Music, Harmony And Rhythm

Album: Brooklyn Dreams (1977)
Charted: 57
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Songfacts®:

  • This song is about the therapeutic power of music, and how it can make your dreams come true. It was the biggest hit for Brooklyn Dreams, which a year later teamed up with Donna Summer on her hit "Heaven Knows." Summer later married Bruce Sudano, one of the three members of Brooklyn Dreams.

    Sudano, who wrote "Music, Harmony And Rhythm" with the group's lead singer Joe "Bean" Esposito, explained how the song came together in a Songfacts interview:

    "At that time I was living right off Laurel Canyon in a little apartment in Los Angeles because Brooklyn Dreams actually formed in LA. I had a little one-bedroom apartment with a little refrigerator, a piano, an acoustic guitar and a bed. We would rehearse there daily, and one day Joe came in with this part where he had [singing] Music, harmony, and a rhythm. I thought it was really great, so on the acoustic guitar that night, I came up with the verses:

    Oh, when the day to day gets me down
    I go off to my world and escape into the sound
    And it gives me strength...


    It was written on acoustic guitar. We got all the vocal parts worked out, then we went into the studio and a part we sang in unison became the musical theme it was built around.

    As a kid growing up I was always enthralled by orchestras, and a big dream of ours was to have real string sections on our songs. So, for kids that grew up on the Stones and the Temptations, as we got out to LA and with the evolution of disco music, it became a perfect fit for us as an R&B band, to incorporate rock and disco into our rhythmic music."
  • This was released on the Millennium label, which sold the group's contract to Donna Summer's label, Casablanca, when Sudano and Summer became an item. The shift to Casablanca took the group in more of a disco direction, but the group was more in the vein of blue-eyed soul. They split up in 1980 - the year Sudano married Summer - after four albums.
  • Testifying to the power of music, Bruce Sudano told Songfacts how it helped him deal with the death of Donna Summer in 2012. "Music is what aligns me so I know who I am," he said. "When Donna left, and the whole time she was sick, as crazy of a time as that was - the craziest time in my life - there was the music that anchored me, and I thank God that I have that."

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