Praying For Time: My Tribute to George Michael

Some songs you write. This one I borrowed, and then spent months trying to deserve.

Praying For Time is a George Michael song. Releasing my version of it in December was not a coincidence, and neither was much else about it. Here is how it came together.

Why this song, and why December

George Michael died on 25 December 2016. For a tribute to him, no other month made sense to me. And there is a second layer to that date: he is also the man who wrote Last Christmas. December belongs to him twice over.

A song he never released

This was not my first time in his orbit.

On my first album, 200 000 Years After, there is a song George Michael wrote. It was given to me in the nineties: a demo called Question Of Love, with only the first verse and the first chorus on it, sung by him. It was never released.

I finished it. I wrote the second verse and a bridge, re-recorded the whole thing, and put it out in 2019. We shot the video in London, where he lived.

So when I came back to his catalogue for Praying For Time, it did not feel like covering a stranger.

The room and the setup

I record at home, alone. Everything happens inside Logic Pro — I write in it, I record in it.

The chain is simple: an iMac, a Universal Audio Apollo Twin, an AKG XLII for the voice, a pair of Focal Solo 6 monitors, and Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro headphones for the takes.

There is no recipe for how a song starts. Usually it begins with an instrument in my hands, a guitar or a piano. I record the chords over a loop and build from there. Sometimes I start from a virtual instrument instead, just to see where a sound pushes me.

The one thing I do on every track: I double the backing vocals. Then triple them. Sometimes four times, sometimes more. It depends on the song, and I stop when the wall feels wide enough to carry the lead.

The vocal

I sing the first pass. Then I listen. If something needs fixing, I do a second one, and that is usually where it ends.

I don’t think you get a better result by piling up takes. It works the other way round: past the second one, you start sanding off the spontaneity that made the first one worth keeping. The first or the second take is almost always the most natural, and so the best, even when there are technical flaws in it. The emotion is there. That is what matters.

I record sitting or standing depending on the song, in a room with the lights low, and always on my own.

The take that ended up on the record is not the best one technically. It is the one where I stopped thinking about singing.

The mix, and knowing when to hand it over

I don’t mix my own songs.

Mixing your own material is a strange exercise: you are far too close to it to stay objective about the artistic choices, and even less about the risks worth taking. So I hand the wheel to an arranger and mixing engineer, and then we work the track together, closely. He makes the calls I can no longer make from where I am standing. I stay in the room.

What I’d tell anyone starting out

Learn the tool properly, and learn it early.

I learned Logic Pro fifteen years ago at YouTips, in Grenoble, with Fabien Fons. That decision is still paying off today. Everything above — the way I stack vocals, the takes I keep, the sessions I hand over — rests on knowing the software well enough that it stops getting in the way of the song.

If you speak French and you want something more structured than an endless pile of YouTube tutorials, their Logic Pro training is where I send people.

Listen to it

If you made it this far, thank you. Stargazer, my new album, arrives in September — I’ll write one of these for it too.