PETE HOPKINS Human Nature, covered

“Just Gonna Boogie”…”Boogie”…. “Boogie Till I’m Dead”  “Boogie Till Dead” “Boogie Till Yah Dead”

Five different spellings and wordings and also as many versions of this song before finally settling on the pseudo-disco, dance floor, funky, fun banger version complete with soaring falsetto “bee geesesque” vocal hook “Boogie Till Yah Dead”

This tune originally was born of a collaboration between myself and Kristian Borresen, a keyboardist, producer friend I made from Norway who I had met while participating in an event called 50/90 which is an undertaking to write and record 50 songs in 90 days.  Kristian liked my voice and sent me a little snippet of music and I wrote some words pretty quickly just kinda on the fly… I am normally a fairly introspective writer who takes great care in crafting the words of his works. But this song… just made me wanna dance… or… boogie.  So that was it!

But wait… the story doesn’t end there.  I was.. around the same time.. working on productions with another friend of mine Chris Andrews originally from Georgia and who happened to be my neighbor just two doors down in my LA top floor apartment building and who would become my best friend until me and my ex split and she moved in with him (platonic and not how it sounds.. in short… he’s gay) and it severed our friendship quite a bit… but that’s another story altogether.  So anyways…. I digress… Chris liked my lyric and melody but thought that the music and my vocal production (or lack thereof) was not up to snuff and requested I let him work with me on it to make it even cooler.  And he sure did.  We sure did…. we made what I believe to be one of the most innovative productions to come out in a long time.  I had become enamored with dubstep and he comes from a background of dance music and electronica.  I strapped on my Stratocaster and threw in a healthy dose of funky pickin’ and wokka chickin’ and then tore up a solo over a very dub-steppe vibed out bridge that I had written. We both spent a good long while patting each other on the back for the good, good work we had created together.  Alas, Kristian Borresen’s original 8 bars of music did not make the cut and to be honest I cannot remember how it even went.  He was very understanding about how it went and we’re still friends so that’s a good thing.
I’d like to check in with Chris and Kris and see what they are up to these days…

Okay so as I said there are five versions of this song that led up to the final release that I’m now celebrating FINALLY releasing for my adoring fans and the general populace. But here are some more rather truncated highlights of things that happened along the way.  When i started this song I was a self taught music producer about two years later I was awarded a scholarship to Cre8 Music Academy (Westlake Audio, Michael Jackson, Thriller, Adele, The Weeknd, Imagine Dragons etc where i learned to make records from the pros and so I opened up my Boogie logic session with my new sets of skills and proceeded to level it up in every way possible.

Enter Deakon Lekross and my project known as “Get Back VAL”  Get Back VAL www.getbackval.com  was my attempt at trying to have a band after many years of going solo because bands are hard and inevitably just never work out.  I met this amazing guitar player whilst jamming at The Namm Show with Roni Lee and I was so taken by his ability when we finished I said “I don’t know what we can do together but no matter what I know it would be amazing”  We exchanged info and kept in touch and a friendship was born.
I knew exactly who I wanted to play drums in Get Back Val… my buddy and amazing drummer Edo Tancredi who I had met several years before at my other friend Kamasi Washington’s performance at The Piano Bar when he was a part of the West Coast Get Down. WCG was a group I used to perform with from time to time and who spawned many excellent funkateers such as Thundercat and Miles Mosley to name a couple. So anyways…  I finally talked Edo (hired gun for life) into recording songs for Get back Val. SO there I was with a band!  Get Back Val – Pete Hopkins Lead singer, Guitarist and 100% songwriter and producer. Deakon Lekross lead guitar and Edoardo Tancredo drums…  we never did wrangle a bassist… and Get Back VAL as of now is Pete Hopkins and… umm… whoever else I choose to involve. call me Trent Reznor. 🙂 Long story longer here is what happened… in a nutshell I had written some songs that were totally poppy and dance in nature and I got the idea that it might sound rad if they had a hard rock shell around them.  And I was right! I think Get Back Val is truly an awesome sounding project and I have high hopes that some of that stuff still get’s a real shot. “Love Me” is an epic tune and represents I believe the best of what that project has sounded like to date… Sooo… long story even longer… Deakon rocked the shit out of “Boogie Till I’m Dead” and it was pretty bad ass… but some part of me was feeling like maybe it had now gone too far away from it’s funky roots and dance disco vibe… I had some conflict bout how to handle that because he was now a part of the song and I’ve always been one to be very sensitive to the feelings of other musicians and creatives.  It was eventually made simpler because Deakon decided to go solo and quit the band and Edo never really wanted to be in a band to begin with so i was then free to do whatever I pleased with it all.. which let’s be real… that is exactly how i like to do things. So I stripped all of Deakon’s guitar work out but I left Edo’s live drums and worked my electronica drum programming into it and layers and layers and layered… till it was satisfied.  It was almost there… ALMOST!
I had everything about where it was meant to be except I had started to feel like it needed a hook to tie it all together.  So in the chorus that was largely instrumental in nature… I stuck some vocals in the only register that was left (which was somewhere up in disco falsetto land) and sang the words with
funky flare and gusto “Boogie…. Till Ya Dead”

Despite having been developing this song fo years…I  still feel like I am rushing the hell out of the release of the video and the song… and it’s all because of two main things that I’m now officially releasing BTYD into the wild….
One is my amazing photographer and videographer and partner in crime Miss Pamela Manning. The other is my mom’s boyfriend Jeff Rice who happened to have a black light for us in the guest bedroom in Seattle where we are currently staying for one more night before heading back to LA. Pamela and I have a knack for not sleeping and letting the creative juices go wild… Thus the video was born and is being edited as i write this.

The song is now available via pre release as of today.. Here’s the link. https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/petehopkins/boogie-till-yah-dead    Boogie will be officially released just before Halloween… So get ready.. Cause it’s time to  “Boogie Till Yah Dead”  -Pete Hopkins