Composition and Recording
The song is about a man who, awaiting his execution in the electric chair, begs the prison chaplain to pass a final message on to his wife. Robin Gibb, who wrote the lyrics, said that the man's crime was the murder of his wife's lover. He came up with the idea following a quarrel with his wife and originally conceived the song with
Robin Gibb told the The Mail on Sunday on November 1, 2009 about the slice of melodrama sung from the perspective of a condemned prisoner:
This is about a prisoner on Death Row who only has a few hours to live. He wants the prison chaplain to pass on a final message to his wife. There's a certain urgency about it.
In the same interview, Gibb talked about writing this and other songs with his brother Barry:
Myself and Barry wrote it. It's a bit like writing a script. Sometimes you can sit there for three hours with your guitar and nothing will happen. Then in the last ten minutes something will spark.
"I've Gotta Get a Message to You" was recorded with "I Laugh in Your Face" (released on Odessa in 1969) on July 12, 1968. This track was not recorded during the Idea sessions, the last recording session was June 25, 1968 when they recorded "I Started a Joke".
Read more about this topic: I've Gotta Get A Message To You
Famous quotes containing the words composition and, composition and/or recording:
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Every thing in his composition was little; and he had all the weaknesses of a little mind, without any of the virtues, or even the vices, of a great one.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Self-expression is not enough; experiment is not enough; the recording of special moments or cases is not enough. All of the arts have broken faith or lost connection with their origin and function. They have ceased to be concerned with the legitimate and permanent material of art.”
—Jane Heap (c. 1880–1964)