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October 30, 2024 14 mins
In episode 1 of season 4, hear Rob Thomas reveal the universal appeal behind "3AM," Mike Levine of Triumph break down "Lay It On The Line," and Amanda Marshall unpack the power of "Let It Rain."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Careful clock clocklocker bolling.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
So cool to be playing violin on just to wreck
it off the tire table.

Speaker 3 (00:07):
You ready for this?

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Welcome to Behind the Vinyl. Here's your host, Stu Jetpbreks.

Speaker 4 (00:16):
We have arrived. Welcome to another season of great guests
and amazing music. Welcome to season four Behind the Vinyl,
where artists stop by, drop the needle on their songs
and give us the goods on how this song was created.
In our first episode of the season, Rob Thomas talks
about three Am, how he wrote it at a very
young age, and how it is a song about everyone.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
The best songs are universal, so I don't need to
tell you about what I went through. I need to
tell you about how that made me feel, and you
can relate to the feeling of that thing.

Speaker 4 (00:42):
That's just two songs away. But first, the nicest bass
player keyboardist in Canadian music, hands down, Mike Levine of Triumph,
tells us his version of lay it on the line.

Speaker 5 (00:52):
Okay, so here we go. I'm going to try and
drop the needle in the right place. Who So this
is a classic Triumph song. Recorded this in nineteen seventy nine.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
It became a signature song for us.

Speaker 5 (01:10):
It really created kind of a formula in some ways,
with a quiet intro and then it grews big drums,
a little bit of harmony here and there. When we
played this song live, it created an incredible vibe in

(01:32):
the audience.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
And when we get to the guitar soul, I'm not.

Speaker 5 (01:34):
Going to talk because it's one of the best guitar
songs that you'll ever hear.

Speaker 3 (01:39):
It just sets up the rest of the song because when.

Speaker 5 (01:42):
You construct a song, need an intro, need verses, need
a bridge, and of course the chorus is Without a chorus,
you got no song, but without an intro, you don't
have a song either. Recording this song was very, very
easy actually, and speaking of recording songs, here's the chorus pim.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
It was fun.

Speaker 5 (02:11):
Rick Rick cut the vocal I think in one take.
It was relatively painless to record, except for the drums
because Gil hated his drum sound.

Speaker 3 (02:21):
And we didn't do this at Metalworks.

Speaker 5 (02:22):
We did a place called Sounds Interchange, which is staying
in downtown Toronto on Richmond Street. Mike Jones was the engineer,
a great guy who passed away recently.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
It was very sad, sad.

Speaker 5 (02:33):
For us because we worked he worked on a large
triph albums. But it's the way, you know, we all
live and then we all go away, and it's all
it's what you do with that at that time space.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
It's important live again.

Speaker 5 (02:49):
This song was really cool to play because the audience
the chorus. We used to break it down and the
audience would go sing right along with it, laid on
the lines. It was fans of the air way too
much fun recording this is from just a Game album.
I think that you know, we weren't heavily into liquor,
or maybe we were, or drugs sometimes, but on that

(03:14):
album it was kind of cool because we all smoked
up and did a kind of a jazzy song I
was late at night, or here's a guitar song.

Speaker 3 (03:26):
I'm gonna hear guitar a little bit. Rick played his
ass off. It was so cool. Oh beautiful, there we go.

Speaker 5 (03:44):
And I love the bass lineups too, because I played
as Okay, here we go end of solo.

Speaker 3 (03:53):
Wow. Killer Rock Radio played the heck out of that song.

Speaker 5 (03:57):
A Top forty actually started to play and then Paola
stopped happening in the United States, so the record died
on the vine because without payola, you didn't have a
hit record. But you neither hear the ALM radio was
our main source of exposure, and they did a heck
of a job for us from this album on. Actually,

(04:19):
this is when they first took Triumph under their wings,
so to speak, and the rest became history, certainly at
radio level, and allowed us to graduate really from playing
theaters to playing arenas. And it was a great progression
which kind of doesn't exist in the music business anymore.
Because you don't have a hit in your first record

(04:40):
within thirty minutes, record company doesn't care to drop you,
and you have no chance. So we were lucky enough
to be around where you had lots of chances as
long as you showed growth. And that's really the whole
story about this song.

Speaker 4 (04:53):
That was Mike Levine of Triumph im behind the vinyl. Hey,
thanks for listening. I'm Stu Jeffries with Rob Thomas talking
about the making of three Am. Shortly, but before that
happens Powerhouse, Amanda Marshall takes a few minutes to walk
us through her song let It Ring.

Speaker 6 (05:09):
Okay, So the year was nineteen ninety four. I had
just moved to Los Angeles to start recording the first record,
and the record was mostly written at this point by
the time this song came along and I heard the
I heard this song sort of almost by accident towards

(05:31):
the end of the album. Kristen Hall had submitted it
and we hadn't listened to it yet, and Dave Tyson
sent me home with it, and almost immediately I was like,
I want to put this on the album. I love
this song. I can't remember exactly what the original demo
sounded like, whether it had that open with the acoustic guitar,

(05:51):
but Kristin was European and she and I actually to
this day have never met, which is unusual because you know,
I've either worked with or met to the songwriters that
I've recorded, whose songs I've recorded. But I just knew
immediately for some reason, the song really spoke to me
and I. We tried all kinds of different arrangements of it,

(06:13):
and what I remember was that the take that finally
ended up on the album was a complete take, which
is sort of unusual. I sort of sang the song
beginning to end, and we listened back to it and
we sort of debated like, do we want to make
any cuts, do we want to make any edits, do
we want to add anything? And we were pretty happy
with it. I can't remember who played that really great

(06:37):
little line in the middle, that guitar line, but I do.
But I just remember being at Dave's house with all
the windows open and looking out over this sort of
valley where he lived, and it just seemed like such
a perfect match. The weather was perfect, and it really
felt like the record was sort of coming to an
end because we were almost finished recording it, and it

(06:59):
just sort of felt like the perfect backstop to all
the other material that we had. It was the perfect
cap for all of the other songs. It's one of
those songs that no matter where I go in the world,
everybody knows the words. I've sung it in rainstorms, which
is like a little on the nose, but we've stopped
shows because it was raining so hard and the whole
audience will just take over singing, let it rain. You know.

(07:23):
I've sung it in Japan, where nobody spoke a word
of English. I remember the first time we went to Japan.
We were in Osaka and we played at this little club,
and Japan is kind of unusual in that you will submit,
or at least in those days, you were submitting the
set list before the show, so everybody the audience was
getting a copy of the set list so they know

(07:45):
what order the songs are going to be in, so
they can anticipate what songs they know, and you know
what songs they don't know. Anyway, And at the end
of the show, I remember walking out to the car
and there was this huge crowd of people waiting for us,
which I could not possibly have anticipated. It was our
first trip. So we got in the car and the

(08:07):
driver started driving, and it was sort of down this
long alleyway and I heard this kind of rush of
noise behind the car, and I turned and there was
this girl who was running alongside the car. We weren't
going very fast, but she was sort of running alongside
the car. She was banging on the back window. So
we stopped the car and I rolled the window down,

(08:31):
and she stuck her head up to the into the
window and she said, Amanda, let it rain. I had
a good time, and it was the most gratifying thing
that had ever happened to me at that point. She
was this young girl, and you could tell that her
anguish was not great, but she understood, you know, she
understood that she had had a great time. She knew

(08:53):
the song. It was the song that she had been
waiting for. And it really speaks the idea that when
you go to see live music, you know, those songs
that you anticipate, those songs that you wait for, that's
the most gratifying part of the night. And it doesn't
matter if you understand the language, if you're from a
different culture. You know, it is a binder for people
all over the world. The song has you know, the

(09:15):
song has taken me from France to Alaska to I mean,
I've been all over the world singing this song. I've
sung it on TV, I've sung it in hospitals, I've
sung it all over the world, and it's always a
song that kind of brings people together. And I'm so
happy that we found it so late in the process.

Speaker 4 (09:32):
She's got the power, no question about that. Amanda Marshall
on behind the Vinyl would let it rain.

Speaker 3 (09:36):
I'm your host.

Speaker 4 (09:37):
Stu Jeffries with a very down to earth, tell it
like it is kind of guy. Rob Thomas, like most musicians,
he became a musician to how do we say up
his status regarding romantic encounters. He's not as delicate with
his explanation as you'll soon hear. Here Rob talks about
his hit song three Am, and we.

Speaker 7 (09:54):
Are going to drop it right on three track number three. Now,
I know the track number three is about to happen
because I hear track number two ending back when I
used to actually listen to my own music a lot,
that sound was very comforting to me. So three Am,
matchbox twenty three am, y three am, Rob.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
Let me tell you three Am was the first song
that I ever wrote that I liked, or more importantly,
it's the first song that ever wrote that I thought
other people should hear. So like I was spending all
my time since I was fourteen years old playing in
bands writing a bunch of songs, but really my only
motivation was that I was a weird kid, and I
was awkward, and I didn't know how to talk to girls,

(10:38):
and the only way that I could talk to girls
was by playing music. And so my first attempts at
writing music were just really bad Lino Richie songs like
I wanted to write stuck on you you know, or
I wanted to write easy like Sunday Morning, and I
just wrote really bad love songs that I thought would

(10:58):
get me laid honestly. And then when I was like
nineteen or twenty, I wrote three Am. And I wrote
it because when I was about twelve or thirteen, my
mother had cancer and it was a weird experience. If
you're a kid and you go to school and you
do normal kid things, and then you go home, you

(11:19):
have the secret life that people don't know about. And
I think there's a lot of references to rain because
we lived in Florida, and if you've ever been to
Florida and you're in the summer, it rains a lot.
And so I had a lot of these memories of
rainy days of my mom kind of sleeping off the
chemotherapy and coming home and taking care of her. I
think one of the funnier things that happened, I mean,
not ha ha funny, but was that it kind of became,

(11:41):
you know, for it became whatever other people needed it
to be over the years. Like some people they apply
it to their marriage, some people apply it to their friendships,
to people they've loved, people they've lost. I think the
best part about a song is that like you. If
I write a song that's about me and it's about
something that I'm going through, you don't need to know that.
The best songs are universal, So I don't need to

(12:02):
tell you about what I went through. I need to
tell you about how that made me feel, and you
can relate to the feeling of that thing. And that's
what I think makes a great song when it's about
you and it's very personal and you can tell every
word what it's about, but at the same time, there's
a universality to it. It's off of Matchbox twenty debut record,
Matchbox twenty, yourself or someone like you. I am a fan.

(12:26):
We originally we literally our record was supposed to come
out on a February and we Paul and I went
to go see this singer songwriter and I can't even
remember her name, and I'm really sad about it, but
she was just this really great singer songwriter and the
record was going to be called Woodshed Diaries. We had
a different title, we had a different cover. And the

(12:46):
next day we walked in because this girl had started
a song and she said, this song is for you
or someone like you, and I thought that that was
the greatest line I'd ever heard, and we stole that
directly and we made it. And our label hated us
because they had literally made up like thirty five hundred
copies of a record with a different title, and we
changed the title and they're like, well, if you do this,

(13:07):
we can't put out till February, and we're like, ooh, more,
rollout time. That's awesome, and then we chose this cover.
Now I'm not sure if you understand, but if you
are a label and you're trying to push a band
and they're going to put out the first record, which,
by the way, I want you to know, the first
week this record came out, it sold a whopping six
hundred and ten copies. That's how big we were. But

(13:30):
when you got a band that's kind of pushing those numbers,
you want to make sure that they make really good decisions.
And we walked in and said this was our album cover.
This was not the decision that they thought that they
wanted to hear. But it turns out I think it's
so horrible that it became iconic in its own way,
and whatever fifteen million people have in their home somewhere
so that's the story about that.

Speaker 4 (13:54):
Rob Thomas three AM wraps up this episode of Behind
the Final Thank you for your time, and if you
find yourself having more of it, please check out some
of our past episodes because there is no shortage of
cool stories on Behind the Bible. While you're there, feel
free to subscribe because we got more where that came from.
On behalf of our team. I'm Stu Jeffries. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
This has been Behind the Vinnle the podcast hosted by
Stuve Jeffries. Audio production courtesy of Doug Morehouse, Derek Welsman
and Troy McCallum. Thanks for listening.
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