In the first segment (1:45-15:21), Anne from Pikapi Podcast drops by to discuss the music of Pokemon Trozei for the Nintendo DS. While the soundtrack isn't the most extensive, it's certainly worth talking about, with some interesting stylistic choices. As usual, there's a game discussion after the episode outro.
In the second segment, Anne and I return to bat around some ideas about songs related to Pokémon movies, but not actually in them. I propose putting "Makin' My Way" into the dock scene of Pokemon: The First Movie, and Anne tries to find a place for "I Am A Collector" in Revelation Lugia (The Power of One). Both ideas have their merits, so listen in and decide for yourself:
There were a few parts of my recent interview with Peter Moshay that didn't quite fit in the interview, but I still wanted to share. Here, he discusses how music is created for games, TV and movies, the atmosphere of working in studio, and a few other things:
In the first segment (1:10-17:56), I interview Peter Moshay, an audio engineer who worked on Dream Street's "They Don't Understand" from the Pokemon 2000 soundtrack. In addition to providing details regarding the recording session, we also discuss some of the many acts he's worked with over the years.
Our second segment (19:13-36:09) is an archival interview with Mark Chait, co-writer of "The Power Of One", also from Pokemon 2000. Like Peter, Mark has had a long and storied career, so it should be an interesting listen:
Back in 2000, boy band Dream Street recorded two versions of "They Don't Understand". One for the soundtrack of Pokemon 2000, and another for their debut album released in 2001. I talk to recording engineer Peter Moshay about the process, as well as his overall career in the music industry, and how the current situation has affected his work:
Transcript:
Steven: So folks, before we start the interview, there is a little bit of sad news I got to put right up here at the front. Earlier this summer, Chris Trousdale-one of the members of Dream Street-very sadly after a bad case of COVID-19 passed away in early June, just before he would have turned 35. And the band did a little-you know-mini online reunion stuff like that, but it is a cruel reminder that life is not fair, and of course we're dedicating this interview to him, his fans, his band mates, his family-all that stuff. Hope...best wishes given the circumstances.
Steven: Hi folks, Steven here. I'm on the phone with Peter Moshay. He's an audio engineer-he does a lot of audio work for music and maybe a few other things, but as far as Pokemon goes, he did the audio engineering for the recording session of "They Don't Understand" by Dream Street, which of course was on the soundtrack to Pokemon 2000. And we're going to talk about that as well as his more recent work and really his whole career which is very interesting. He's worked with some really interesting folks over the years, but Peter, why don't you go ahead and start off at the beginning? Where are you from originally, and how did you get into doing music?
Peter: Hi everybody, I was...I started growing up in California out in the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood area, and being a musician myself when i was younger, I got very into the technical end of it early on. I worked in music stores as a kid because I would hang out in them and take lessons at the music stores. And waiting for my mom to pick me up or my dad to pick me up I spent so much time in the music stores fiddling around with all the stuff that they had, I ended up working in a music store at a very young age, and that kind of progressed into doing more technical things, where I went into working in recording studios and kind of pushed my playing to the side, and really fell in love with doing audio recording and stuff like that.
Then it slowly went into working with a lot of particular bands going on the road with them as well, helping them to kind of duplicate the records that they were making live. So, being an audio engineer out on the road, I gravitated towards that and it's been a great career for all these years. I've worked with countless bands that many people might know.
Steven: Yeah, and I think one of the the big ones is actually Hall and Oates, which I'm sure most folks have at least heard of [even] if they're not exactly familiar with who that is. How did that one come about?
Peter: Well, after many years of traveling with bands on the road you meet a lot of other bands. I had toured around with lots of bands over the years: The group Journey, the Cars [?], Manilow [?], groups like Quiet Riot, hard rock groups, Kenny Loggins. Over that traveling time, you meet lots of other people. Well, in the travels I met some of the guys in the Hall and Oates band, and they needed somebody and I fit the bill, and started working with them back in 1987, all the way till now.
I still do work with them. They're out there actively, always touring and recording, and we started this show about 11+ years ago called "Live From Daryl's House" which is an online...live musician's playing in Daryl's house, online and that's kind of become its own thing. We've been streaming that show on the Internet since since about dial-up ended and we had DSL. As soon as we got enough bandwidth to be able to put video with the audio, we were doing it and we've been doing it ever since, and we've spawned off into having restaurants with live music in them called Daryl's House Club, and I run those places now where we have music every day of the week. Live music and great food.
Steven: Yeah, it definitely has helped you out this year. You've been very ahead of the curve with some of your knowledge there and it's really paid off this year. We'll talk more about what you're doing more recently a little bit later in the interview, but since a lot of folks may not be familiar with what goes in on the technical side of doing a recording, can you sort of briefly describe what your responsibilities are on a typical studio recording?
Peter: Yeah. Well, once the song's written-that song was written by Steve Diamond and Robbie Neville two [indistinct] and songwriters themselves. They'll sketch out the song...generally they might sketch it out either on an acoustic guitar, piano, whatever their instrument is, and then like the two guys will get together maybe and finish off the arrangements of the song-just how it'll basically go.
Then you've got to go into the studio, which now is your laptop or even your iPad or your phone, but we would go into the recording studio and put down all the individual instruments-that's like the drums the bass, the guitars, the vocals, backing vocals, all that kind of stuff, and you do it either all at one time in part or in pieces.
So, for instance like the guys they would record their vocal parts...usually we would put them in the same room divided with some sound treatment-sound baffling-between them, and they would sing their parts, kind of all down together. And sometimes-maybe if somebody messed up a lyric or this or that-we'd go back and fix it. That's the general idea of how you would try to do it. A lot of the instruments would be pre-recorded. That would be done before you would do the vocals, but that's kind of how it goes. You would put the instrument track down and then the vocals generally last.
Then after that comes the mixdown process-once everything's done, the mixdown process is separate, and generally the mixdown process is done within a day, [where] you really focus on making it sound the absolute best it can.
Steven: Okay that's a great overview. So, how did you wind up working on "They Don't Understand" then? You talked a little bit about the the writing team. Did they happen to just fall in your lap there, or were they in the orbit of certain people? How did that come about?
Peter: Yeah, they were in [the right] orbit. Both Steve and Robbie Neville were (at the time) working with both Hall and Oates, and [I?] was working on those records at the same time. So when this project came up, you know I just happened to be working on their other projects as well. So, of course you know the man in the room gets the gig, and I just moved over to that project that day.
At that period of time, every single day was a new project, whether it was the Dream Street project, or I at the time was working with Mariah Carey, or Daryl and John, there was always something going on every day at that point in time. It was a big music machine in New York City at that time.
Steven: Yeah, New York, always pretty much known for its music, but especially busy then-and largely now as well.
All right, well, what did you know about Pokemon when it came in? You seem to have some familiarity, but you definitely were not in the age demographic for the franchise at the time. What did you know about Pokemon?
Peter: Oh yeah. You know, I've been in Japan so many times, and Pokemon was huge all over the world, but especially Japan, so I had seen it quite a lot and some of the guys...Steve had kids and many of my friends had kids, so it was definitely around big time at the time. Always around, and Nintendo was so big at the time too, so everybody I think was aware of it at the time.
Steven: So you actually had some decent knowledge, which is, you know, a little different. We always hear those stories with Donna Summer or even more recently with Bill Nighy and some of the other folks on Detective Pikachu, but you seem to have sort of an inside track, so you kind of knew what you were getting into. That's pretty neat.
Peter: Yeah, there was also-at that period of time-a lot of people in the music industry starting to work on music specifically for video games and stuff, because video games at that time were starting to become really ingrained not only in culture, but it was big business and people wanted to up the quality of the the audio and the music on video games then, and get-just like this-custom songs put in. It created a whole industry in the recording world, and now it's a big part of the video game industry.
Steven: Okay, well, going back to "They Don't Understand" and the recording session for that, obviously you had...there were the various instruments in there, and of course there were the the five guys. They were really kind of like late middle school early high school back then in 2000, but they were coming in to do their vocal parts.
One interesting thing-you had mentioned the kid that Steve Diamond had-Cole Diamond is listed as a song inspiration for "They Don't Understand". I don't know exactly what happened there. It sounds like he probably was talking with his dad said something along the lines of, "hey you could rework this into a Pokemon song. Why don't you?" and somehow that that all went through there, but there are two versions of the song. How did that kind of affect the recording process?
Peter: Yeah, What happens during the recording process is when you're doing one-at least at that time-it was kind of the start of the period of where people would think about doing multiple versions of the song, because if you would do a pop version of the song, at that time there was a lot of hip-hop going on, a lot of rap going on, a lot of different versions. A lot of electro dance music going on at the time.
So when you're doing the song, you would immediately think like, hey would this song work as like a dance club song? Could you speed it up? So we would always think that way, and we would take those original tracks that were recorded-maybe just the vocals-and get it together with a person that would do more dance oriented tracks and let them change it up into maybe a different version of the song. Very common. It keeps the cost down too because you've already kind of got the song already laid out and the vocals done on it and you can take those things, and just add different music to it and make it a new song.
Steven: And how did that exactly play out here? There are about half a dozen lines that are different between the two versions of the song-basically, the other version removes all the Pokemon references and replaces them with more relationship-based stuff. Did you have to record it through like both times, or did you record the lines that were different separately? How did that work for this session?
Peter: We would generally do alternate takes, and have some alternate version lines in there and keep them separate, just like you would do maybe in a song that has cursing in it. You would separately record those so you could do a separate mix with those vocal lines in it, and back then the music was recorded digitally [just like now], so it would be easy to splice them in.
Steven: Yeah, I figured you might want to save a little work there and not have to go through-you might do maybe the line before that and the line after it to sort of make it feel more natural, but it sounds like you wouldn't record like the whole thing, right?
Peter: Yeah, maybe not the whole song. We would just pick the lines, but you would always just record the whole line, not just pop in a word. You'd record a whole new line because a lot of times you'd have to change the way you would phrase it or something like that. It just depends on what you're trying to do and say.
Steven: Gotcha. All right. Well, do you have any other particular memories of the recording session? I know you were kind of in a separate room from the performers and what not because you had to monitor the levels and things like that, but any other particular memories from that session?
Peter: Oh yeah, we definitely spent time hanging out and talking. They were very interested in hearing because they knew about the group Hall and Oates, and they were interested in talking about Mariah Carey at the time and all the different projects, and asking about...artists always kind of like to ask about the other people you're working with, and they're always interested in hearing stories about it.
So, I don't remember exactly specifically what we talked about, but I do remember that we were sitting around, and since they were young and they were always interested in the music of course because they were musicians, I'm sure we were telling stories about-I was telling them about things that were going on and working with other artists at that time.
I just remember they were just such great kids, man they really were, and we always had a blast. And I saw them for multiple days actually, because I was working in the same studios, and so they were still in there doing stuff working on other songs at the time. It was always fun working during that era of time.
Steven: All right, well, obviously it's been, you know, 20 years since that was recorded. You've done a ton of stuff since. What's some of the stuff you've been working on more recently?
Peter: Well, we have our venue that we work on we have our "Live From Daryl's House" tv show that we've been doing for 11 years now. We have a couple of restaurants/music venues-Daryl's House Club in upstate New York here where I'm at now, and we stream our live shows five nights a week usually. So you can see a lot of the stuff that we're doing already on the web, so you can watch...it's kind of like peeking into a club that has lots of live music, and it's super high quality going out so you're watching music being played live by musicians...great bands we always have great bands five nights a week, and we just like to keep the music world alive out there and just expose it to people.
Steven: Yeah, like we said earlier, you had some experience that really has paid off given the current circumstances, which are unfortunate, but you've managed to adapt relatively well. You mentioned the the Facebook [page] for Daryl's house and whatnot. Do you have any social media or website that's that's for you specifically?
Peter: You know, I don't really...I mean I have my own webpage-petermoshay.com, but it's you know...I'm an extension of the artists i work with, and I have been absolutely blessed to have worked with all the best artists in the world. I mean, I have done hundreds if not thousands of records over the years, and shows and traveled the entire planet numerous times.
I really like to be seen through the artists I work with. I am an extension of the people I work with, and I love for people to go to our webpage and just check out some of the bands. I engineer and record and do the video production for all of the bands up there, and you're gonna be amazed. I guarantee people will find a new band that you didn't know about that you'll love.
Steven: All right, well, thank you very much-been great having you on Peter.
Peter: Thanks for having me.
Steven: This has been Steven Reich. All right folks, thanks.
The B-52's eclectic body of work made them a great choice to record a song for the Pokemon 2000 soundtrack. Find out why here:
Transcript:
You wouldn't hire just any band to do a song based on the legend from Pokémon 2000, as not many acts would have the talent to give it just the right balance of seriousness and humor. Thankfully, the B-52's were willing and able to provide their services for the soundtrack. Sure, "The Chosen One" might not be as off-the-wall as "Rock Lobster", but it does capture the sense of fun the band is known for, and with its surf rock influence, it fits in nicely with the movie's tropical island setting. If you want to draw parallels to the characters of the movie, well, Fred's voice does remind me of the island elder, and Kate and Cindy could represent Melody, but it's more likely you would simply attribute it to a musical group performing during the festival-I suppose that's an idea if this movie ever gets a remake. In any case, do you think they made the right decision tapping this group for this song? Be sure to let us know. Thanks.
In order to provide audio content in a form more suitable for longer listening sessions, I've decided to repackage some of my interviews in podcast form. Each episode will include at least one new (or recently released) interview, though it won't necessarily have every interview we produce. As such, I've decided to call this the "Poké Press Digest Podcast".
In this initial episode, we have two segments. In the first (0:57-44:48), Anne from Pikapi Podcast joins in to discuss the Japanese and English ending themes of the second Pokémon movie. We go over production details, analyze the songs, and then determine which one we like better.
For the second segment (44:55-59:37), I interview Try from the "My Life in Gaming" YouTube channel. Their channel covers retro video games, with a focus on how to get optimal picture and sound quality from original hardware. We discuss the origins of the channel, and their upcoming Game Boy episode.
Finally, after the outro (1:00:02), stick around to hear Anne and I discuss some of the other songs from the Pokémon 2000 soundtrack.
Here's a transcript of the "My Life in Gaming" segment:
Steven: Hi, I'm Steven Reich from the Poké Press studios in Madison, Wisconsin. I'm on the phone with Try from the "My Life in Gaming" YouTube channel, and Try your channel focuses a lot on various technical aspects of video games in terms of getting them to appear correctly and stuff like that, but you've also covered specific games and you also have done some kind of interesting "How to Beat" videos-how did a channel like that-how did that get started?
Try: Well, Coury and I have known each other online for a long time. I'm one of the founding members of a website called "The Backloggery" that's backloggery.com, and it's a game collection tracking site, sort of with a focus on tracking which games you've beat, which games you left unfinished, and we just met through there and sort of just hit it off because we're both video editors.
We met with a bunch of other Backloggery people at MAGFest which is a convention, a gaming convention near Washington, DC and at some point Coury was like, "You know, we should make a YouTube channel together you know. There's not a lot of YouTubers out there that I think have like a professional background in video editing", so we thought we would be interesting.
The first thing we did was those "How to Beat" videos, sort of inspired by the old VHS tapes that would tell you how to beat Mega Man 2 or Ninja Gaiden or something like that, but we did it with modern games, and I think that was never intended to be the focus of the channel but we thought it would be an easy thing to do to get started, and it was kinda light and funny-not at all the kind of content we intended to create long-term, but it was I think a good starting choice because it did get us some attention early on and we kinda used that as a launching point to get into the the other types of videos that we wanted to make.
Steven: Yeah, as i mentioned before one of the big things your channel focuses on is video quality-a lot of RGB-related topics and things like that. How did that all get started?
Try: Well, really that's in a lot of ways that's kind of the origin of the channel because part of why we decided to make a YouTube channel was because we had been looking at this website [called] Hazard-City. It's run by this guy in Germany that has so much information on video scalers and stuff and the Framemeister, which is this Japanese upscaling box that, you know you can plug RGB from your retro consoles into it, and it's just perfect crisp pixels and it's amazing and we're looking at this and thinking, "Wow, does this really do what it looks like it's doing? I'm not quite sure I believe it." And, you know Coury finally bought one, he showed me some pictures and I'm like, "Okay I believe it." You know, it's this three-hundred-dollar box, and it's a lot of money, but you think about it that's like the price of a modern console, [and] if retro gaming is important to you, then you know it's not that bad of an investment if you really think about it.
Between that and some capture cards that we bought, we're like, "Wow, we've got this like awesome setup for capturing real consoles in such high quality-we should put this to good use," but we did not anticipate really making videos about video quality-we just wanted to have really good quality captures for other videos that we would be making. It's called "My Life in Gaming" in part because we wanted to tell stories about games and maybe some personal connections that you might have to those games-not just us, but we always want to interview people, like for example when we did a Myst episode, we interviewed the creator of Myst. You know, we want to have other people's voices in our videos if possible, but then we wanted to make this video about the Framemeister because it introduced us to the this whole world of high-quality capture and it just took off, and we're like, "Well you know, we could do a whole series about this and all the stuff that took us so long to figure out we could like make this great resource for other people to discover this.", because I think a lot of people didn't know-I mean we didn't know until just four years ago that this kind of stuff is even possible, so it's just kind of our way of sharing that information, and it was never intended to be the main thing but it kind of has become that.
Steven: So you have actually, in the RGB series you have a couple levels-100 is sort of the basics, 200 is system-specific, 300 is sort of niche topics, so you're going to be having a new 200-level video, hopefully within the next few weeks about the Game Boy, which is kind of interesting in part because it's a portable console, so it's not something you would normally think would make a great topic necessarily, but as it turns out you've come across a lot of things and this is probably gonna be your longest video yet. So, how did this get started?
Try: Yeah, it's almost twice as long-I'm looking at my timeline right now, which is about maybe 20 or so percent edited, and it's a an hour and three minutes-it's more than twice as long as our longest video, otherwise. Yeah, it's absolutely insane.
Originally, early on in the series, I was like, "Oh, I wanna do a video about how to play Game Boy games on your TV, and how to get the best quality doing that.", because you know obviously the options people think of are Super Game Boy on Super Nintendo and the Game Boy Player on GameCube, but there's a lot of nuance there. Then Bob from retrorgb.com-he's the guy that runs Retro RGB-he's been a huge supporter of ours and he's got a great website and also does a great YouTube channel called the "Retro[RGB] Weekly Roundup" and he was like, "You know, I need some space and I know you're going to do a Game Boy episode." I think this is around this time last year, actually. He just sent me this big box full of Game Boy stuff. We're talking backlit-modded Game Boy and Game Boy Pocket, front-lit modded Game Boy Color, original Game Boy Advance with the brighter backlit SP screen put in it, clock-modded Super Game Boy, just all kinds of stuff that I never even would have really thought of looking into because I had this on-TV focus.
I was like, "Well, you know I guess we could just do kind of like an all-encompassing video, but I'm just going to talk about the handheld stuff like really, really briefly.", but then, you know I just start writing the episode now I'm like I got to the point where I'm like I don't see what I can cut out without being as comprehensive as I want to be and it just it's ended up being this big thing. There's been fleeting thoughts like, "Maybe we can separate Game Boy and Game Boy Advance into their own episodes, or maybe we can do portables and on-TV and in separate episodes or something.", but it's like there'd be so much overlap between them because there's just so much shared between platforms within the Game Boy series and you kind of have to understand how Game Boy Color works to understand how Game Boy Player works and how Game Boy Color backwards compatibility works on Game Boy Advance and how Super Game Boy has special palettes that are not recreated on any other official hardware, and so it's it's like, "Let's just include it all in this one massive episode that I'm completely insane for even tackling."
We had hoped it would release [on] Black Friday-probably not going to happen, but I am keeping that mindset that I'm going to release it on Black Friday-it keeps me motivated, it keeps that glimmer of hope that I could have it done by then. If I don't keep that, then I'm just gonna make terrible progress between now and Thanksgiving, but yeah it's intense but it's-I know it's gonna be big because you know people are interested to know more about Game Boy.
Steven: Definitely, and especially of course, Pokémon fans. Anything in particular you wanted to sort of share that might be specific to the Pokémon games?
Try: Well, certainly for Super Game Boy it's pretty cool because the way it works is it can draw sort of hidden areas in the screen to have entirely separate color palettes. Normally, you can only assign four colors to a Game Boy game in a Super Game Boy but a Super Game Boy enhanced game like Pokémon Red/Blue and of course gen[eration] two, they can, well, in the battle screen they can basically draw a box around each Pokémon and they can be the correct color they aren't bound by the four-color limitation because those areas of the screen where those Pokémon exist can have their own color palette. So that's pretty exciting.
On the N64 end we are covering the Wide-Boy 64 which was a development tool and a press tool for getting Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance screenshots through an N64-nothing particularly special regarding Pokémon there, but we are going to look a little bit-just a little bit-into the emulation through Pokemon Stadium and Pokémon Stadium 2, which is kind of interesting because even though it's emulation, you do get the benefit of the Super Game Boy enhancements there. But, you can use flash carts-this isn't something we're really going to be able to show directly-but people have experimented with editing rom headers to trick the Pokémon Stadium games into loading non-Pokémon games. They basically fool [Stadium] into thinking that it's Pokémon Blue or something like that. I understand that they kind of crash like when they try to save and stuff like that, so it's not really a reliable method, but it but it is kind of interesting.
Steven: Especially if you could use the double and triple-speed options that you can unlock in at least the original Pokémon Stadium to play those games at hyper speed-that might actually be kind of interesting.
Try: Yeah, well with this overclocked Game Boy that I'm borrowing it's got this dial where you can literally overclock it or underclock it. It's kind of wonky I wouldn't really trust it to be honest. I was told that it's actually kind of intended more for people who want to do something with like the Game Boy sound chip for music or something like that, but there's a dial on it that you can turn and you could play the game at hyper speed, though I think it would be pretty likely to crash from what I've experimented with.
Steven: Alright, well we certainly look forward to that Game Boy episode in the near future. In the meantime, what are some of your other plans going forward for the channel? Additional systems, additional topics, what are you looking into?
Try: Well, you know it's hard to believe we've gone all year without making a new Sega episode and Saturn and Dreamcast are both pretty high priorities. Dreamcast in particular is very popularly requested, so we want to get back to Sega. We want to do PlayStation 2, we want to do Wii, we basically want to do every system that is realistically possible-original Xbox and other RGB topics we want to talk about SCART switchers, we want to talk about all kinds of things. And outside of RGB I mean, you know we always want to take a break and get to our-just get to our game-focused episodes. They're the kind of our reprieve from our more technical episodes because they do take less work, and you know they're not as popular but they're sometimes just what we want to do, and we're never gonna run out of ideas. We talk about it all the time, like I just literally cannot imagine I could ever run out of ideas-it's just there's so many things that we just want to talk about. We've got this list of topics from when we started the channel and we haven't done but maybe fifteen percent of them because you know we just keep getting sidetracked by the newest idea we have and there's just so much wanna talk about-technical and otherwise.
Steven: Yeah, it never really ends with this, and of course you know in this era of the Internet we've actually had opportunities to learn more as some of the developers and hardware folks have sort of come out of the woodwork, so there's always going to be more-I think you're right about that.
Try: Yeah, I mean it's so funny you can come up with new things to talk about for retro stuff, and it's-I think a lot of people don't think about that. They think just what's old is set and done with, but there's so much to it and so much the people still are doing in that world in terms of new developments to modify the hardware and get new results.
Steven: But in the meantime, how can folks find your YouTube channel, and you have any other social media?
Try: Well, we've got of course YouTube is just youtube.com/mylifeingaming. We've also got a @MyLifeInGaming Twitter and then we've got our individual personal accounts-mine is @tryumph4ks inspired by the the fish in the Wind Waker they called the Triforce the "triumph forks", and Coury's just @couryc. We've also got [a] Patreon account-just patreon.com/mylifeingaming and that has gone a long ways to supporting the channel. We've also got Facebook but I don't know anything about that-I don't follow Facebook, but Coury pays attention to it.
Steven: Alright, well thank you very much, Try. This has been Steven Reich talking to Try of the "My Life in Gaming" channel about his upcoming Game Boy-related episode.
Earlier this week, I had a chance to interview Mark Chait, co-writer of "The Power of One" by Donna Summer from Pokemon 2000. In the interview, we discuss how he got started in music, what writing the song was like, the song's impact (and yes, we discuss Herman Cain, as well as one other politician), and his current work producing music in Los Angeles and China. It's a great listen if you want to learn more about the song, or the state of the music industry:
If you want to learn more, you can visit Mark's web site for additional information.
Editor's Note: Hangzhou is actually the location of the 2016 G20 Summit, not G8. This year's G8 Summit is in Japan.
Transcript:
Steven: Hi, I’m Steven Reich here at the Poke Press
Studios in Madison, Wisconsin. I’m on the phone with Mark Chait, who co-wrote
“The Power of One” song from the second Pokémon movie. But Mark, before we get
into that, why don’t you start at the beginning? How did you get involved in
doing music?
Mark: I grew up in South Africa as a child prodigy
of music. I actually have a Masters of piano performance and violin. So, I was
an early start at music. And classical music, I actually represented my country
at 15 years old. So, I traveled the world as a classical musician. So, I was a
very early starter.
Steven: So, that was your education in music. How
did you get involved in the music business itself?
Mark: Well, I actually went to Columbia University
for 5 years. And when I was in New York, I started playing around with film
music. And I had met a lot of people in the industry who forwarded my music to
Los Angeles where I met a lot of film producers who saw that I had a talent for
doing film scores. So, that’s how everything started. And that was Steven
Segal, the actor, who actually gave me a big piece of music to write for a film
that he ended up not doing. Basically, that’s how I ended up having a big large
orchestra score that ended up in my first film, which was 1992 in a small short
film for Sony Pictures that had Brad Pitt staring in it. It was a very
interesting way of entering the film business.
Steven: What were some other pieces you worked on
during the 90s?
Mark: I wrote a lot of film score music in the style
of Ennio Morricone, because the first film that I did that actually went to the
Oscars for Best Live Action Short, was a film that Morricone was going to do.
He told Sony Pictures and the studios that they would have to wait 9 months.
So, the director wanted somebody that could do him. When I first started, a lot
of the film music that I wrote for the various films that I did work on in the
90s, were of that genre-the very melodious, similar orchestration pieces. And I
also wrote a lot of piano and violin, but they weren’t published at that point.
So, I just mainly did my work for film score music. And this is way before I
started doing songs for films.
Steven: What eventually led to you doing vocal
songs? How did that get started?
Mark: It was a lot of interest from record producers,
actually. Like David Foster and Charlie Midnight, who said that my music has a
very good song quality and we should try and put vocals to them and see how I
am writing songs. I wasn’t sure that that was the way I wanted to do it. But I,
nevertheless, tried it. And I have a good talent for summing up a feature film
in 4 minutes in a song. I originally started working with Randy Goodrum who
wrote a lot of hits in the 90s as well. He took me under his wing like a lot of
other film composers did as well.
Steven: Nice. So, let’s move on to “The Power of One”. Do you know, how did you get chosen to work on this project?
Mark: I had met the head of music at Warner Brothers at the time. He still is, actually. And a very nice man who was a fan of my music. And he said, “We’re doing this Pokémon, do you want to have a look at the film and see if you can come up with an idea?” And I did. And then, I invited Merv Warren to join me in co-writing the song. Basically, that’s how it got started.
Steven: What was the writing process like? Did it come together quickly? Did it take a lot of time? How did that come about?
Mark: The first draft came about pretty quickly, like they always do. If you’re a musician and an artist, you understand. These things come quickly. And then, there was a lot of time involved in changing things and producers involved. The lyrics, I would say, was much harder than the music. The music took about 2 weeks to come together. But then, we had to actually find the correct lyrics that matched the movie. That was about a 3 week to a month process. It was a very pain staking process to get that correct. I loved working with Merv Warren. He’s a fantastic songwriter. We really enjoyed the process. I think that’s the key to writing a hit song.
Steven: Definitely made quite an impact. Very memorable. Are there any particular lyrics that you’re particularly proud of, or have an interesting story behind them?
Mark: Well, the obvious one is the one that everyone talked about with Herman Cain. It inspired a lot of people in avenues that I never thought was even possible. The opening four lines, I think, are the ones that are mostly used, even to this day. “Life can be a challenge/Life can seem impossible/It’s never easy/when so much is on the line.” I think those lines pretty much say a lot.
Steven: Absolutely. Anyone can relate to that. We’ve all had times in our lives that are like that. You did mention, of course, Herman Cain. For those who aren’t aware, about 4 years ago, he was a politician running for US President. He sort of misattributed your song. He thought it was from the Summer Olympics and didn’t realize it was actually a Donna Summer song. First of all, how did you find out that that happened, and what was your reaction there?
Mark: It was very easy to find out, because it was all over the press all over the world. To be honest, it was at the Olympics, but it wasn’t part of the Olympics. NBC would cover the Americans during the Summer Olympics and at the end of every day, they would have the outtakes of all the events that occurred during the Olympic games. And, the song was perfect for covering that. The song was used many times by NBC to cover the Summer Olympics. It wasn’t the official song of the Olympic Games, but the confusion was pretty easy to make.
Steven: Was it funny when it happened? Did it make you feel like you had created something that was really memorable?
Mark: As any artist would tell you, any artist would be delighted that anyone would be talking about their work. Negative or positive, that’s not for me to say. But the fact that it inspired a conversation on the level for the Presidency of the United States, it tickled me pink. It really created a very warm feeling in me that somebody would use something that we created to further their career and use it as an example of, I think, the courage within themselves. So, any time anyone uses a song, it’s always wonderful. I had a similar experience with Hillary Clinton when she was at a dinner in New York for the Democrats. They chose my song, “The Power of One” and I got to perform it actually, with a wonderful singer from Broadway, Lillias White. And the same thing, it sparked a whole conversation. At the end of the performance, Hillary Clinton walked on stage, smiled, grabbed my arm and said, “Mark’s already summed up my entire speech in that song. So, any time anyone uses a song for that purpose, that you create as an artist, it’s a wonderful thing.
Steven: Just to clarify, that thing with Hillary Clinton, was that before or after the Herman Cain thing?
Mark: That was before. It was before, yes.
Steven: That is absolutely fascinating. I love hearing that type of story. You’ve really shed a lot of light. We knew a fair bit about it, but you’ve really put in some interesting details. Really glad to have that.
Steven: Alright. Well, since you did that song, you’ve had quite a long career after that. In fact, currently, you’re actually working in China. How did that come about?
Mark: Well, 3-and-a-half years ago, I was invited to score a live-you can call it a musical, but it was actually the largest multimedia event in the world. It was called Illusions [and was] just outside of Shanghai. And they had 5 composers who failed at doing the task, because the whole show was told through music. There wasn’t any language. It was a very big task. They had 5 Chinese composers who wrote Chinese music. And what they really needed was Lord of the Rings 400-piece orchestra and choir kind of thing. They had invested an enormous amount of money-much more than we would ever spend in this country-to create a show that would be on the world stage with actors from all over the world. And when they came to Los Angeles to find composers, I met the chairman and he fell in love with my film score and music. Because, it was kind of what they were looking for. It was very epic. A lot of my film scores have that epic sound with full orchestration, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Choir. And that’s what ended up happening. This show took a year and a half to build. The CGI film took four years to make. This was basically a show on an enormous stage that was built for us with 180 degree screens, 8 stories high. And in front of it, were 60 actors. Some of them being Cirque du Soleil and part of the New York Ballet. And that put me on the map in China. Since I successfully completed the mission of doing a musical of such stature, I was approached by a wonderful organization where they have a collection of masters from around the world in their field, and they are partners to help better and further the creation and the understanding of Chinese composers.
Steven: What else do you like about China, besides getting an opportunity to work on music there? What’s the country like for those of us who haven’t been there?
Mark: It’s mostly surprising for everybody who’s never been there. I’ve been there for 4 years. But it’s not that I’m there full time. I’m still based in California, in Los Angeles. And I have a studio in both Los Angeles and Shanghai. What we love about China is that they are open to experimenting. The process was much more different than it is here. Here, we spend years and years planning things. There, they spend a couple of months planning things and than put it into action and see how it turns out. And for any artist, I think it’s a wonderful thing to be in the sand pits of experimentation. There are amazing people that I have become connected with in the film industry-actually, in all industries-who are all part of the same consortium that we are. It’s actually called DeTao, which means “The Way”. It’s almost like an enormous think tank of world leaders coming together that creates something new. I think it’s wonderful. The other thing that I’m going to say will surprise most people. Living in Shanghai is like living Paris or New York on steroids. It is nothing really Chinese about it, although it is China. And it was actually the area that I live in is called the Former French Concession, and it was built by the French. So, in essence, living in Shanghai is much more enjoyable in many ways than living in other parts of the world.
Steven: That’s really neat. What’s some of the other stuff you’ve worked on recently in either place?
Mark: Many things. One of the things I got to really explore is that I am a concert pianist. And I just have a new sponsorship by Bösendorfer. One of the things we’re doing is we’re doing piano performances around Asia, which is usually accompanied by the films I have scored. And it makes for an interesting new platform of performance. So, we’re doing that. I’m also writing, getting involved with films and television series in China. That’s an exciting thing. And the great thing about working in China is not only am I scoring for film, I’m scoring for provinces and scoring for cities. I was asked by the mayor of Shanghai to write the soundtrack for Shanghai. That’s been a year long project. I just recently scored the Zhejiang province, which is a very wealthy province in China. The capital of it is called Hangzhou, and it’s on a beautiful lake. The G8 Summit [Editor's Note: Actually the G20 summit] is going to be there. So, the government officials came to me and they asked our studio in China, called Studio Chait, to come up with the DNA, the brand of music, that depicts what they are and how they’re represented to the world. This is a very large project because it involves many people and statistics and research. So, scoring locations and cities and provinces is sort of like scoring the Olympic Games for me.
Steven: In what way?
Mark: Because it’s scoring the emotion that comes out of an event. How do you feel when you go to Shanghai? What is the essence of the Zhejiang province? And because I’m good at encapsulating a 4 minute song to tell you the emotion of a one and a half hour film, it’s a good strand of DNA that goes through everything that is associated with it. In essence, it’s what we call music branding.
Steven: Neat. And you mentioned you have a studio-type establishment that you do work from. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that? And it has website, doesn’t it?
Mark: Yes, it does. Actually, if you go to my website, which is markchaitmusic.com, there is a link to the Chinese studio as well. The easiest way to see what’s going on in China is to Google my name, Mark Chait, then put the word China in. Then, all the Chinese websites come up in respect to what we're doing in China. It’s really fascinating. Our organization is called DeTao, which means ‘The Way’. We have a staff, we have full scoring facilities, and we just did our official launch-opening up the studio-at end of July 2015. It’s almost like a full music studio/film scoring/sound design studio, and we are a full music solutions studio. So, if someone wanted to do a film and they want to have music and sound effects and sound design and all of the above, we fulfill those needs. That’s kind of the way of the future.
Steven: Fantastic. I really love that. Do you have any social media accounts you want to plug here? Why don’t you do that?
Mark: The social media accounts that we have are on something that I’m not sure your listeners can get onto. It’s called WeChat. It’s the Facebook of China, but it’s actually got every application combined. Most of our social media is on that. But also, I’m going to start adding things to YouTube. The best way for my social media is through my website, which is markchaitmusic.com.
Steven: Sounds good. Been great having you on. We’ve learned some fantastic things. Not just about Pokémon, but also about how the world of music is evolving. Thank you very much, Mark.
Mark: You’re very welcome.
Steven: This has been Steven Reich from the Poke Press studios in Madison, Wisconsin, on the phone with Mark Chait, co-writer of “The Power of One” song from the second Pokémon movie.
The movies are set to released in February (the 9th for The First Movie and the 16th for the second and third) for $14.98 each. While the descriptions do make reference to the theatrical shorts, they also appear to be placeholders and it is not known for certain if the discs will contain these or any other special features. It is also not known if these movies will be coming to Blu-ray or digital distribution in the US, though the recent trend of releasing the 8th, 9th, and 17th movies digitally suggests that possibility for these films.
The first three Pokemon movies have been out of print in the US since the 10th anniversary of their original US theatrical release dates, the result of an apparent expiration of Warner Bros.'s rights to distribute them. Since then, they have made occasional appearances on television and the Pokemon TV service, and were released on DVD and Blu-ray in Australia earlier this month. These new US releases come very shortly before the 20th anniversary of the original Pokemon games' release in Japan.
The following is an interview with Pam Sheyne (pronounced “Shane”), co-writer
of “Wonderland”, “The Extra Mile” and “One” from Pokémon 2000.
Where are you from, and how did you get
into writing music?
I was born in Auckland, New Zealand and relocated to the UK when I
was seventeen years old. I started out singing and playing guitar in a hotel
band in London then eventually moved into doing session work and touring. I
toured as a backup singer for the Pet Shop Boys in 1991
which was an amazing experience but a real cross roads for me as I didn’t want
to continue being on the road. In 1992 I decided to concentrate on writing
songs full-time and got my first publishing deal. (My husband Nigel Rush was my
first publisher which is how we met). I wanted to be an artist but I started
having success with songwriting first and realised that it was more suited to
me. I am most definitely at home being in the studio writing and producing.
What were some things you worked on before Pokémon
2000?
I love
collaborating and particularly enjoy working with a producer and artist in the
room. In the mid-90’s I teamed up with Eliot Kennedy (Spice
Girls/Bryan Adams/Take That) and we co-wrote/produced for Rebbie Jackson
(Michael’s big sister). She came to London to work with us after we recorded
“Yours Faithfully” for her in LA. My first big success in the UK was with an
artist called Billie Piper
and a song called “She Wants You” which went to No. 3 in the charts and from
there I went on to work with a bunch of acts like Louise who was in girl band Eternal, Norwegian girl
duo M2M and Haley Westenra from my
home country New Zealand. I started doing more regular writing trips to LA, New
York, Nashville and Stockholm to broaden my network and eventually moved to LA
in 2008.
How did you get involved with writing songs
for the movie?
It was on a
writing trip to LA that I had a meeting with Darren Higman at Atlantic Records
for the first time. Darren mentioned he was looking for songs for the upcoming
movie soundtrack and he asked me if I wanted to write something for it. When I
went back to London I called writer/producer Matt Rowe as we had been working
together on a few projects. Darren sent us the visuals to write for one spot in
the movie.
What was your experience with Pokémon prior
to this?
I had never
watched Pokémon before and had only seen the huge impact it had on kids and how
popular it was all over the world.
What was the writing process like?
Matt and I
wrote “Wonderland” and “One” specifically for the film and soundtrack. I
remember us sitting in the studio with a blank page and watching the film
without music for the first time with these cute little characters all falling
down these tunnels and thinking, “I love working to picture, this is going to
be a blast!”
How did “The Extra Mile” get written?
“The Extra
Mile” was written with Tina Arena and Andrew Frampton originally for the Sydney
Olympic Games as Tina was asked to sing a song at the opening ceremony. She
didn't end up singing the song at the games but Laura recorded it for her
Italian and Spanish albums and then it additionally made the Pokémon Soundtrack
album.
Were the songs intended to be used in the
movie, or just inspired by it?
“Wonderland”
was written for a specific scene in the movie and “One” was just written for
the soundtrack. “Wonderland” was not
used in the film itself however because there were publishing clearance issues.
Two of the songs (“Wonderland” and “One”)
have Spanish versions. Were you involved in either of those?
My husband
and I flew to New York to produce the vocal with Angela Via at the Sony
Studios (it was actually originally intended for Dream Street, but was changed
at the last minute). We then flew down to LA to produce the Spanish version
with the translator Jorge Piloto, and then flew back to New York to mix full
length versions of English and Spanish versions. Vocals for “One” were produced
by David Foster-he added to Matt’s production and produced the Spanish vocals (translated
by Claudia Brandt) with Denisse Lara at 143 Studios near LA.
Was an Italian version of “The Extra Mile” ever
considered? Also, what was recording that song like?
There was
talk about doing an Italian version but they wanted it to be only English
language songs on the record for some reason. Nigel, Ben Robbins and I flew to
Milan to produce Laura Pausini’s vocals. It was such a pleasure to work with
her and she was very detail-oriented and such a trooper- we spent hours getting
the pronunciation right. The mix was done at RG Jones in Wimbledon in the UK.
You recently spent some time in Europe
teaching music composition. What was that like?
I was asked
to mentor at a songwriting retreat with and for my friend Martin Sutton (The
Songwriting Academy which is based in London) at the end of May this year. Martin
has been doing this for a few years now and on this occasion we were four
mentors and 32 songwriters. We didn’t teach composition as such but did
masterclasses on the craft of songwriting and lent our experience on the
business side of it. It was a week-long camp in co-writing sessions with the
songwriters each day and because we were all staying in the same place we also
got to socialise and hang out so it was a lot of fun. I have also been
mentoring a lot of artists from South Africa and some have travelled to LA to
work with me over the past couple of years. I am looking at doing more of this
in the future as I enjoy working with young artists and teaching them some
tricks in writing songs. Watch this space!
Where can folks find your web site, and do
you have any social media that you post on?
