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http://www.mjjforum.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=32294
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazett...ing/9025764.htm
Posted on Sun, Jun. 27, 2004
Musician Pharrell Williams still making it up as he goes along Music
By David Segal
Washington Post
SUN VALLEY, Calif. – Pharrell Williams is in love.
Maybe it won’t last a lifetime or even a few years or, for that matter, the next five minutes. But at the moment, the man is smitten, and he’d like the world to know it. At a minimum, he’d like the Hispanic babe in the clingy gray sweat pants to know it because she’s the one he’s in love with.
“Sweat pants,” he sighs, massaging a few sentimental chords on a white piano. “I see you, you’re looking good in those ... sweat pants.”
Williams is making it up as he goes along, killing time on a sound stage with the two other members of his band, N.E.R.D. The trio is here to film its latest video, an R&B heartthrobber called “Maybe.” With luck, “Maybe” will turn up soon and often on MTV’s “Total Request Live,” which just might perk up the tepid sales of N.E.R.D.’s second album, “Fly or Die.” So far, the band has yet to launch a truly monster hit single, which is odd because launching monster hit singles is what Williams does, it seems, in his sleep.
As one-half of a production duo known as the Neptunes – the other half is N.E.R.D. band mate Chad Hugo – Williams has programmed the beats or written songs for Nelly, Britney Spears, Jay-Z, Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake and Usher, to name a few. Rock acts such as No Doubt, Garbage and Marilyn Manson have hired the Neptunes, too.
Hip-hop charts have rarely been Neptunes-free in the last few years. In February, the pair pocketed the Grammy for producers of the year. Now Williams seeks megaband status for N.E.R.D., a feat that would make him and Hugo the rarest of pop creatures: sought-after producers with a side project that sells.
When the filming breaks, Williams, 31, is huddling with a team from N.E.R.D.’s label, Virgin Records, and then the video director. Everyone wants Pharrell.
This is unfortunate because at the moment Williams is supposed to be in a nearby mobile home, listening to his 10 favorite songs and explaining what he loves about each tune. He provided The Washington Post with a list of his best-loved tunes a few days earlier, and the plan was to play the music and get him talking about himself and the artists and bands that shaped him.
Few producers have shaped the sound of today as much as Williams and Hugo, who met in jazz band in seventh grade in Virginia Beach. In high school they experimented with samplers and beat production, and were discovered in a 1992 talent show by a scout for producer and singer Teddy Riley, for whom they produced a track.
After producing “SuperThug” for hard-core rapper Noreaga, the jobs and money started pouring in. By 2001, Williams and Hugo, along with a friend known only as Shay, had resurrected their high school band, N.E.R.D. (it stands for “nobody ever really dies”). Their debut, “In Search of ...” drew critical raves but not big sales.
Now N.E.R.D. has been touring hard to generate buzz for “Fly or Die.”
Williams climbs into an SUV for an impromptu, two-person listening party and begins tearing the cellophane off the CDs bearing his top 10 songs.
“You got some great (stuff),” he says, in apparent awe.
Yeah. You chose them.
“Uh-huh,” he says. This evidently jogs Pharrell’s memory, but his first selection suggests he didn’t fully grasp the My Top Ten concept when he devised this list. It’s “I Still Love You,” which the Neptunes produced for a hip-hop girl group called 702.
You picked one of your own songs as an all-time fave?
“Yeah,” he says, enraptured now by the sound of his own vocals on the song’s chorus. “I just like the emotion of it. You’ll find that a lot of my picks are based on the fact that the songs are emotional and they take you on an emotional ride.”
Williams switches discs, to Stereolab’s “The Flower Called Nowhere.” He is silent for a minute.
“When I hear great music, I tune out whoever I’m talking to,” he says quietly. “I can’t help it. If something’s crazy, and I ain’t never heard it before, I’m locked in. If it’s greatness, I’m oblivious to everything. You could be smacking my girl-friend, I can’t help it.”
Williams, it’s soon clear, isn’t kidding. He zones when each track plays, and it takes prodding to get him to say much of anything.
There’s idol worship for Michael Jackson’s “The Lady in My Life,” the last cut on “Thriller.”
He notes a chord change he calls “mystic,” then lets slip that he’s met Jackson a few times.
“He’s cool, man. Nice dude.”
Nice dude? Hey, how about some detail? Any detail.
What did you guys talk about? Music?
“No. When I get around people like that I don’t talk much. I was just in awe.”
[此贴子已经被作者于2004-6-28 11:03:55编辑过]
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狗仔卡
发表于 2004-6-26 00:00:00
显身卡
楼主
发表于 2004-6-28 00:00:00