Deee-Lite | Groove Is In The Heart (Change Request ReVision)
For this ReVision, I reconstructed the most famous and successful song from one of the leaders of the New York New School of the 1990s.
Released as the first single from their debut album—World Clique—“Groove Is In The Heart” was released in August of 1990, and shot Deee-Lite into the stratosphere. This track’s crossover appeal was by design—claiming the number one spot on Billboard’s Hot Dance Club Play in 1990—featuring guest vocalists Bootsy Collins and Q-Tip.
This song—remarkable—was a beacon of creative sampling, as one of the first radio played pop records to feature such an extensive list of source material, including snags from Bel-Sha-Zaar, Herbie Hancock, Vernon Burch, Ray Barretto Theme From Green Acres, Ralph MacDonald, Billy Preston, The Headhunters, Hateful Head Helen, and even more.
I remade this mimicking the programming of the original—which was a major challenge just to get the percussion sections to emulate a multilayer of samples being summed—added additional drums and rearranged the song to be a longer version that I always wanted.
I used the Roland JV-1080 to reproduce the horn sections and saturated everything to 1990. This was produced with @EventideAudio effects processing, including UltraReverb, SP2016 Reverb, and Tony Visconti’s Tverb.
