Thorn3z and Pinup (ft. Ned Donovan and Hannah Richter) - Yesterday I Loved You (from "Once Upon a Mattress")

This is the 7th of 11 posts about our project, Give My Regards to Broadway: Classic Showtunes Reimagined.

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The 7th track on our project is "Yesterday I Loved You" from "Once Upon a Mattress". Music by Mary Rodgers and Lyrics by Marshall Barer.

You can blame Mary Rodgers (or I guess, Ed Flesch at The Fireside) for this entire project. So if you hate everything about it, you know, there's where you should direct your ire. In the fall of 2013 I was playing The Minstrel in Once Upon a Mattress at The Fireside, and every night, David Sajewich and Jessica Jaros would (beautifully) sing this loving track to each other. And every night during the little section marked "freely" on "I openly confess" where the song generally goes halftime, myself and other castmates would pretend like it was a dubstep breakdown. So this track really was the inception of the entire project.

Fast forward to the actual planning of these tracks, and I reached out to Hannah Richter as my closest friend in NYC connected into the EDM world. At the time, however, I thought she could connect me with an EDM artist. So that conversation went sort of like this, "Hey Hannah, I'm doing this project reimagining classic showtunes into new styles, and I want to do "Yesterday I Loved You" from Once Upon a Mattress as an EDM track. Can you connect me with a good local EDM artist?" "Well, yeah...I guess...but, you know I do EDM, right?" A fact I was wholly unaware of. And so Hannah immediately was brought in to the fold.

A few weeks later, on a thursday in February, Marcus Thorne Bagalà and I have just recorded the Common Jack version of "On the Street Where You Live" and we reset our brains to get ready to record some EDM with Hannah (that was a crazy day of music). Hannah shows up, with a bunch of great ideas and various EDM pieces built and goes, "I like all of these ideas individually right now, and none of them when put together". So Marcus, Hannah, and I lock ourselves in Marcus' apartment and start making some EDM magic out of all of these ideas. Over the course of about 7 hours (and lots of caffeine), we built this awesome, gritty version of the song with, what I think, is a super rockin' break.

This track sort of ended up becoming one I sang on by accident, in that we forgot to really plan for a male vocalist. Like 12 hours before we recorded I asked Hannah who she was bringing (thinking she was organizing that) and she responded wondering who I had set up (thinking I was organizing that). Having never sung anything like this before, it was a fun trip to really wail on some notes that are certainly higher than I'm used to full voicing with no vibrato. And Hannah, is a full blown professional and she knocked her vocals out of the park in like 1 or 2 takes.

This one probably took the most or second most mixing time because of how intricate each sound is. It was important that every sound be heard, without it just screaming at you the whole time. I can't begin to describe how brilliant Marcus' work as a mixer is on this track (though I'm sure you can hear). We sat for hours with me asking him to try things, and him telling me why I was an idiot, then him doing things that were literally magic and it getting better, every single time. This is also one of the few tracks that we legitimately added a ton to after the initial recordings. So many of these sounds were layered in later to help enhance the arrangement.

This might be the "strangest" track in the project. It's certainly the most out there, but it's also the one that has gotten the best response from the most amount of people. I think lots of people in Musical Theatre listen to EDM and feel like the two are so separate that they have to keep those lives completely sheltered from each other, so I'm glad that we were able to bridge that gap for some.

Shoutout to Steven Moore for the "Lady Larken" scream in the second verse. Steve sings on "Near To You" which is the 10th track on the project, but after finishing his vocals he goes "is there anything else you need?" and we knew we needed this scream, nor did we know where we were going to get it. So I simply asked Steve to scream those four syllables in rhythm. After the first take I said "can you do it like you're utterly terrified?" and what was produced is so very perfect, it went directly into the track :P

Check out all the tracks at www.neddonovan.com/GMRTB

Thorn3z and Pinup (ft. Ned Donovan and Hannah Richter) - "Yesterday I Loved You”
From the musical "Once Upon a Mattress"
Music by Mary Rodgers
Lyrics by Marshall Barer
Arrangement by Marcus Thorne Bagalá and Hannah Richter

Recorded at Muse Light Music
Produced and Mixed by Marcus Thorne Bagalá (marcusbagala.com)
Executive Producer - Ned Donovan
Mastering by Steven “SolidGold” Goldman at Four Legs Records (fourlegsrecords.com)

Male Vocals - Ned Donovan (neddonovan.com)
Female Vocals - Hannah Richter (hannah-richter.com)
​Additional Vocals - Steven Dean Moore