Reflections on “Time Alone With You” by Jacob Collier and Daniel Caesar

I played this for my students a while ago. A lot of them liked it. Some of them didn’t.

I really like this song. It reminds me that to making something groove it has to be “imperfect.” There has to be something in it that isn’t quantized and timed absolutely perfectly as if to be timed by a computer. That doesn’t mean that computer-generated music like chiptunes aren’t good music, but that they don’t have the same rhythmic groove and feel as songs that are played by real people.

This idea is something that you learn about at Berklee College of Music in the Film Scoring department. When making mockups (virtual “recordings” of orchestral music) of film cues you often think a lot about this. To get some of the best results you need to start by playing every single part into your computer. Then maybe you adjust the overall “accuracy” of the rhythm by quantizing or adjusting it to be more evenly timed.

But if you quantize everything too much then it becomes robotic and no longer sounds like a realistic orchestral recording. The goal with mockups is to make it sound like a real, in-person, live orchestra performed and recorded it. That orchestra wouldn’t have every single player playing everything at exactly the same time. If you’ve got a violin section of 16 players, you’ll have 16 slightly different starting points for a note. That’s the effect that you want to create when making a mockup. Obviously, that becomes a little difficult when you have one single track that plays a violin section patch. But you get the idea.

It also reminds me a bit of the song “Didn’t It Rain” by Sister Rosetta Tharpe which I have a blog post about.

There’s a call and response in this song, just like “Didn’t It Rain”. It’s not the exact same type of call and response, but at the beginning of the song, Daniel Caesar and Jacob Collier are alternating what they’re singing.

Something I really like in the song is the contrast between the two voices. 
They already have contrast naturally because they both sing in two different styles. Jacob Collier’s voice is very round and warm and soft. Daniel Caesar’s voice is a little harsher. This contrast is amplified because Daniel Caesar is singing in a low register by himself. And when Jacob Collier sings he is in a high register and has multiple layers of voices combined. This increases that contrast and I think it’s a nice element to add to the song.

When Jacob Collier leads the verses this contrast is still present. Jacob Collier is singing in a high register and Daniel Caesar is singing in a low register. They both have multiple layers of voices, but one is singing words and the other is singing fewer words, often only being vocables like “oh” or “ay.”

This contrast is even present in the music video.

Jacob Coller has all of these different and eccentric costumes and costume changes while Daniel Caesar stays in gray sweats the entire time. It makes sense because Daniel Caesar’s voice in the song stays relatively the same. It doesn’t change as much as Jacob Collier’s voice does.

I also like that at the beginning there’s this short riff that’s played repeatedly throughout. It’s a fourths based riff and it’s used kind of like a transition riff to go from one section to another. I like having that short one bar transition there. I think it adds some continuity and structure to a song that has a lot of chaotic and different bits to it.

That’s it for this post. I hope you enjoyed reading it. Make sure to sign up for my newsletter and thanks for reading.

Peace.

ISJ