Neither of us do things that are portable-I can’t just uproot and go there. Because both of us are rooted in our cities. It’s like a candy-coating sprinkled with unicorn dust, but in reality it just doesn’t work. And just logistically, it’s not feasible long-term. I love him profusely, but he’s on the other side of the world. I was enamored with the fact you both said really nice things about each other even though you’re each other’s exes. And I was thinking to myself, oh dear god Valerie, what does this song sound like? And they picked it up as a single.” And he wouldn’t tell me any details. It was like, “I kind of wrote a song about you. I remember when he told me about the song. We didn’t have a bad falling-out or anything. It’s bizarre and crazy-and yeah, I love him to death. I always say it’s like we’ve got this really weird alien baby because we’ve got this connection until the day that we die. So this musician wrote a whole song about you that actually saw the light of day. On a breezy spring afternoon in, the Valerie-her hair still ginger as hell-sat down with me to spill everything about how a fateful fling became the sweet, enigmatic, ubiquitous track that it is today. McCabe tells me he never would have dreamed it’d blow up like this, but he’s thankful that it did, regardless of the avenue it took. Winehouse wasn’t in it-by that time, she was battling pretty severe heroin addiction. That very year, people remixed it, and a music video dropped. Mark Ronson produced the 2007 cover with Winehouse on vocals, and it surged past the original to number 2 on the UK charts. And that’s how the whole “why don’t you come on over, Valerie?” thing happened. McCabe corroborated everything Star told me about the song’s narrative: Star allegedly caught a charge after several driving offenses, nearly went to jail (hence the line Winehouse most notably sings as “Do you need a good lawyer-er-er?”), and couldn’t move to the UK to be with him. “She was in the States and I was home and it was kind of like a postcard,” he said wistfully.
McCabe wrote the song about Star in 2006, for the Zutons’ second studio album, Tired of Hanging Around, in the back of a cab in about five minutes.
“Oh yeah, that’s her,” he confirmed, in a thick Liverpool accent.
So we got a hold of McCabe and interrogated him.
0 kommentar(er)
