‘The Greatest’
featuring Luke Strand
“YOU’RE A FIGHTER, YOU’RE A WINNER…”
I started this track just jamming to a drum loop from my buddy Adam Stehr. I think that initially I played the stabs you hear in the intro with my Prophet 5, and added the bassline with the Moog. Like a lot of the stuff I work on, I kind of just put it down for a bit after creating the initial idea...
I ended up coming back to the beat a couple of months later when I was working on new material for the album and a bunch of melody ideas came to me and I kind of had a new lens on the song.
From there I sketched out some lyrics that were inspired by a close friend of mine who was going through a tough time. At that point I had the demo idea and was already thinking of asking Luke to come in as a featured singer on it.
Here’s the original demo with my scratch vocals:
Next me, Luke and Jordan (he’s also the dude singing backgrounds and playing guitar in the video) all got on a Zoom call and did a really great vocal session where we basically knocked out the whole tune. Luke obviously threw his sauce on it and Jordan really killed the vocal production and recording.
I had a few pals play some other instruments on it! They are listed below…
“Everything comes
in waves”
…and a cop almost pulled us over…
THE CAR VIDEO
Everything was running really smooth when we shot this video. On the first take we recorded for this song with Luke, we captured something pretty funny…
About half way through the take, a cop got behind us. Luke noticed right away, but the rest of us were too into it to realize so we just kept on rolling.
Towards the end of the take I picked up on it as well and got really nervous…
Luckily he ended up just passing us, but I wonder if he would have enjoyed the music…