I Got Law (Original Demo by Blur)
Tomorrow Comes Today
Tomorrow Comes Today (Gorillaz Live 2001 Tour)
Tomorrow Comes Today (Demon Detour)
Tomorrow Comes Today (Escape To Plastic Beach Tour)
Tomorrow Comes Today (Damon Albarn live with backing band The Heavy Seas)
Tomorrow Comes Today (Humanz Live)
"Britpop taught me how difficult it is to be experimental in this country."
- Damon Albarn
In 1993, Damon Albarn took his band Blur from being one hit wonders to a band that single handedly started a new musical movement. Britpop was a movement that took bits and pieces from Britain's most essential groups like The Kinks and The Jam and combined them all into one neatly and tightly produced package. At the front of this movement was Blur with their trilogy of albums "Modern Life Is Rubbish", "Parklife" and "The Great Escape." However the life of a pop star was uncomfortable for the group, causing them to feel creatively drained. So in 1996, guitarist Graham Coxon came back from America fascinated with the indie rock scenes there of lo fi, noise rock and grunge and declared that he wanted to make music that "scared people again." From that message of distress to his fellow band mates came the self titled album "Blur" which spawned some of their biggest hits "Beetlebum" and "Song 2" (the latter better known as the woo hoo song.) The album was the most underground and punk rock thing Blur ever did and yet it became one of their best-selling albums. Three years later Blur bested themselves again with their masterpiece "13", it's best songs combined Damon's cries of pain and anguish with no wave keyboards and Graham's noisy guitar work. It is one of the most brilliant and personal things Damon Albarn has ever done.
I Got Law
While making "13", Damon Albarn was becoming not only disillusioned with the band Blur but rock music in general. He found himself listening to trip hop, dubby reggae and hip hop more than
rock, and the rock he was listening was the more experimental or punk stuff like Public Image Ltd., The Swell Maps, Magazine, The Human League, Pixies, Suicide and The Clash to name a few. During the album's recording, he wrote a song called "I Got Law" which he wanted to do with the group. It was a very hyper song reliant on synthesizers and drum machines. The rest of the group didn't like it, so Damon tucked it away for later usage. Less than two years later, the song would evolve into the something completely different.
Along with recording in Damon´s 13 Studios, they also recorded in Geejam Studios in Jamaica. There they soaked up a more dubby reggae sound which became an important factor in the first record as well as this song in question. Dan The Automator took Damon´s rejected Blur demo "I Got Law" and based the song around a well used drum sample of Allen Tousiant´s "Get Out of My Life, Woman." This slowed the song down and made it less hyper, a perfect groove for a dub influenced trip hop song.
The first thing that´s noticeable about this song if you are a fan of Damon Albarn's previous music, is the lack of a six string electric guitar, a prominent force in all of his songs up to this moment. Instead the song is based around a distorted bass guitar hook and a few minimal interjections from a piano and synthesizer which sounds like a string quartet, all of which are played by Damon. However the main focus of this song is Damon´s vocals and Agustus Pablo influenced melodica solos. The song is about a person who is hooked on technology a common theme in Damon's music, ("the camera won´t let me go...stereo I want it on" in 2001 this was all we had for the most part technologically, now we have way more things to be addicted to.) The song addresses isolation from the world, whether its someone in denial ("don´t think I´m not all in this world") or someone who isolates themselves by choice ("don´t think I´ll be here too long"), but in fact these people are one and the same. This is what technology does to us, why stay outside when you can have fun inside with all of your stuff? But yet this is a normal thing to do so it doesn't make the person an anti-social, or does it.
This doesn´t matter though, because he will pay when tomorrow comes today, however tomorrow is today, the future is now and it will also be the past in due time. After laying down the song´s hook the second time. A layer of Damon Albarn voices scat and sing over a chilled out melodica solo on top of an even more mellow groove. Eventually the song quiets down, the drum sample is processed to sound muffled, Damon´s melodica plays it´s last couple of notes, and Damon´s army of vocals is stripped down to just one falsetto sung hook which eventually becomes muffled by Dan The Automator's production. The song ends smoothly and all that is left in the last few seconds, is Damon unplugging his loud distorted bass guitar from the amplifier.
In 2000, Damon Albarn had finished recording the album and plans for its release were made for March 26, 2001. Damon and Jamie originally wanted "Clint Eastwood" to be the first single as it was the most commercial song on the album. However the label wanted a single within two weeks of the album being finished, which wasn´t enough time to animate a full length video. So instead they released an EP of "Tomorrow Comes Today", their proposed third single, and released an accompanying low budget video to go along with it. Since they didn´t have enough time to animate a big video, the video consists mainly of still images of English cities with drawings of the characters inside of them. The only true animation in the video is 2D´s mouth moving in sync with the song. While not the debut they wanted for the project, the mellow video fits with the song´s aesthetic and atmosphere.
They later re-released it as their third single like they originally planned and the song became a live staple for the band. Gorillaz have played this song at a majority of their concerts and it has become a staple for every one of their tours. Live the song takes a louder dynamic with the drums being played by the drummer instead of being sampled like on the original. This gives the guitarists, on their respective outings, the ability to go all out with sonic and spacey textures over the song´s very minimal and bass heavy groove. Damon often improvises more on his melodica solos during it sometimes extending the song by about a minute so the groove can be heard in its full glory. He even brought the song on to his solo tour in 2014, showing how well it is looked upon by the Gorillaz fanbase.
Today
In 1998, Damon and Jamie hatched the idea for Gorillaz. The idea was still very rough around the edges, the band´s working tite was Gorilla. Jamie originally had a different guitarist character named Paula Cracker and a "gorilla in the band who plays bongos." The characters became what they are now when Damon said that Jamie was always drawing 17 year old girls as his characters, so Jamie instead made the guitarist a ten year old Japanese girl named Noodle. The "z" at the end of Gorillaz was added because it was "more hip hop."
Damon Albarn in his trademark 13 Studios along with his crew of engineers and programmers Jason Cox and Tom Girling started coming up with a couple songs for the group. These songs were the b side "Ghost Train" and album track "Punk" (we will get to those two songs in a later entry.) While these songs were a step in the right direction, Damon Albarn wanted a less guitar heavy rock sound for the album. So he enlisted a team of Los Angeles DJs whom he admired to help him and his crew produce the record. The producers were Dan The Automator and Kid Koala who helped create what became the sound of the first Gorillaz album.
The first thing that´s noticeable about this song if you are a fan of Damon Albarn's previous music, is the lack of a six string electric guitar, a prominent force in all of his songs up to this moment. Instead the song is based around a distorted bass guitar hook and a few minimal interjections from a piano and synthesizer which sounds like a string quartet, all of which are played by Damon. However the main focus of this song is Damon´s vocals and Agustus Pablo influenced melodica solos. The song is about a person who is hooked on technology a common theme in Damon's music, ("the camera won´t let me go...stereo I want it on" in 2001 this was all we had for the most part technologically, now we have way more things to be addicted to.) The song addresses isolation from the world, whether its someone in denial ("don´t think I´m not all in this world") or someone who isolates themselves by choice ("don´t think I´ll be here too long"), but in fact these people are one and the same. This is what technology does to us, why stay outside when you can have fun inside with all of your stuff? But yet this is a normal thing to do so it doesn't make the person an anti-social, or does it.
This doesn´t matter though, because he will pay when tomorrow comes today, however tomorrow is today, the future is now and it will also be the past in due time. After laying down the song´s hook the second time. A layer of Damon Albarn voices scat and sing over a chilled out melodica solo on top of an even more mellow groove. Eventually the song quiets down, the drum sample is processed to sound muffled, Damon´s melodica plays it´s last couple of notes, and Damon´s army of vocals is stripped down to just one falsetto sung hook which eventually becomes muffled by Dan The Automator's production. The song ends smoothly and all that is left in the last few seconds, is Damon unplugging his loud distorted bass guitar from the amplifier.
Tomorrow
They later re-released it as their third single like they originally planned and the song became a live staple for the band. Gorillaz have played this song at a majority of their concerts and it has become a staple for every one of their tours. Live the song takes a louder dynamic with the drums being played by the drummer instead of being sampled like on the original. This gives the guitarists, on their respective outings, the ability to go all out with sonic and spacey textures over the song´s very minimal and bass heavy groove. Damon often improvises more on his melodica solos during it sometimes extending the song by about a minute so the groove can be heard in its full glory. He even brought the song on to his solo tour in 2014, showing how well it is looked upon by the Gorillaz fanbase.
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