About a Girl - the story of a theme song

In the summer of 2007 we, as in Combine the Victorious, were one of two bands with a song being considered for the theme to a new television series called "About a Girl." It was pretty cool. The music supervisor told us that she'd pitched over 300 other songs first to the two networks before they found our song "Blue Kitchen." We never knew heard the other song that was under consideration, but feel lucky to have landed the spot!

The only hitch was we had to condense a three minute song down to 15 seconds!

Obviously only the essence was required, so we chose to try and fit an entire chorus into the intro sequence. The song had been recorded at 115bpm originally and in the course of working on it we'd decided to speed it up to 117bpm. That was the cut that the producers were listening to. Their idea was to have a very rapid intro sequence with quick cuts of each of the characters flashing rapidly on the screen while Blue Kitchen played. Seemed easy except we couldn't even get to the end of the chorus before time was out, never mind have an intro or outro. We're talking 15 seconds here right?

So we tried speeding it up. All the way to 130 bpm, which I have to say sounded pretty shit. I mailed the production supervisor three or four different cuts at various speeds until we agreed upon 126bpm. Still quite a leap, but the song maintained some semblance to the original. Next came agreeing on the mix.

Rumour has it that everyone signed off on the 126 bpm version, liked the intro and outro hits and were generally happy... until the following Monday morning when a new co-producer heard the theme song for the first time and queried, "Is there any reason why they're singing about a Blue Kitchen in the middle of the chorus?" Fair enough really, except that the title of the song was actually Blue Kitchen so we were a bit wary of changing it. However I suggested we could alter the lyric from "here in blue kitchen today" to "here in our kitchen today." I mean, I didn't really have to be in a BLUE kitchen if it meant losing the deal. Right?

So we re-sang the sped up chorus and tried to insert "everything's alright, everything's okay, everyone if here in our kitchen today." After all the months working on the song it was like pulling a tumor out of my brain to not sing the original lyric over and over again. Took me almost two bloody hours. Then it was Isabelle's turn. I forewarned her that if may be quite a challenge to sing the altered words, but she came in, did three or four takes and was done: no problem at all. And I even used one of the early takes for her double. Frustrating.

We sent that version off and felt pretty good about our work-around. However, this one was met by a "can we have one without the word 'kitchen" in it at all?" Hmph.... that was a hard one to even try. There was more than one never sent e-mail composed that afternoon, however I was ever so lucky as to receive a very clever idea from Manny Pereira, the production supervisor. He has obvious musical ability because he made the observation, "isn't the music in the section right before the chorus kinda the same thing? Couldn't we use those lyrics over the chorus music?" It was the perfect solution. In fact it improved the whole thing dramatically.

Now the lyrics went:

"we're coming to your floor,
knocking on your door,
always room for more.
everything's alright..."

(this isn't the actual opening credit, just an audio clip of the opening edit - I wanted to only load the song but it wouldn't let me -had to make it a video! you'll get the idea.)



...seemed rather fitting for a tv theme song. I started laughing as I mixed it down because it seemed so stupidly perfect. I was imagining "Friends" or something, it was really quite sweet. They were in fact very happy with that and we started the paper work. (Thanks again to Sarah Webster down at SL Feldman's for doing all that for us, it's impossible to express how much my eyes glaze over when presented with a contract or form of any kind! Mille Grazie!)

Everything was cool at that point, but next came a phone call about getting music for the ending as well. This was one of those good news/bad news things. The good part was that we'd get a whole 30 seconds for the outro! The lame part was they had no more money in the budget. But, of course we had to do it, reimbursement or not.

The outro piece was a lot simpler, only took one shot at it. Since we'd already agreed upon a tempo I started with that and threw everything I could into those 30 seconds, even a snare drum ba dum-dum at the finale. Isabelle sings lead in this part this part, which is kinda cute: I sing the intro and she sings outro. Personally I much prefer the ending credit version, there's more time, so we could fit all the parts in and have it hold much truer to the album version. Only regret not sending them a louder version, as it always seems a bit low on the televison, especially following a commercial!

After all that malarky we sat back and and awaited the debut of the series. It came out way earlier in the States. It was funny to discuss the show with people who'd viewed most of the season before we'd even seen a commercial for it! About a Girl started in October down south but we didn't get it in Canada until March! By that point we'd seen a clip of it via my brother-in-law's netcam pointed at his tv, but it was a lot cooler to sit down and wait to hear our song appear on the television for the first time. We were both cheersing each other quite a bit that night!! Plus the adventure hasn't stopped yet. We noticed that after the first season aired on E-Channel the series was picked up by Showcase for it's autumn programming. That made us smile a bit too.

So from being the very first song that Isabelle and I wrote together, in our basement, with no greater thought than "what the hell let's try it", Blue Kitchen has now been heard around North America. We've met many cool people on our myspace due to the song, and have had a ton of exposure (though admittedly you need to be an extremely fast reader to catch the name in real time as if flashes on the screen)! And this was the same song that I personally thought was too simplistic to put on our album. Isabelle always defended, probably because it was her first song, but also because she really liked it! Pretty good beginners luck!

If you'd like a copy for your iPod you can find it by clicking on the album artwork below:



Thank you for reading this. Cheers,

Mark Henning