Overtones is a column that examines how certain sounds linger in our minds and lives.

"You picked a heck of a subject because most people, they don’t know. They don’t understand. It’s very rare for someone to even think like that."

This is what Philly Soul composer Thom Bell tells me when I reached him on his home phone in 2011 to talk about his string arrangements for soul songs. I had spent some time tracking him down, circling through old managers who didn't represent him anymore and old friends who had stopped passing his number along. He hadn't worked in any meaningful capacity in years; he was comfortably a legend, carrying around a suitcase full of sterling, immortal credits—co-writing and producing "La-La (Means I Love You)" by the Delfonics and the Stylistics' "You Make Me Feel Brand New" to name just two—that would be powerful currency until the day he died.

Nonetheless, he answered his phone on the third ring and chatted with me for two hours. My need was not necessarily journalistic. I was calling because I had a problem—an  aesthetic one, but it felt pressingly real to me: I needed to connect all the music I'd ever loved back to itself. I thought Thom Bell might be able to help me out.

This is a lifelong, helpless weakness of mine. I've always yearned to be told that everything I love is related, even if I haven't figured out quite how yet. My personal musical interests, meanwhile, insist on the opposite. We are just the lint you've accrued in life, they say. Classical? Childhood violin lessons. Rap? Growing up in a mid-90s suburb. Punk and indie rock? See previous answer. But I've never been able to leave it there. If all of this stuff is going to occupy my mind, it has to join up somehow.

So why Bell? He intrigued me because he was essentially castoff, a refugee, from American classical music. He was the head of a loose coterie of hippies, hipsters, and misfits operating at the fringes of 1970s soul; people like Larry Gold, a cello prodigy who dropped out of the Curtis Institute to play in The Sound of Philadelphia orchestra when he was a teenager. Or Bunny Sigler, a spectacularly eccentric R&B tenor and sometime opera singer who referred to himself as the Great Siglieri. Bell, meanwhile, was a discouraged former pianist who gave up the classical repertoire when he learned inserting your own harmonies into the masterworks was frowned upon.

These people shared a love of classical music that they didn't quite know what to do with, a feeling I will always relate to. They had stumbled into this peculiar world—charged with private ecstasies and riddled with forbidding behavioral codes—and then stumbled out, bewildered,  grand sounds glowing in their heads and a pressing need to find somewhere to put them. They proceeded to feed Wagnerian brass and Samuel Barber strings (or their own crude approximations of them) directly into the pop-cultural mega-processor. Their sound is leaked into the groundwater now. 

"I didn’t want to re-voice chords in my head—adding sevenths, ninths, elevenths—but the music made me do it," Bell tells me. "And once I started hearing those things, I told my mother, 'I’m awfully sorry, but I can’t just can’t do any more of this [classical] music.' That stuff started getting on my nerves—the chord progressions, the whole tonality was always the same. When you play Prelude In C-Sharp minor, it’s Prelude in C-Sharp minor. If you vary one note, then people say, 'Oh, he wasn’t so hot.' People don’t expect you to be contemplating changing things."

So Bell brought this classical training, as rudimentary as it was, into pop music. He had nowhere else to put it. "We were all muddling through," he says, of the sessions that bore out majestic songs like 'La-La (Means I Love You)'. "We were all nothing together. I just happened to be the leader of the nothings. I used four violins, one viola, and one cello for years. That’s all I could afford."

His pitiful budget, combined with his partial, on-the-fly understanding of the art of orchestration, which he absorbed via library books and constant quizzing of his musicians, produced an inimitable sound. All great art has at least one grievous accident beneath it, the grit that produces the pearl, and Bell's arrangements were nothing if not a series of them. 

"The very first time I wrote music out for my strings, I wrote a figure and put above it: 'pluck,'" Bell remembers. "And the musicians said to me, 'Hey Bell; what’s this ‘pluck’ business? What are you talking about, man?' I was like, 'You know, [mimes plucking strings with fingers].' They just looked at me and said, 'You mean pizzicato!' They still send me Christmas cards teasing me about that. Oh, and in the beginning of 'La-La (Means I Love You),' when they have the tremolo parts—I wrote that as ‘shake.’ All of a sudden these four guys just started shaking in their chairs. I said, 'What are you guys doing!?' 'You said ‘shake!'"

Partly because of these knowledge gaps, Bell's harmonic language remains like nobody else's. I sat down with a composer friend at a keyboard to try and suss out the chord changes in the song "You Make Me Feel Brand New", and as he plowed through it, he kept sitting back, chuckling. The parts could never have been written by a "proper" student of orchestration, but the song feels literally transformative as a result, never quite in one key or another. It is in a permanent state of arrival—every harmonic turn feels like the epiphany that the song has been building towards. It is clear that Bell regards it as his masterpiece.

"That’s the only song in the world that kicked my backside," he admits. "I kept trying to force this melody to do something and it just would not do it. And I walked around with it in my brain, and I wrote it and rewrote it—and it was nothing but one note! It was one chord. One lousy chord. I rewrote that fucker in my mind for about a week."

Bell confesses to some savant-like tendencies. "I’m like three or four different people working on the same song," he says. "Sometimes these people sit down and talk to each other beforehand, sometimes they don’t pay any attention to each other. After I've written out the arrangements, I would sit down at the podium to conduct it and just think, 'Who wrote this?'" 

He continues, "Every melody I ever wrote, I worked hard on. And once I deliver it, that’s it. There’s nothing else I can do. I had one rule: You cannot change that melody. You don’t know why it’s right, but you know it is. You take a pencil and you put it in the pencil sharpener and you sharpen it and sharpen it and sharpen it—once it reaches its point, it’s done. Once it gets to where it’s supposed to be, that’s where it’s supposed to be. After that, it breaks."

When I ask Bell why he struggled with "You Make Me Feel Brand New" in particular, he waxes lyrical. "When you make a person feel brand new—and you’re talking about the inner fiber of a person’s being—that is a very sacred, dark, private spot that not many people touch and that no one sees. When you are in love with somebody, when you’re making love with somebody, you’re riding the ether with them. That’s the closest of love you’re ever going to feel. So the music itself has to indicate that same feeling. You look at the lyrics 'you make me feel brand new,' and whatever goes with that has to be strong, boy. It cannot be weak anywhere. It has to be like the girder going up a 100-story building. And when you take that away and listen to the melody, it has to be just as strong. That’s what I was trying to do."

Soaking in these stories, I felt something settle in, with a click. Most days, my love for classical music feels like a phantom limb pain, an impulse with no receptors. Hearing Bell talk, I felt an almost-physical sense of relief. Classical to soul to rap: It remains a series of imposingly wide leaps. But listening to Bell talk about, say, working out the voicing possibilities of the French horn from a library book for "Ready or Not Here I Come (Can't Hide From Love)"—a song sampled for Missy Elliott's "Sock It 2 Me!" and Three 6 Mafia's "Who Run It!" and quoted by the Fugees—I felt the gaps narrow. Classical music fans and rap fans may regard each other with mutual mistrust and blank incomprehension, but the music, slippery and promiscuous, knows better.