If you like singing in the shower you are not alone! For years we’ve suspected that some artists may have gotten inspiration for songs while cleansing themselves. In a recent interview with People Magazine former American Idol judge and 80’s pop star, Paula Abdul walked down memory lane to talk about the way that her hit song ‘Straight Up’ came to life.
Abdul’s story sounds more like how girls are tricked into “innocent modeling jobs” that turn out to be not so innocent. Thankfully, it all turned out more than ok for Abdul!
Abdul recalls that she had been given the chance to get a peek of the song Straight Up. She mentioned that she was “obsessed” with the song. She was really looking forward to meeting songwriter Elliot Wolff. Her experience meeting him though was a bit underwhelming.
She remembered, “So I go to this apartment building and I meet Elliot Wolff, and I expected this R&B dude. His sounds were so incredibly R&B and funky and different,”
Out comes Wolff though, and let’s say he didn’t look “soul” at all! Paula described him as, “[A] slight framed guy with red frizzy hair, Coke bottle glasses”
Paula ended up getting two surprises back to back in that first meeting. Not only was the songwriter not the type of person she was expecting to meet. She then asked where they were going to be recording. Wolff had no shame in telling her that they were literally going to record the song in his shower!
The song went on to be featured in Paula’s first album, “Forever Your Girl” and the rest as they say is history! However, Paula shared some more easter eggs of the original recording!
As one could expect the neighbors in Wolff’s building were not too thrilled that he was using his shower as a studio. You can believe this or not, but according to Abdul in the early unedited versions of the songs you can hear the complaints by the neighbors. She mentioned,
“In the early masters that were released, you could actually hear someone banging from the next apartment, going, ‘Shut up!'”
After that, she also took time to talk about another event in her life that people still don’t believe happened.
After talking about recording a song in a shower Abdul goes on to talk about other stories in her life that you may or may not believe. Like that time that she was allegedly in a plane crash which sparked her multi-year hiatus.
For some reason, details about the crash remain few and far between to this day. That’s why a lot of people subscribe to the theory that it never happened. Did you hear any neighbors screaming when you listened to “Straight Up”?
