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Inspiration never seemed to be that much of a struggle for Phil Collins in his prime.
The fact that he was absolutely everywhere every single time he came out with a new record was already a bit of a headache to deal with, but he wouldn’t have been trying to promote himself that much if he didn’t have the songs he thought could sell millions of copies. But if you look at the heroes that he looked up to, Collins felt that he needed to follow in the footsteps of those who made the masterpieces in his record collection.
Because while Collins could make the most complicated arrangements in the world with Genesis, sometimes the best option is the simplest half the time. It doesn’t take a rock and roll genius to hammer out that drum fill in the middle of ‘In the Air Tonight’, and yet when listening to the record, Collins seems to be doing everything he can to hold back and make the tune sound a lot more ominous so that the drum fill sounds perfect in the mix.
Even when he’s working outside of his wheelhouse, though, the fact that some of his greatest collaborations came together so naturally doesn’t even sound like it should work. The idea of someone who looked like him eventually working with Bone Thugs-n-Harmony or getting the chance to write a tune with Philip Bailey doesn’t make any sense, but that came from Collins doing his homework when it came to his favourite artists.
A lot of his upbringing was centred around the biggest names in soul music, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate rock and roll when he wanted to. The Action meant as much to him as Led Zeppelin did when he started making his first forays into music, but when he heard what The Beatles were capable of as a group, he figured that they should be the standard that he held himself to whenever he made his own solo tunes.
The Fab Four already had an uncanny ability to make pitch-perfect pop, but what knocked Collins out was the fact that a song like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ sounded so natural when it first came out, saying, “My grounding is The Beatles, and whenever I heard those songs growing up, I always felt like I knew them. Nothing was a surprise; it was just fantastic. You feel, like, ‘Of course, fantastic.’ It’s not like, ‘Whoa, I’ve never heard that before.’” Then again, it’s not like they couldn’t surprise everybody when they had the chance.
Before prog-rock even had a name, most of the band’s best moments tended to come from them trying out new things, and even if King Crimson broke down boundaries for prog, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ did a lot more for the genre than anyone realised. It gave everyone permission to make strange sounds, but it was the sense of melody that Collins kept hanging onto.
It wasn’t always easy trying to find that one magical chorus whenever he was writing his songs, but even if everyone was calling him softer as he got older, the fact that he could stretch himself came from listening to The Beatles. After all, the band was supposed to give people confidence that they could do it themselves, and if Lennon and McCartney could make pop songs and star in films, Collins could do the same thing when he started making music for movies like Tarzan.
So while most people can try to twist their songs in a million different directions when it comes to arranging everything, Collins felt that no one needed to worry about that kind of thing when they had The Beatles as their guide. It was all about making the best music that he could, but the best tunes are the ones that seem to fall out of the sky and sound like they’ve been there since the beginning of time.
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