For music fans, today is Earth, Wind & Fire Day. You don’t have to be a superfan to figure out why. It’s all in the first line of EWF’s classic, “September”
Do you remember the 21st night of September?
Love was changing the minds of pretenders
While chasing the clouds away
The song was co-written by legendary EWF founder Maurice White and equally legendary songwriter Allee Willis. Willis has one of those bodies of work people look at and go, “Oh hey, I didn’t know that was her!” She says she learned a key lesson as a songwriter that I think any writer–any artist for that matter–can use.
Apparently they went a couple of rounds about White’s chorus…
Ba-dee-ya, say, do you remember
Ba-dee-ya, dancing in September
She wanted to him to change it.
“And finally, when it was so obvious that he was not going to do it, I just said, ‘What the f*** does ‘ba-dee-ya’ mean?’ And he essentially said, ‘Who the f*** cares?’” she says. “I learned my greatest lesson ever in songwriting from him, which was never let the lyric get in the way of the groove.”
Never let the lyric get in the way of the groove! For me, it’s a motto for writing and for living.