This week Tony and I hit the studio! Electric Lady Studios began as Jimi Hendrix’s answer to the high cost and limitations of rented studio time during the sessions for his 1968 album Electric Ladyland. In 1968 he bought The Generation, a defunct Greenwich Village nightclub where he’d often jammed, and chose to convert it into a purpose-built recording studio rather than reopen it as a club. Designed by architect-acoustician John Storyk with curved walls and a relaxed, atmospheric layout, it opened in 1970 and Hendrix recorded there for only about ten weeks before his death. In the decades since, Electric Lady has become one of New York’s most storied studios, hosting major sessions across rock, soul, hip-hop, and pop. On the show we explored some of the best that Electric Lady has produced.
Hendrix & Chic
Originally conceived during the Little Wing sessions of 1967–68, Angel was written early in Jimi Hendrix‘s his career, refined over several years, and completed at Electric Lady Studios on July 23, 1970. The final take, the last of seven, was included on The Cry of Love (1971), the first posthumous Hendrix release assembled by Eddie Kramer and Mitch Mitchell from material intended for his fourth studio album. The song is inspired by a childhood dream Hendrix described about his mother, which gives the lyric its sense of longing and mythic imagery. Although the song traces its origins back to Olympic Studios in London, it is the Electric Lady version – engineered in the studio Hendrix designed and opened months before his death – that was finally committed to tape.
Everybody Dance was recorded for Chic’s self-titled 1977 debut, and features Norma Jean Wright on lead vocals with harmonies from Luther Vandross, Diva Gray, Robin Clark, and David Lasley. Nile Rodgers has noted it was the first song he wrote expressly for Chic, though its recording session was famously resourceful: the band reportedly paid an elevator engineer $10 to ignore their after-hours activity. The single became one of Chic’s signature tracks, later sampled and reinterpreted by artists including Steps (Stomp in 2000) and the Manic Street Preachers (It’s Not War) Just The End of Love in 2010).
The Clash & Erykah Badu
Rock the Casbah, the second single from The Clash‘s Combat Rock (1982), was recorded partly at Electric Lady Studios after initial sessions in London. Drummer Topper Headon composed the core of the track himself, independently laying down the drum, piano, and bass parts that define its rhythmic shape. The song’s narrative describes a fictional Middle Eastern king attempting to ban Western rock music, offset by imagery of resistance and misrule; its vocabulary draws from Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, and Sanskrit loanwords. Although inspired partly by real bans on Western music in Iran after 1979, the song remains a stylized fable rather than direct reportage. A wristwatch alarm owned by guitarist Mick Jones provides one of its recurring sound effects, and a monophonic quotation of Dixie appears late in the track. It became the band’s only U.S. Top 10 hit, though Joe Strummer later expressed discomfort when the title was found written on an American bomb during the Gulf War.
Recorded at Electric Lady Studios during the peak of the ‘Soulquarians’ era, Didn’t Cha Know is a collaboration between Erykah Badu and producer J Dilla. The song is built around an unlicensed sample of Tarika Blue’s 1977 track Dreamflower – later settled out of court – and appears on Mama’s Gun (2000), which Badu recorded with key Soulquarians Questlove, Pino Palladino, James Poyser, and Roy Hargrove. Although the single did not enter the Billboard Hot 100, it earned a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Song and has accumulated influence through its connection to this collaborative moment at Electric Lady. Alongside Voodoo (D’Angelo), Things Fall Apart (The Roots), and Like Water for Chocolate (Common), it forms part of a cluster of albums recorded in overlapping sessions at Electric Lady that reshaped the sound of neo-soul and alternative R&B at the turn of the millennium.
Lana Del Rey & Yebba
While Lana Del Rey‘s Ultraviolence (2014) was recorded at multiple studios, Pretty When You Cry was captured largely in one live take in Studio A at Electric Lady, with vocals and guitar tracked together and room reverb left intact. The song, co-written with guitarist Blake Stranathan, features later overdubs of drums and additional guitars but retains the loose, improvised quality of Del Rey’s initial performance. Much of the vocal line was reportedly ad-libbed, and the title phrase itself does not appear in the lyric (“pretty when I cry” does). The recording demonstrates Electric Lady’s continued use as a space for minimally staged performances even within otherwise heavily produced albums.
From Yebba’s debut album Dawn (2021), Distance was produced by Mark Ronson and features musicians associated with the late-1990s Soulquarians sessions at Electric Lady Studios, including Questlove, Pino Palladino, and James Poyser. The track draws on stylistic elements linked to that period, such as a restrained groove, spacious harmonic movement, and ensemble-led interaction. Although recorded decades after the Soulquarian era, it reflects continuity in personnel and working methods rather than direct historical revival. Yebba first gained wider attention through online performance videos and subsequent collaborations with artists including Chance the Rapper and Ed Sheeran.
Brotherhood of Man v Simple Minds
Our soundslike this week came from an unnamed listener, who heard similarities between Angelo by Brotherhood of Man (1977) and Chelsea Girl by Simple Minds (1979).
Sleigh Bells Quiz
For our quiz this week, we played only the isolated sleigh bell part of famous Christmas songs – guess the artist and song!
As always, find the show and blog at joebennett.net/5live, with occasional Instagram extras at @joebennettmusicology. With a new show comes a new Spotify mega-playlist, which contains all songs featured on the show:
And you can still listen to our old mega-playlist here.
- Words: Joe Bennett, John Pierce O’Reilly
- Audio production: Joe Bennett, Rafi Waters
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