| Sinnerman is a traditional North American gospel song in which a sinful man runs away in search for God and His creations, in order to find redemption. It is in this vibe that GilberT, revisits this North American classic in the midst of the chaos we experienced in 2020. We talked to him about the production of the track and the clip, directed by Rabu Gonzales. Check it out! Where did the idea for the music version come from? After 3 albums released, in 2017 I received an invitation from producer Tomás Magno to carry out a project focused on Soul songs, all recorded in a traditional way with a band playing together and mixing in loko, at the legendary Toca do Bandido studio, just as it was done at the beginning of the 60s according to the sound of the Motown and Stax studios. In the middle of the process, Tomás envisioned the possibility of me making a version of my own way and with my interpretation of some classic soul, this in a chat between the recording sessions that at first did not pass from there. One day we talked about gospel songs and a growing national polarization, where everything seemed ruled by hatred and in that conversation he raised the song Sinnerman, immortalized by Nina Simone, while he mixed talking about what he felt when he heard that song. We knew that the song became a kind of anthem during the manifestations of civil rights in North America and, recurrently, it returned to the agenda when some event related to racial issues and rights were violated, but we went into the most spiritual sense of the song and how much it went against the situation we were experiencing. He told me to do it one day, but do it my way. In 2020, when in Brazil the social isolation due to the pandemic started effectively, I had a kind of creative blackout. I couldn’t turn on an instrument, write or even talk about music, then in a day on a call to talk to my mother and know how everything was going (We are quarantined and distant) she asks me: Did you see in the newspaper what happened to the boy? “And until that moment in the morning I did not know that it was the boy” João Pedro “who had been murdered in an operation police officer at Complexo Salgueiro in São Gonçalo / RJ I think it was a two saddest feelings, apart from the constant news that someone close or someone from a friend had lost his life due to contamination by Covid. That same day, at the end of the night, Sinnerman came to my mind and summon Bruno, I called Seu Cris to master that song that would end and I spoke with Rabu to listen to the pre of that version and help me make a video. How was the production process of the track? I had a skeleton from the old pre-production with a drum and piano looping that I did on the fruit loops program, but as the timbres were very poor I asked Bruno Marcus to redo the piano riff, which tied all the music. I invited Robson Riva to record his interpretation of drums on top of that sketch and contrary to what he always did, I recorded guitar, synthesizer and double bass at home after Robson’s record, in an attempt to be more accurate with the swing, pasting the mix with the as little editing as possible and thinking about the natural person without falling into the temptation of excess studio resources. Sinnerman’s emergence comes from reports from the late 1700s, where slaves sang, then she strolls through spirituals until in the early 20th century, she is adopted by North American evangelical churches as a purge gospel song to encourage the faithful to confess their sins , until a recording appears in the name of Julius Cheecks and Ernest James in the early 1950s and in 54, a rock-sounding emulation in the name of Les Baxter and Ernest James, but in 1964 it gains a version that is immortalized by the singer and pianist Nina Simone. I could not make a version based on these “versions” I thought of a slower tempo, where I could breathe better and decided that I would only register when I found my tone, assimilate English in such a way that there was no other distraction except for my best feelings in the registry. Talk about the conception of the video clip and its connection with the director. You already did other jobs together, right? Rabu Gonzales had access to the audio of the version still in pre-production. He has worked on two of my clips and I have done everything from bases to tracks for his work. We live far away, but the internet always brings us closer with job changes. Already in the quarantine, after listening, there was a late night that we talked on the phone for an hour, where he tells me that he would make the video with the greatest pleasure, mainly because he liked the version and informed that since the isolation he had taken all the equipment work for your home, envisioning having the ability to make records with limitations due to conditions, but with good quality. My companion, Isabel helped me record some shots at home, with a cell phone and improvising the lighting with another cell phone, where she raised the possibility of giving a vision of spiritual redemption, through shadows, with crosses being projected on the wall with paper filters and trying to fix the low light and directed light on my face. I idealized the graphic part that was inserted in the video and it would give unity for dissemination in the networks, drawing with gouache ink, then scraping the drawings with a stylus and scanning p to keep the texture … I didn’t need to talk to Rabu with the embryonic path we were taking it and he, even though he was an atheist, seemed to be talking about everything that Isabel and I had thought of as a path to narrative construction. I explained to Rabu how far this song came from and what motivated me to record it, and from there he already defined everything in a confluence of ideas in a single phone call. We had a launch deadline, and the only thing I said is to use the material I produced at home with Isabel the way I wanted and even eliminate it if it wasn’t necessary or out of line with my ideas. I asked him not only to direct, but to find a way to act in the clip and that I just wanted to see the night before the release .. So it was done and in a way that I find a characteristic of him in creating videos on a low budget, but with great ideas, the video was delivered to me and there was no no doubt when seeing for the first time, that Sinnerman’s version had a visual identity, through that video, that closed the effort of all involved in a beautiful way and gave the song a story with enough force, made in a simple way, but with a lot of dedication and love. |
