Review
Genre and Mood
Trinidad Senolia’s You Showed Me - Edit is deep house with a soul singer’s heart. Yoruba Records, who released it, called the song a pure expression of love and its story, a seventies-inspired sonnet turned into a deep soulful groove: romantic in what it says, groovy in how it moves, soulful in the tradition it leans on.
Song Summary
The track is the third of four “postcards” on the EP Postcards From Strangers. In the label’s description it stages a dialogue between a heroine and her hero, in which he declares his undivided passion for their future, and that dialogue is intertwined with a classic song by the Turtles. The song is You Showed Me, written in 1964 by Gene Clark and Jim McGuinn of the Byrds and a US top ten hit for the Turtles in 1969.
Musical Breakdown
What the Sources Describe
No review maps this track part by part, and the label’s notes describe its story more than its arrangement. They give three things to listen for: the two voices of the dialogue, the Turtles’ song woven through it, and a groove they call deep and soulful.
The Borrowed Song
The Turtles’ version, the one most people know, slowed the Byrds’ original down: their producer Chip Douglas played it slowly on a harmonium with a broken bellows, and the band kept that pace and added strings. Listen for how much of that languid mood survives inside a dance track.
Concepts in Focus
A groove is the felt quality of a rhythm, how its parts lock together and push against each other. The label hears this one as deep and soulful, and the whole EP as a walk through what it calls the body and mind of diasporic grooves, from a Haitian invocation on Sucre Sacre to Bata drums on La Pacifica.
mixing is the stage where the recorded parts are balanced into one finished track. Mateo Senolia produced You Showed Me at the Red Room Studios in Los Angeles, but every song on the EP was mixed by Osunlade, the St. Louis-born producer who founded Yoruba Records, at The I’lle Mobile Studios in St. Louis. The sound you hear is partly his decision.
Artistic Context
Trinidad-Senolia is a DJ and production team: Garth Trinidad, whose voice narrates La Pacifica, and the producer Mateo Senolia. The YouTube release credits Mateo Senolia as composer and lyricist. Postcards From Strangers came out on Yoruba Records, the house label Osunlade founded after moving to New York; the label’s Bandcamp page dates it 14 November 2014. Its other tracks bring literature into the mix, with readings from novels by Marcus J. Guillory.
Impact and Reception
The label introduced the EP as the start of the duo’s epic odyssey; no review of this track has been found. It is here because it was among the owner’s most played songs of 2021, and because a 1960s pop song keeps finding new homes: De La Soul sampled the Turtles’ recording in 1989, long before they guested on Gorillaz, De La Soul – Feel Good Inc.. Put it on late and follow the conversation.
