It feels like you and Bernard, when you were working on those
records, especially Sister Sledge, you kind of designed the story for
those acts?
Yeah, you have that concept exactly right. We never met Sister Sledge
until the day they walked in and sang. I guess the only proper way to
describe our relationship is we conceived Sister Sledge from a series
of interviews that we had with the president of the company, we were
label mates and then we basically superimposed our ideas of who
they were onto them. People who learned to sing in the church were
governed by certain rules that you just didn’t break, whereas like Chic,
we had no problems breaking rules! It goes ‘now Freak!’ and you
just play on endlessly, ‘I said Freak’ and you just keep playing, it’s so
completely unorthodox and it went on to be the biggest selling single in
the entire history of the Warner organisation, the entire history of the
whole catalogue. If you look at the metrics of how often Le Freak gets
streamed, compared to, say, another big record, like, We Are Family,
which gets streamed a lot, they still stream Le Freak every day, like, a few
thousand people listen to Le Freak.
Songs like ‘I'm Coming Out’ have come out of your own experience
or your own observations and you thought, that’s a song. Le Freak is
a personal protest, but I love the story of I'm Coming Out?
It’s fantastic. [Laughter]. I mean, talk about the song writing process,
once again! There was a group of transvestites full on Diana Ross
impersonators in the men’s bathroom when I went in. it was no big deal,
I practically lived in the bathroom in those days. Anyway, I looked to
both sides, the left to the right and I went, ‘woah, I'm in with all these
Diana Ross impersonators, this is amazing!’ My first reaction was to
say, ‘Hey, guys, you won't believe this, I'm actually working with Diana
Ross,’ and I thought they would all cheer and I kept thinking, oh man,
I'm going to seem like an idiot, [laughter], they were going to think I'm
some jerk, so I couldn’t say anything.
We didn’t have cell phones, so I had to run outside the club and find some
kind of call box where Bernard, who was at home asleep with his kids,
I always used to make fun of him because Bernard had so many kids. I
said, ‘Please, man, please wake up, Bernard, write this down, because I
know I'm going to forget by morning.’ I said, ‘I'm in this bathroom with
a bunch of Diana Ross impersonators we've got to write a song called
I'm Coming Out.’ I said, ‘Bernard, please, just do this for me, man, I
don’t have a pen. Then finally, he woke up and we start laughing and he
gets the importance of it. It was unbelievable, it had nothing to do with
music at all, just the concept, the word, the deep hidden meaning. Diana
loved the song.
You know, as a composer, you're really anonymous but you know you
have a job to fulfil and that job is to take an artist, the arc of their lives
and go to the next place in that story. So I don’t want to make the last
Diana Ross record, no way, I want to make the next Diana Ross record,
so my brain is already geared up for a fight just to convince people, to
take a chance of doing something new and different, even if you fall on
your face, because you've done something that says, as an artist, I was
thinking and living and breathing and moving on.
And what about Adventures in the Land of the Good Groove? Isn’t
that what Bowie heard?
When I met Bowie, we went back to my apartment a couple of days later,
to listen to my first test pressing for Adventures in the Land of the Good
Groove and whilst listening down from top to bottom, because that’s
how we listened to records in those days, from the beginning to the end,
I became immediately depressed, because I knew that it was a flop, it was
going nowhere, there wasn’t one radio station that was going to play it,
no black radio stations, definitely no white radio stations in America, it’s
like that, black radio, white radio.
But then David said to me, and I’ll always remember this quote, because
it really made me feel like a giant, David Bowie said to me, ‘Nile, darling,
32 wirrallife.com
if you do a record for me half as good as that one, I’ll be the happiest
man in the world.’ I kept thinking, it was a flop, but then, just recently
I thought about it from Bowie’s perspective. What if he sang that, that’s
what he was thinking. I didn’t have a clue, I should have right there on
the spot written to my record company and said, hey, David, here’s your
new album. [Laughter].
So, you will keep hold of ideas, you'll never sort of throw anything
away, in case you might use it later?
Right, I wrote the chromatic turnaround in We Are Family when I was
17 years old at Woodstock. I just, I pinched it from another band, it was
a lick in one of their songs. We didn’t have tape, you know, like cassette
players and stuff, so I just filed it away in my brain and said, one day,
that’s going in a song, so as we wrote We Are Family and it does the
normal turnaround, ‘I got all my sisters with me, we are family’, it’s the
second ending turnaround.
So, once you have the idea, will you immediately start building the
track, or will you wait until the song is completed?
It’s always different, you know, it’s my blessing and curse that I'm never
without an idea. Today, I'm going to work with new writers that I've
never worked with before and I can't wait because I love to see what
their process is. I'm totally malleable when it comes to the song writing
process and how we go about it, I've done it with hundreds and hundreds
of people, so I can easily switch to their style and never ask them to
switch to my style because my style is all over the map, I don’t have any
one particular way of doing it. I think that that’s what's fun, because it’s
exciting every single time.
I was having dinner with a doctor one time and she was talking about
some very powerful stuff, we were having dinner at the rooftop of my
hotel and I said, ‘could you please excuse me for a moment?’ She says,
‘oh, sure, what do you have to do?’ I said, ‘I need to go to my room,
I want to write a song called Scars.’ She was like - this guy’s a nut…
I just said, ‘I'm looking at all of these people, knowing that we all have
scars, and wouldn’t this be a beautiful song? If you think you had a scar
that was so horrible, but someone was so in love with you that the first
thing they wanted to do was kiss that ugly scar.’ And she looked at me
and she says, ‘that’s beautiful,’ so I said, ‘can I go write the song please?’
[Laughter]. I left, and I ran downstairs, wrote it down real quickly and
then came back up and finished my dinner.
So if the words are so prominent in your thinking process before you
even pick up an instrument, does that mean that you'll immediately
try to marry those words to a melody when you do sit down, or might
you write a piece of music and then start to put the words in later?
It’s different every time. See, I would love to give you what it seems like
you're searching for. [laughter] But if I said that, I'd be less than honest
because it doesn’t work like that. We were just driving over in the car and
we were talking about the credits on the album. There's a song I wrote
for Diana Ross called ‘Queen’ that features Elton John and I said, ‘you
know, I wrote that song 25 years ago.’ I remember when I got Elton to
sing the song, I told him the story. He saw Diana Ross and says, ‘Oh, I
sang that song that Nile wrote for you.’ - she had no idea what he was
talking about, that was 25 years ago! Elton called me, and said, ‘Nile,
Diana said you didn’t write that song.’ I was like, ‘Elton, use your brain,
she's just forgot, it was 25 years ago!’
You can listen to the full Nile Rodgers interview at the ‘Sodajerker
On Songwriting’ podcast https://www.sodajerker.com/episode-123-
nile-rodgers/
The podcast was created by two long-time friends, Simon Barber and
Brian O’ Connor discussing their love of song writing with some of
the world's most successful songwriters including Paul McCartney,
Paul Simon, Noel Gallagher and Joan Armatrading.