The Bridge in Silk Sonic’s ‘Leave the Door Open’ Almost Broke up the Band
Silk Sonic went through a lot making their debut album, An Evening With Silk Sonic, including its hit, “Leave the Door Open.” Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak had to do extensive research to make it as authentically 1970s sounding as possible, and used Mars’ Cadillac to out what needed to fix. Plus, the band almost broke up while recording the bridge for “Leave the Door Open.”
However, it all worked out. Silk Sonic’s music is getting the recognition it deserves.
Silk Sonic ‘did research’ before recording ‘Leave the Door Open’ and the rest of ‘An Evening With Silk Sonic’
Initially, Silk Sonic established what .Paak calls their “foundation — the Sixties, Seventies, the old school.” Listening to a single note of An Evening With Silk Sonic, it’s evident that the sounds of the 1970s deeply inspired the artists.
Mars told Rolling Stone, “I don’t know what year it is. I’m not looking at the charts. So we’d just come here every night, have a drink, and we play what we love.”
Rolling Stone wrote, “In order to re-create the Sixties and Seventies soul and funk atmosphere they were aiming for, Mars explains, they and Mars’ longtime engineer, Charles Moniz, ‘did the research’ to ‘get the right things, down to the skins on Andy’s drums. I’ve never realized till this album how much the right guitar pick matters. The right gauged strings. All this science kinda stuff.'”
After consulting old session guys about which gear they needed and reading old drumming magazines, Mars and .Paak “focused on emulating old-school playing styles and then recording them in a period-accurate way — just one or two mics on a bunch of musicians playing at once in the same room.”
.Paak said, “Those players back then were playing with such patience. The music we grew up with is heavy drums, bass smacking, so we got all the instruments but were still like, ‘Why doesn’t it sound right?’ Because we were f***ing bashing!”
So, on Silk Sonic’s An Evening With Silk Sonic, Mars and .Paak did what actors do for Oscar-nominated roles. They did the research for the album, going one step beyond. We’ll see whether their efforts helped them win at the 2022 Grammy Awards on April 3.
Silk Sonic almost broke up over the bridge in ‘Leave the Door Open’
.Paak said that “Leave the Door Open” is Silk Sonic’s “mission statement. It’s the intro to the book, to set the tone and let you know the sound. There’s different kinds of waves, but the whole album is wrapped around that.”
As the mission statement, “Leave the Door Open” is very important to An Evening With Silk Sonic‘s success. However, Mars and .Paak wanted the entire album to do well. So Silk Sonic pushed its release date back to perfect it and released “Leave the Door Open” first.
“We had some moments in the danger zone! I think we put the pressure on ourselves by putting out ‘Leave the Door Open’ — but a deadline is important, because at some point, you gotta say, ‘This is it.’ Otherwise you’re gonna work it till you hate it,” .Paak said.
“But there’s a beauty in that — you do have to get sick of it, because that means you put the love and the time and the passion in it, and it’s taxing.” For “Leave the Door Open,” .Paak added, “That bridge almost broke the band up. But it wasn’t right, and we all felt it.”
Speaking about the bridge, Mars said, “Andy played this thing, and he knew where the groove had to go, but for some reason I kept screaming, ‘Man it sounds like books falling!’ I was like, ‘We gotta turn it down,’ and it was the math where all those old guys were jazz players.” “They were tiptoeing,” .Paak added.
Although the bridge was tough to record, the musicians and the band got it just as they wanted. Mars’ Cadillac also helped.
A ‘decade-plus-old’ Cadillac CTS helped reveal what Silk Sonic needed to improve on in ‘An Evening With Silk Sonic’
Mars’ “decade-plus-old” Cadillac CTS helped Silk Sonic realize something about “Leave the Door Open” and the rest of the album.
Rolling Stone wrote, “In a way, it’s become one of his [Mars’] closest musical confidants — he’s mixed every album he’s put out since 2010’s Doo-Wops & Hooligans by listening to it inside the Caddy, getting a sense for it in the sort of real-world scenario he deems optimal: A pimped-out American luxury sedan so old it has a CD player.
“For Silk Sonic, one of the things the Caddy helped reveal, .Paak said, was ‘Oh, we’re playing too hard.'”
Working out all the kinks in “Leave the Door Open” and the rest of An Evening With Silk Sonic proved beneficial. Silk Sonic earned four Grammy Award nominations for “Leave the Door Open,” including Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best R&B Song, and Best R&B Performance.
An Evening With Silk Sonic will officially be eligible for Grammy album recognition in next year’s award ceremony. It will undoubtedly earn nominations, considering what Silk Sonic went through to make it.
