Track 19 of Saturday Sounds is my spin on a 1981 somewhat obscure synthpop track called “You Don’t Know My Name (But I Know You)” by Kym Amps.

I think the original is a brilliant tune, and she has a killer voice. Actually, you should check out her other tunes, too. She seems to have had more success in classical than pop, so while I’m sad that these tracks never got much traction, I’m glad she got to keep making music.

Also, I very nearly missed my 3PM Saturday Arizona time deadline on this track. I actually had its final form uploaded Thursday night, but I apparently neglected to schedule it for publishing, instead keeping it private, which I caught shortly before starting to write this blog. Would’ve sucked to do all this work and not have it count towards the project! But I caught my error about 45 minutes before deadline.

With that said, the original song had what I felt was a little tongue-in-cheek approach to what can be a pretty creepy topic. They made a video for it which seems to confirm my feelings a little. It’s fun in all its early 1980s low budget video glory. But those lyrics are pretty damn dark, and I wanted to recast it a little darker than its original sound.

I don’t use much of the original tune, apart from Amps’ vocal performance, and part of the main synth line cast as a repeating piano figure. I dropped nearly all the harmony, keeping it to a very simple i-V-i thing (and the V barely appears). To keep it from total darkfest, I introduced a jazzy organ ostinato. I went a little bluesy on it because I stumbled on it and I thought it kind of worked, only changing it for to add a little depth and a short 4 bar solo riff towards the end of the song. I think that solo is in Dorian ♭5 (I didn’t analyze it, just picked it out on the MPK-249) which lends a little jazz-blues inflection to it.

The tempo is actually a little faster than the original (125 vs 121) but to me it feels a little slower because of the relatively sparse arrangement. There is a LOT going on in the original, as befits the lushness in a lot of 1980s synthpop. My only nod to that lushness is using a tubular bell sound during the pre-chorus, which is also a sound present in the original. We live in sparser times, and a sparse arrangement I felt spoke to our current world better as a society that takes things like consent and stalking somewhat more seriously than we did then.

I hope you enjoy listening to my first remix! It’s a little rough in places but overall I’m fairly happy with it.