With more than 2,000 recordings to his name, Nathan East is one of the most decorated and in-demand bass players in the world – contributing his low-end chops to iconic tracks such as Get Lucky by Daft Punk, Chaka Khan's Through the Fire and Easy Lover by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey, to name just a mere few. And among his many sessions, he was sometimes compelled to ditch his rich bass tone and emulate a guitar.
Love Will Follow from soundtrack juggernaut Kenny Loggins' 1985 album Vox Humana was one such track. “Well, it was basically me, Kenny, Greg Phillinganes [veteran session keyboardist] and the drum machine with the basic tracking section,” East tells Vertex Effects.
“These songs, again, like Footloose, I don't really use a pick, but I grew my nail just long enough to get a passive sound. And so even on Footloose, and then the intro of this song, Love Will Follow, I also use it. I do my impersonation of a guitarist.”
East reveals that what sounds like a double guitar in the intro is actually all him, “pretending to be a guitar. That's the bass. And again, just the three of us in the studio, and just trying to make a jam.”
As East briefly mentions in this interview, he also played a key role in making the behemoth that was Footloose – which bears the same title as the 1984 musical drama film that became the seventh highest-grossing film of that year. The song itself spent three weeks at number one and became one of Loggins’ most instantly recognizable songs.
“I remember we were on tour – this was 40 years ago, again – but we were on tour and every single day we rehearsed it,” he recalls in another interview with Vertex Effects. “So wherever we were, Atlanta, whatever, okay, find us a room at the hotel and they'd be going there.
“So pretty soon I was like, ‘We're gonna rehearse Footloose? Okay.’ [exasperated sigh] But I have to admit that by doing that, I was able to kind of develop the bassline over a period of time, and when we went in the studio to record it [was], like, first take done.”
Speaking of Nathan East’s contributions to the music lexicon, he's also the bassist behind Eric Clapton's heartfelt Tears in Heaven – a session he still refers to as one of the most emotional in his decades-spanning career.
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