David Baron and Kevin Kadish - Deserve
Kevin Kadish "The song is super personal to me. I wrote it about my wife.
Dave (David Baron) was staying with us visiting for a week.
My wife and I had had a fight one night and the next day, Dave was recording some random piano pieces on my Steinway. I gravitated towards the one that became “Deserve”. I sat down and wrote the lyric and melody to his changes very “stream of consciousness”. Straight from the heart about my feelings about the fight with my wife. I have been in the room with dozens of artists and my job as a co-writer (Meghan Trainor, Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato) is to help them feel comfortable enough to bare their souls in a song. This was my chance to do this for myself, turning the tables on myself “so to speak”. Dave and I had been close friends and collaborators for about 15 years, so I felt very comfortable being completely honest with my life in the room... not really thinking anyone was going to hear the song, but some songs just find a way to people whether you like it or not.
'Deserve' is about feeling like a messed up person in a relationship with a very normal person and having the overwhelming feeling that you’re not worthy of that person’s love or love at all.
When we got the the bridge I knew what I wanted to say, but we had to write that in a more traditional way. That’s why that section feels more traditional. It was created after the verse and chorus were written and Dave and I jammed on changes that felt more uplifting and it seemed to work out perfect.
The track wasn’t much more than adding some drum programming, backing vocals, sub bass, vocoder, and strings. Then, once we were happy with the instrumentation, Dave and I sat and arranged the dynamic curve of the production. We used Dave’s piano changing octaves as a powerful scene change tool. That allowed us to have less instruments and still have it feel like the music was shifting.
The whole thing took maybe a day or 2, but felt very organic and under-thought. We tried to make it all about the vocal and the emotion of the song. The thought was that when the words are powerful sometimes you don’t need powerful production and less becomes more.
When I played it for my wife, she cried and said you need to do something with this."
