s a tight group, which reminded me of the way that I am with my family and friends.
My collaboration with Alecia is the most ideal kind of songwriting partnership I’ve ever had; Lindsay Lohan, erm, not so much.
On what happened after “his” house burned down (yes, it includes Pink)
Making it worse, we couldn’t get back right away – we were stuck in New York. It was Thanksgiving weekend, and the airline wouldn’t let us change our flight. We had to wait two more days to get home, which was a drag. As soon as we got back, Nora and I went up to the site. It’s weird – the first thing you want to do is just go back. Not that you can save anything; you just want to go back and start dealing with it emotionally. It was a little rough going, but pretty quickly we realized how great all of our friends were. As we trudged up the ash-covered driveway, of course the first person to come roaring up to meet us was Alecia. She had a bag of clothes in her trunk for us, which is something I’ll never forget; that says so much about the quality of her character. During that time, it was overwhelmingly heartwarming to see people come out of the woodwork to help. We’d come home with just our overnight suitcases to our name, which was all we had left. In no time we were flooded with clothes, baby stuff, everything we needed that we no longer had.
(..) I did need something to write songs on, however. My creativity got a big jump-start thanks to a cool thing Alecia did. She came over one day and said, “Well, I didn’t see you on your birthday, so I got you a late birthday present” – and handed me the most amazing electric guitar. After the firs I didn’t have any electric guitars: nothing had survived from the collection I’d built up for decades. Yeah, it was painful to even think about replacing them, so when Alecia brought out this guitar case with a big bow on it, I was flabbergasted. She’d gone and picked out the most beautiful, tobacco sunburst Gibson Les Paul – the exact same model Ace Frehley played with KISS in 1974, bringing me totally full circle in my musical life. This was the most beautiful guitar I’d ever seen, but more than anything, Alecia’s gesture just blew my mind. It was like, “Oh, that’s going to be my guitar now!” I was starting over, and Alecia provided the first step. Sure, I’ve built up a nice collection of guitars since then, but that Les Paul is still the most cherished instrument that I possess today.
On writing “Here Come The…”
Probably the biggest so-called hit form the album, “Here Comes The…,” was definitely in that same confessional mode: it documented where I was at in my relationships before the fire happened. I started that song when Alecia and Carey were having problems; it was weird that one of my best friends was going through some of the same things I was, which made it even more intense when she told me she wanted to sing on it.
When Alecia and I were working together in the studio around that time, I was as much a therapist for her as I was a producer, and she served the same function for me. I was there listening to her, helping her deal with her emotions while we tried to write songs; there was a lot of crying and a lot of worry about what she was going to do. As we commiserated, I felt really bad for her: I’d been there before – I’d been through a divorce and knew what it was like. When I first played Alecia “Here Come The…,” one of the main reasons she wanted to sing on it was because she was feeling big-time what the lyrics were saying: “Here comes the heartache, the move-out date, excuses for my friends…” That’s the hardest part, telling all your friends who are friends of both of you, “Well. We’re not going to be together anymore, so you can be my friend or her friend, but you won’t be friends with both of us in the same room.”
Thanks: unique_jana3
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