I recently received this email from Joel Patterson (link to his website below), who describes himself as “the enfant terrible of the recording website Gearslutz”. I’ll let you read his email and my response is below:
Hi Irene,
Great site! Glad you’re so willing to help out the neophytes out here.
I’ve got a question, it goes like this: every so often I will hear a familiar phrase in a “new” song, I guess the latest was in the Enrico Iglesias “I Like How It Feels.” This may be an ancient song… I’m not too exposed to the current scene… anyway, he weaves the phrase “ticket to ride” into his lyric.
Or, whoever wrote the song did, is Enrico a talented guy? A front man for a larger organization? Isn’t he descended from Julio Iglesias, some kind of star of a previous era? So many questions, so much I don’t know…
“Ticket to ride” is obviously a quotation from the Beatles‘ tune “Ticket to ride.” I am on the fence between thinking this is a heavy-handed, blatantly obvious, cheesy play, and thinking it’s cool and hip.
If I were to work the phrase “rolling in the deep” into a new, original song, in a way that worked within the song and had a completely different melody from the Adele hit, I’m just wondering how that would strike you, overall? Cheesy? Hip? What’s your take?
Thanks!
Joel Patterson
www.joelpatterson.us
“Hi Joel,
“This is a great question! First of all, I think timing is everything. If you encompassed “rolling in the deep” into a song in the very near future, I would consider it tacky because it would APPEAR to be the use of a phrase in order to draw attention to your own song. You have no idea how many people hit my website using that phrase just because I did a bit of a critique on Adele’s song! So people out there looking for that song lyric, or a discussion or critique of it, would also potentially find any other song containing that lyrical phrase if it was posted on the web.