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From album
One Night Only
Bee Gees · 1998 · Track 4
Details
Duración3:27
ÁlbumOne Night Only
Año1998
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The story behind
The song Words by the Bee Gees, written by Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb, was born from a shared experience of frustration. According to Barry Gibb, the lyrics emerged after an argument, where the words exchanged, regardless of their motive, generated a mood that was captured in the composition. The central idea is how words, whether to cheer or sadden, have significant power. This piece was recorded on October 3, 1967, at IBC Studios in London, along with World and an unfinished track. Interestingly, Words became a song that featured only Barry Gibb's voice, and from then on, it was usually his solo moment in the group's concerts.
The recording of Words had particular moments. Barry Gibb recalls that at the beginning of the session, Robin Gibb would fall asleep on the piano, preventing him from composing the part Barry wanted. Faced with this, Barry ended up taking charge of the piano melody himself. Furthermore, the song is notable for a distinctive piano sound that arose from an accidental discovery. While experimenting with the recording equipment controls, Maurice Gibb achieved a compression effect that made the piano sound as if forty instruments were playing at once, creating a dense and rich texture that was applied to many of their subsequent recordings. Sound engineer Damon Lyon-Shaw, who was working as an assistant at the time, was the one who actually devised the technique of feeding the piano through a series of compressors, obtaining that metallic and particular sound that Maurice assumed was the work of his colleague Mike Claydon.
Words reached number one in countries like Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and China. In the United Kingdom, it ranked eighth, being the group's third top 10 hit in that country. The song has been performed by numerous artists; a notable version was by Rita Coolidge in 1978 and, later, by Boyzone in 1996, which marked their first number one in the UK. In 2011, in a UK television special, it was voted the fourth favorite song by the Bee Gees.