CAMERON ADAMS
James Blunt has revealed the NSFW secret behind his fragile ‘I’m so hollow’ vocals at the end of his global hit Goodbye My Lover.
The British musician recorded the track in 2004 on a piano he found in the LA bathroom of late Hollywood star Carrie Fisher.
Blunt said he wanted to make sure he went “deep” on the emotional ballad that has been streamed over 250 million times.
“What I thought I’d do was I’d buy a hash brownie,” he explained on his LISTNR exclusive podcast Being Blunt.
“I thought I’d take one of these and get weird and deep in on the song. And the person who sold it to me said ‘Just take a quarter of this’. So I ate a half of this hash brownie…After about 45 minutes I was in f—ng agony! I was My brain was going crazy, this thing had sent me totally loopy and I wanted to tear my own skin off.”
Blunt suggested his producer Tom Rothrock join him on the ride.
“He walked in and said ‘How are you feeling?’ and I said ‘yeah, it’s quite mild, it’s fine’ so he ate the other half of the hash brownie. At which stage Tom Rothrock hit some kind of planetary level and started screaming ‘Take me to hospital! Take me to hospital! Take me to hospital now!’
Blunt figured the best way to deal with the evolving edible situation was to get the piano ballad recorded as quickly as possible.
“I’m singing Goodbye My Lover for the first time, and I’m high as a kite, and I’ve just left the army and now I’m in Los Angeles and I’m in Carrie Fisher’s bathroom and there’s this guy on drugs in the corner and he’s screaming about going to hospital and I’m singing this song and I think I’m gonna die now!
“And as I reach the end of the song and I think I’m gonna give it my all and you can hear from the pain of the song I think I’m gonna die. And sure enough at the end of the song I completely pass out. If you listen really closely you can hear someone’s last breath as I expunge and faint and pass out on the floor. And then what we have to cut out from the recording is Tom screaming ‘Take me to hospital’ and the engineer turning around and going ‘What the f— is happening with you guys?’ Then Carrie Fischer walked in with some soup going ‘Who wants soup?’”
Being Blunt includes more stories about stalkers, serial stage-diving and how Elton John talked a woman into his bed.
Blunt has just released his first singles compilation The Stars Beneath My Feet.
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