Chicago singer and keyboardist Robert Lamm and trumpet player Lee Loughnane discussed the creative process behind the band’s classic “25 or 6 to 4” during an episode of the AXS TV series “The Big Interview.”
Lamm and Loughnane told host Dan Rather about the band’s long journey and recalled how some of the group’s lasting tunes came about.
Lamm revealed that the idea for the tune for “25 or 6 to 4” came when Chicago was enrolled by the famous Los Angeles club Whisky a Go Go to perform on certain nights.
“I was living up the street from the Whisky. Coming home one night, I was just kind of unwinding, I sat down at the piano and started playing something like the riff, which had no name and had no lyrics yet,” Lamm recalled. “And I just kind of fooled around with it for…maybe half an hour, looked out over the city, looking at the lights on the tall buildings. So that was, like, [the] ‘flashing lights against the sky’ lyric.”
He added that on trying to figure out what the song was going to be about, he got the inspiration for the lyric to its chorus.
“I couldn’t quite make out what the time was, but the hands on the clock were somewhere around 25 or 26 to 4 a.m.,” Lamm said. “And I thought, ‘Well, for now, I’m just going to describe the process of writing this song. I’ll figure out what the lyrics are going to be later.’ But I didn’t need to.”
Lamm and Loughnane also talked about how they wrote “Dialogue,” another super hit from the band.
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