Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway - Back Together Again (Cold Duck pared back jam mix)

This remix was more decisively shaped from its beginning by the limitations of the multitracks I had to work with than any other project of mine. Whenever "Back Together Again," a truly lovely example of late '70s disco, runs through my mind it's usually Ray Chew's sax line, the delicate beauty of Luther Vandross and Gwen Guthrie's backing vocals, or--of course--the fantastic bass line that gets stuck in my head one more time. Sadly, the tracks I was able to use for "Back Together Again" didn't include any handclaps or horns (goodbye Ray!), strings or backing vocal tracks (no Luther or Gwen?!). Basically all I had to work with here were Roberta, Donny, some keyboards and the bare bones of the rhythm section.
At first I was toyed with the idea of overdubbing a poet or some other "found" vocal, but I really like this song and wasn't too inspired by the notion of making it into something completely different. I have adored the original 12" version of this song ever since I first heard it ages ago, and the bass break there is simply the meaning of life itself. I did an edit of the 12" and album versions long ago that I'm still pleased with, so I decided here to work instead towards a long, soulful breakdown mix. That way I could preserve the beauty of the original and get around not having most of the song's best hooks by keeping things low-down and funky.
Going through the many vocal takes by Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway (one of the oddities of this multitrack pack--while it's missing a lot of the song, it still offers all of the original's uncompiled voice recordings), I noticed that Roberta maintained a pretty constant stream of direction and feedback to her band and engineer through much of the recording. Along with those "stage directions" were all sorts of vocalizations by Roberta ("oohs" and "ahs") that were cut out of the final compiled vocal. I created my own comp track of Roberta's commentary and enthusiasm, and then spread those like candy sprinkles over the mix, using Roberta's vocalizations to provide emphasis to the mix.
While the original 12" version is still my favorite, this Roberta-directed, pared-back breakdown mix is still a lot of fun.

[@cosmocosmoton]

You have great taste in music, thank you for this!

[@DJVJColdDuck]

The best thing a person can ever hear! Thank you right back!!!