Earth, Wind & Fire – Can't Let Go (Dave Lee fka Joey Negro Elevated Mix)

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“I Am” was my first Earth Wind & Fire LP and it’s one which I think represents the band at the height of their musical powers. Though it was a late single from the album in the UK “Can’t Let Go” wasn’t one of EW&F’s big hits, but that means I’ve never tired of it from hearing it endlessly on mainstream radio. Built around a very distinctive gospel style piano riff it was near the top of my most wanted multi-track list. I eventually managed to get hold of it about 5 years ago but its was a bugger to remix, for a start the piano is very busy and has lots of “room” spill, which scuppered some of the arrangement ideas I had. I tried replaying it but it just didn’t fit in sonically with the rest of the stuff. I got it to a “finished to an unsatisfactory standard” stage. I regularly returned to it every couple of months to see if anything jumped out as wrong sonically or arrangement wise, normally I’d make a few tweaks but I was starting to think maybe it was a remix that wouldn’t make the final cut. Then over the course of a few days (3 years after I had started it) I had some break throughs in the arrangement, starting with removing the middle 8 (which I liked but was making my version feel a little disjointed), then using the verse music later in the song as an instrumental break made the remix go somewhere interesting, I ended up using it in the intro too. Somehow changing one element led to another idea and another until it finally all fell into place, like a particularly difficult puzzle. Now it’s probably my favourite remix on the album. Some people might recognise I borrowed the chord progression for a remix I put out in the late 90s.