BMGThis past weekend at their HoagieNation festival in Philadelphia, Daryl Hall & John Oates serenaded the crowd with their new tribute to their hometown, “Philly Forget Me Not.” The song, a collaboration with Hall & Oates’ current tour mates, Train, is the first new non-holiday single by the duo in more than 10 years, and Daryl tells ABC Radio that writing it was a true collaborative effort.
According to Hall, the “beginning kernel of the idea” for “Philly Forget Me Not” started with Train singer Pat Monahan and songwriter Jay Stolar.
“Pat sent it to me and I said, ‘This is great,'” Daryl tells ABC Radio. “There were some rudimentary lyrics, and I played around with that and personalized it and sent it back — it was back and forth.”
He continues, “Then I produced it…Pat came to my studio and he sang his lead parts, I sang my lead parts, we gave it to John, John sang the background parts, and there you have it.”
The song’s lyrics are, of course, inspired by Philadelphia, so there are some inside jokes. Hall says when he was writing his part, he “threw in a lot of references” to his own music. For example, the lines “Every time I go away from ya/ I can feel my mama wait for me,” refer to two of his songs: “Wait for Me” and “Every Time You Go Away.”
However, Daryl admits that he felt a little weird about literally singing a line from Hall & Oates’ smash “Rich Girl” after the lyrics “I remember ‘Rich Girl’ in the summer like yesterday” come up in the song.
“It was Pat’s idea,” Hall says, laughing. “I was wondering about it. I’m going like, ‘Errr…am I gonna reference myself?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, yeah, do it!’ So that’s what I did!”
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