It begins, 'Do you remember?' — and we supply the memories. Dan Charnas tells the origin story of the Earth, Wind & Fire hit that still unites generations on the dance floor.
"The, kind of, go-to phrase that Maurice used in every song he wrote was 'ba-dee-ya,'"she says."So right from the beginning he was singing, 'Ba-dee-ya, say, do you remember / Ba-dee-ya, dancing in September.' And I said, 'WeWrong. Willis says that at the final vocal session she got desperate and begged White to rewrite the part.
"And finally, when it was so obvious that he was not going to do it, I just said, 'What the f*** does 'ba-dee-ya' mean?' And he essentially said, 'Who the f*** cares?'" she says."I learned my greatest lesson ever in songwriting from him, which was never let the lyric get in the way of the groove." I asked Jeffrey Peretz, a professor of music theory at New York University's Clive Davis Institute, what makes that groove so powerful. He says a lot of it has to do with how the music unfolds. The song's very structure is an endless cycle that keeps us dancing and wanting more.
"There's four chords in the chorus that just keep moving forward and never seem to land anywhere — much like the four seasons," he says."It's the end of summer, it's the beginning of fall, it's that Indian summertime, it's the transition from warm to cool."The trigger for that yearning feeling, Peretz says, is the opening line. White asks,"Do you remember?" and we supply the memories.
"We went through all the dates: 'Do you remember the first, the second, the third, the fourth ... ' and the one that just felt the best was the 21st," Willis explains."I constantly have people coming up to me and they get so excited to know what the significance was. And there is no significance beyond it just sang better than any of the other dates. So ...