Paul Young “Every Time You Go Away”

Last year I had the honor of performing with Paul Young, he’s a lovely human being with some great songs, and this is his biggest hit, “Every Time You Go Away”.  You’ll see the keyboard parts I play along with how I set up my keyboard splits and effects etc to be able to play all the parts at the same time.  (You can also check out the live performance in the second video if you want.)

(Just scroll down if you just want to watch the videos and skip my explanation.)

This is some real “behind the scenes” stuff showing the effort I put in to trying to learn and play Paul Young’s “Every Time You Go Away” hit correctly based on the original record. Just between you and me, I’d checked out what his recent keyboard players had been playing live and I didn’t feel like they were capturing the essence of the recorded song well and I wanted to do better.

FYI there’s also the danger when you choose to learn keyboard parts from the record versus how an artist’s keyboard player plays them now, because it’s always possible that the artist *doesn’t like* how something was recorded on the original record and prefers how it’s currently being played live, meaning that if you learned the actual recorded parts they may not like it (!)

A good example of that is Rick Springfield’s song called “I Get Excited”. The original hit recording is MUCH slower than how he plays it live, and on the record the keyboard player plays eighth-note chords. I was told by Rick’s previous keyboard player (my friend Paul) that he didn’t like that keyboard part and that that’s why he didn’t play it live, so I followed his lead.

Anyway – Here were the main issues I had with the live keyboard parts for Every Time You Go Away that I didn’t want to emulate:

1. In the intro there’s an important keyboard part that plays a melody in octaves, and on the record it has an echo on the piano. It’s very distinctive and no recent keyboard players had been doing that. So I created a “split” on my keyboard so that the high notes on top of the keyboard had a built-in echo just for that part. (I also “stacked” the octave notes” so that by just playing one note the note would play two octaves.
2. The verses had a very specific two-note synth part that played, but the recent keyboard players were just choosing to play a basic piano accompaniment part instead.
3. The b-section part where he sings, “Can’t go on, singing the same thing” again had a very specific descending keyboard part on the record that his recent keyboard players were simplifying, basically playing it at half speed. Again, it didn’t sound like the record.

The top video explains the steps I took to work out those things, and you’ll also see some of the more intermediate chords being used in the song that I had to work out

“Backstage Video” Showing My Keyboard Parts

Every Time You Go Away: Full Live Performance

Below is a live recorded version of the song so you can hear it in action. 🙂

Let me know if you have any comments or questions about it, would love to hear them. On a side note, you can get instant access to this full Paul Young Module as well as 80+ other Modules (over 1,000 videos) at a special discounted price by clicking the link below, thanks for watching!