100% - Track by Track review by Beverley Knight

Beautiful Night

The first single is about celebrating and holding dear the last moments you share with someone you love, before you ultimately have to say goodbye. Both I and Amanda Ghost who was my co-writer, knew exactly how that felt as we had lost very dear friends in our lives. I didn’t want a morbid song, it needed to feel like a lullaby, and production duo The Rural nailed the strong yet gentle nature of the melody and lyric with a simple beat and piano riff.

Breakout

I co wrote this with DJ Munro. It’s a “go out and have a great time” song!!! I wanted an anti-credit crunch, anti wallflower, feel good track, I think it hits the spot! It’s the first disco-eque song I’ve ever done.

In Your Shoes

Produced by DJ Munro, it features a sample from the brilliant track “Rip It Up” that I have loved from childhood by Scottish band Orange Juice. I recently met Edwyn Collins, lead singer and composer of the band who went on to have huge success as a solo artist, and he loves what I have done with it!! It is total guitar led funk with a wicked sense of humour in the lyric “get yourself a life - and make it work!” In Your Shoes is about people who focus their envy of your progress onto you and your life, instead of concentrating on their own journey.

100%

The title track is about my total commitment to my boyfriend, something I haven’t always done if I’m truthful, but this feels right. 100% has also become the mantra for my commitment to my career - I always give 100% of myself to music! I co wrote it with the brilliant Guy Chambers, he had recorded a beautiful instrumental piece with his musicians, I heard it and converted it into a groove ballad. Produced by Jonathan Quarmby and Kevin Bacon, it has the most stunning string, horn and flute arrangements. Killer.

Every Step

I was lucky and privileged enough to work with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis who are one of the most enduring, revered and successful R&B producers/songwriters in music history. This was the only overseas writing trip i made, the rest of the album was written in the UK. I was mindful of the fact that I was writing with some of my heroes, and so decided to write a lyric that would sum up how all the years of work had “brought me to the place where I stand today”. I had no regrets about the decisions I had made over the years and I was proud to have lived “every step as me”. The sound of the track is uplifting with the trademark Jam & Lewis double octave piano signature at the top of the song, and has a “grown up R&B” feel.

Soul Survivor

Soul Survivor is a rocking track produced by Bacon and Quarmby. I wrote it with Guy Chambers, at first intending to give it to Tina Turner as a testament to her years of staying in the music industry. I loved it so much I decided to keep it, but felt after I had sung it down that a legendary voice could add something extra special to it. Enter the incredible Chaka Khan who flew into London to perform the track as a duet with me in the studio. It was utterly fantastic! We both see ourselves as soul survivors; we have rode through the ups and downs in our musical careers, and we are both still here and loving it!!

Turned To Stone

This is a song I wrote from the sad memory of a previous relationship. Sometimes as a relationship reaches it’s end, you can become strangers, not even speaking. As though made of stone. Although it has a sad lyric, the feel of the track is very upbeat, especially when it hits the chorus! There is a recurring guitar signature throughout which is very sing-a-long, in fact I join in with it at the final chorus.

Bare

This as the title suggests is a stripped down semi live production of a 6/8 classic time signature soul ballad. I wrote this with Jamie Hartman of Ben’s Brother. The key is deliberately low, as it produces a warmer, richer sound from my vocal in the verses. It is a song with a journey, it crescendos three quarters of the way through and then falls away right at the end. It is about the fear of opening up your heart entirely to someone you know you are in love with, because it is at that point you become the most vunerable. I went through this last year in the earlier stages of my relationship with my boyfriend. We’ve all been there…..

Square Peg

I wrote this with Paul Simm, who had coincidentally worked with The Rural and trained them in music engineering! They in turn, produced it. It has a haunting and raw quality to the production, with a really weighty beat and again led with a piano riff, and rises and falls with a string section. This is the most open and honest song I have ever written bar none, and while committing the lyric to paper was unbelievably hard, the lyrics took me around 30 minutes to complete. I am very self aware, the music industry has that effect on anyone who enters it. I wrote square peg about the fact that I don’t easily fit any of the stereotypes associated with musicians,especially “urban” (black) artists, and as a result many in the media do not know what to make of me at all.

Gold Chain

Another Amanda Ghost co-write, it has a feel of an up to date version of a 70’s blaxploitation movie, not dissimilar to something you would hear on a Jay-Z album. Gold Chain is an assertive song about not treating me as you would a gold chain, an accessory to be stared at and then discarded on a whim. The Rural once again took control of the production and created that movie soundtrack feel, adding horn samples and stabs, wa-wa guitar and the bouncing double-time hi-hat which gives it that 70s feel.

Money Back

This the last of the three songs produced by DJ Munro. The message is simple that we have all stated at one time in our lives, “I want my money back!” I am talking in this case about a relationship where the trust has evaporated and consequently, so has the whole point of the relationship. I’m asking for all the time, care, work (”money”) invested in that relationship to be handed back! The production as with many of the songs on this album has a laidback, joyful, summer - R&B feel, quite the opposite of the lyric. This is also one of the few songs in my career (along with Gold, Remember Me and Salvador) where you can here me playing keys!! They were from the original demo and ended up staying on the finished production!

Painted Pony

I wrote this with Craig Wiseman, one of the world’s most successful songwriters and co-writer of my song “Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda”. It’s another of the songs I have written in which I speak of how it has felt to be a recognisable name or face in entertainment, and how it can have a damaging effect on relationships when my lifestyle and specifically its demands on my time, is just not understood. This the last Rural production on the album, and I remember speaking to the lads explaining the concept and the vision I had for the production. I wanted them to create a ” little girl’s musicbox” feel, the kind that when you open it a ballerina twirls around until the music slows down or the lid is shut. They completely captured that sound.

Too Much Heaven

Too Much Heaven is a classic Bee Gees ballad that was a hit in 1978. I remember begging my sister to buy it and I would as a five year old, sing along to the record, making up my own words as I didn’t know the lyrics and was too young to have understood them. I knew that melody inside and out though!! That melody stuck in my head and my heart and never left. It is simply stunning. I was asked by Robin Gibb earlier this year to sing two Bee Gee songs in a charity concert he was hosting. I chose Too Much Heaven as one of the songs. Robin enjoyed it so much that he suggested I record it which I did - with Mr Gibb himself featuring on backgrounds!!!! Again produced by Bacon and Quarmby, they gave the song a fresher sound without compromising the lushness of the original.

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