Jamiroquai is an artist who has a lot more to offer than just super-funky music. Throughout his illustrious career he has very successfully managed to create his own kind of popular music that’s highly personal and evocative, creating worlds and alter-egos and bringing together Jazz, Funk and Psychedelic music. On his eighth studio album Automaton, Jamiroquai is playing with a wide array of modern ideas cleverly disguised as contemporary electronic dance music: ideas about robots, AI and the future of humans and machines are translated musically into synthesizers, parallel moving chords and electronic music sounds that underlie lyrics like “All this love I felt for you // Has gone away to another place // I put my faith in a digital world where they've given me // Eyes without a face”. As always with Jamiroquai, the production is beautifully rich and polished, groovy and live-sounding while staying economic and precise. Here is one of the the album’s tracks, “Hot Property”:

This track is a good example to the different layers a song can have, as it is easily taken at face value for just another song about a hot lady. In interviews Jamiroquai alludes to it being inspired by real-world Russian and Italian mafia figures and the sorts of women that participate in organized crime, a very different kind of “Hot Property” : “Don't you ever cross the line // She can be deadly very dangerous // Her mind's a razor blade // And now she knows she got it made because // She just killed a man”.

It was a lot of fun using my two synths to play some of the sounds on this track and to play with different hands switching between the different parts and sounds. Hope you like this one! Video and transcription below: