Nik Furious: Sunday Best: I Was Made to Remix

I Was Made to Remix goes back 15 years to 1998 when I was still in high school. That's when the Jimi Hendrix double disc album BBC Sessions was released, including a version of I Was Made to Love Her.

To explain the significance of the original recording requires a brief explanation of how BBC radio worked in the UK back then. They had certain rules about how much radio music had to be live and how much could be taken from commercial albums. This resulted in a lot of two-track recordings produced expressly for BBC radio featuring popular recording artists. 

In October 1967, the Jimi Hendrix Experience was in the BBC studio recording a few songs. Stevie Wonder was next door. And when Mitch Mitchell stepped out to pee, Wonder sat in on drums and recorded a couple songs with Jimi.

Stevie has a really distinctive drum technique. I have a hard time describing its uniqueness because my drum vocabulary is a bit stunted. But I like what he does! And hearing his loose, funky style accompany Jimi and Noel Redding is fantastic.

Overall, their rendition of I Was Made to Love Her -- which was Wonder's hit song of 1967 -- is just okay. But it's the very end where they play a half-minute of magical music that really captures me. It's got this happy/sad/beautiful/raw combination that often happens while jamming but rarely gets recorded.

So when I was thinking of unconventional songs I'd like to experiment with and remix (sometime in 2008-2009), I Was Made to Love Her came to mind. I wanted to see if I could loop the magical moment and extend it into a full song. And so I did!

I Was Made to Remix was really just made for me personally so I could listen to an extended version of a musical moment that I love. However, when my friend Deniz was spotlighting "Perfect Moments" as the theme for her radio show, Modern Donkey, I gave her a copy of this song and she shared it on her blog.

Also, a listener of hers blogged about that Modern Donkey episode and linked to my song. Deniz responded to him in the comments with a Nik Furious shoutout. You can check out their exchange here.