Writing “Take Me As I Am”.

In 1986 our band Erotic Exotic put out our first record called “Take Me As I Am”. Within the freestyle market the song did very well, and actually saw the top 10 spot on billboard’s dance chart. Every now & then someone will ask me “what are you singing in the last part of the chorus”? The reason they ask is because that line is very long considering it’s only 1 bar long. The chorus goes like this: (each line is a bar).

Come on baby take me as I am,

Come on baby.

Come on baby take me as I am

Or don’t even take me at all girl.

As you can see the fourth line which sings the same as the second is way longer, so you have to rush the words together. This is something that within the craft of songwriting is a no-no, but freestyle music was more about the beat and the hook, and none of us really had any technical songwriting knowledge at the time. Fortunately the song worked as it was.

The interesting thing however is that that was not the original chorus of the song. Instead the original chorus was stretched out and was intended to stay that way right up to the day we went to record the vocals. Here’s how it went: (in this version, each line is 2 bars long).

Take me as I am

Take me or don’t take me

At all.

It was a good friend of ours named Frank Diaz (co-founder of the group Exposé) who told us when he heard the demo that he didn’t think the chorus had enough of a hook to it. The song has a keyboard hook that plays after every chorus and vamps out at the end of the song. Frank felt that the keyboard part had more of a hook and was catchier than the chorus.

We kind of thought the same thing but I guess we needed someone else from outside to say it. The three of us who originally wrote the song (Al Perez, Mario Gil and I) took our demo back to listen to it more carefully. We decided to re-write the melody on the chorus so that it would follow the same melody as the keyboard hook.

By this time we had also decided to hire Eric Thompson to sing the song. I was basically singing the song in all the demos but really liked Eric’s personality and we began to have him sing the verses while I sang the pre-chorus and we both sang the chorus. The combination had a good balance and gave everything a bit more dynamics. We all instantly knew after our first meeting that Eric would eventually become the band’s lead singer.

So in August of 1986 the five members of Erotic Exotic with nothing but a fistful of pride and confidence went against everybody’s suggestion of hiring a professional producer and recorded “Take Me As I Am” ourselves. The session began at about 7pm on a Friday night at a 24 track studio in Ft. Lauderdale and lasted until 5 am the next morning. We recorded all the parts including vocals, and then did two mixes of the song all on the same night (something I would never do today). While recording the vocals Eric decided to experiment on the ending of the song and began singing the original chorus (he had always preferred that version). We liked what he did so we decided to keep it in. So now when you listen to the song you can hear him sing the original chorus in the background at the end while the rest of us sang the new chorus.

When it was all done we took a cassette copy to one of our cars and listen to it. Although very tired, we were very happy with what we had. Now all we had to do was to get everyone else as excited about it we were. Luckily we did.

Crushing lyrics just so they fit into a melody is not something you’ll see advised in any songwriting class or book, and it may have been that we were naïve or fearless (or maybe both), but when we wrote that song, we went with what felt good to us. It was a gamble. The proof is the fact that most people don’t even know what the line actually says. But because all the other elements were there (melody, beat, catchy hooks), the song was successful.

Like they say “sometimes you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelet”.