{"id":13,"date":"2026-02-17T15:07:48","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T15:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web110warden.mydcts.org\/?page_id=13"},"modified":"2026-02-25T16:20:02","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T16:20:02","slug":"background-and-composition","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/web110warden.mydcts.org\/index.php\/background-and-composition\/","title":{"rendered":"Background and Composition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
<\/span>
\n
\n
\n
\n

Derrick McKenzie auditioned to be the drummer for Jamiroquai by recording the opening track, “Just Another Story”, with the band in one take. McKenzie replaced the band’s original drummer, Nick Van Gelder, who failed to return from holiday. The track has “a long, squittery, highly rhythmic intro \u2013 tight snare drum, Fender Rhodes piano, generic (’70s) synth sound, strings, galloping bass, clonking percussion”. In the song, Jay Kay “extemporises a street tale \u2026 midway between rapping and singing.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The album was recorded at Townhouse, Battery, and Falconer studios, all located in London. As the band started to record, Kay suddenly fell into a second-album syndrome worsened by his increasing drug use. The songwriting process was complex for the band, as Kay was often dissatisfied with the results, leading to songs being scrapped or rewritten. He also struggled with writing lyrics “because suddenly I wasn’t homeless, I had everything I needed. So I found myself creating problems to write about.” The Latin-tinged “Stillness in Time” was written when Kay was at his lowest point in recording the album. He said that “the sweetness of [the song] was really wishful thinking; a hope that things would get better.” “Half the Man” is a mid-tempo track about Kay’s twin brother who died shortly after birth: “[In] that sense I always have a part of me being missing, but it also doubles up really nicely as a love song”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the band’s songwriting going back and forth between harder and softer songs, they shifted to writing “Light Years”, a track Kay described as having a “very heavy vibe”. The fifth track, “Manifest Destiny”, a mellow song with “a brass-heavy coda”, was written when Kay read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, telling of the mistreatment and massacres of Native Americans. The sixth track, “The Kids”, is an “aggressive” song with “mariachi-band trumpets and snapping bass” meant to “[capture] the feeling of the streets” and is about youth protests against the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, a bill that outlaws unrestricted raves. It is the only track on which Van Gelder played drums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The seventh track, “Mr. Moon”, is a love song with “incredibly complex chord structure[s]” about a girl whom Kay met at a rave but ended up with the band’s keyboardist Toby Smith. The following track, “Scam”, is said to feature orchestral arrangements “with which Rich Tufo and Johnny Pate once draped Curtis Mayfield’s soul-protest funk in stark grace”. The next track, “Journey To Arnhemland”, is an instrumental that features didgeridoo playing. The tenth track, “Morning Glory”, is, according to BBC Music, “laid back, a blissed-out joy; perfect comedown music with percussion darting from speaker to speaker.” Halfway through recording the album, Kay found his turning point when he wrote the final track, “Space Cowboy”, while his drug use was “completely out of control and I was losing my mind”. He further said in 2013:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyone thinks it’s a nice song about getting stoned\u2026 but for me it went much deeper\u2026 Is it about me or someone else? Is it about marijuana or cocaine? What it was about was someone who was very lost, trying to hang on and come back before he drifted off into a blackhole never to be seen again \u2026 [‘Space Cowboy’ gave us] the momentum to push on and finish what I still think is one of our most creative and accomplished albums.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
\"Jay<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-13","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web110warden.mydcts.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web110warden.mydcts.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web110warden.mydcts.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web110warden.mydcts.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web110warden.mydcts.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/web110warden.mydcts.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33,"href":"https:\/\/web110warden.mydcts.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13\/revisions\/33"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web110warden.mydcts.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}