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'in the air' may be the incense of the church.
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On its original release in 1981 it peaked at #2. The song has charted in the UK on three different occasions. I never wrote anything down and then afterward, I listened to it and wrote them down." The lyrics you hear for 'In the Air Tonight,' I just sang. I remember the first principle I had for making my record was that I would get a voice down very quickly so everything else would fit to the voice. I was coming from Genesis recording and rehearsing history where sometimes we didn't know what the vocal was going to be doing when we recorded the track because lyrics were sometimes written after the track was recorded. I probably added an acoustic Fender piano pretty early. You could eliminate certain sounds and program bass drums and snare drums, so I programmed a bass drum part into it, but basically the rest of it was already on there. 'In the Air Tonight' was just a drum machine pattern that I took off that CR78 drum machine.
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Said Collins: "I got back to find that I had a lot of time on my hands because the family wasn't there, I rang up and said, 'Can I have my drum machine?' because I had to start writing some of this music that was inside me.įace Value was all written over a period of a year-and-a-half, and some songs were written overnight. In an interview with Mix magazine, Collins explained that he wrote this song after returning from a tour.
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