Four Things That Inspired ‘5 Minutes’ By Allen Stone

November 16, 2022

US neo soul and contemporary R&B performer Allen Stone released the single ‘5 Minutes’ in October 2022. The elastic and upbeat ‘5 Minutes’ followed Stone’s 2021 LP APART.

Stone is on tour around Australia this month, appearing at Harvest Rock festival in Adelaide and performing headline shows in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. Here, Stone tells Music Feeds about four things that influenced the themes and aesthetics of ‘5 Minutes’.

Allen Stone – ‘5 Minutes’

1990s hip hop and R&B

Allen Stone: Okay, so recently I’ve been really inspired by 90s hip hop and R&B, like Jay Dilla and Common. I got really into hip hop when I was like 22. I remember I listened to that common record, Be, like until it was dust. And making ‘5 Minutes’, when I heard the music to it, I really felt transported back to that time in my life.

Presence

Allen: I lost my mom and right at that same time had my second boy, a little boy named Sandy that we named after my mom. Your perspective changes on life when it’s put right in front of you in that capacity, and you realise how fragile it is. You realise how little time you have and how important it is to take time to make it slower.

A new method

Allen: With ‘5 Minutes’, I’d never written a song like that before, in that way. Typically I start with the lyrics. I think of, “What am I gonna write about that’s super clever?” But ‘5 Minutes’ was the first tune I’d ever gone in the studio and just written the melody first. So, we had the beat and the producer just turned on a microphone and I started just singing/making nonsense words.

We took five takes of that and then went back and cut those melodies into spaces that were like, “Oh, that sounds like a chorus; that sounds like a verse; that sounds like a bridge.” And then the lyric was informed by that. And one of the weird lyrics that I was just kind of humming was, “Okay, I wanna just wait five … Can we just wait five minutes?” So then the spark of feeling like slowing down and taking time and really being present with the people you care about came into focus.

1990s aesthetics

Allen: I’ve been really inspired by 90s branding. You know how fish eyed-out and bubbled-out everything looked back in those days? It’s funny how art is like pretty cyclical and things inspire other things. And the colour yellow kept coming into the frame when we were putting this tune together.