Best Of All Time
Best Of All Time: The Story Behind SHAB's New Single
There is a particular kind of joy that only arrives when you are not alone in it. That is the feeling I was chasing when I wrote Best Of All Time, and in the end it is the reason the song exists at all.
Best Of All Time arrives this Friday, August 21, on every streaming platform, and the official music video arrives with it.
I wrote it with Bonnie McKee and JHart, and it was produced by Damon Sharpe, during the same run of writing sessions that gave us Perfume. I would rather name them at the beginning than at the end, because a song like this one is never the work of a single person. It came together over a handful of afternoons in a room where four people were paying close attention to one another.
The song is about the people who stand beside us, who believe in us, and who remind us of our own strength at precisely the moment we have forgotten it. Our families, our partners, our friends, and the ones who somehow make us want to become better versions of ourselves. It is also my celebration of resilience and hope and the deliberate choice of joy. Whether I am happy or heartbroken or angry, whether I am celebrating or simply trying to make it through another ordinary day, this song is my reminder to dance.
I should say something about the title, because it is easily misread. The hook is not a boast about me. It is "when we get together we're the best of all time," and the word doing all the work in that line is we. The song is about what two people become in one another's company, something neither of them could be alone, and I mean that as widely as it can possibly be taken: a partner, a friend, a sister, a room full of people at a show.
There is a line in the second verse that gives away everything else. People never thought we'd make it this far, but now we're breaking the cage. I have been the person nobody expected to get this far. I have also stood beside someone else who was that person, and watched them find out. This song is written from both of those positions at once.
Musically it is bright and fast and full of strings, and the Persian influence in it runs underneath rather than sitting on top. That has been my approach since I first began writing in English. I have never been interested in decorating a Western pop song with Persian ornament, only in carrying something across and having it arrive intact. If you want to hear where it lives on this record, listen to the violins in the pre-chorus.
The video is the largest performance piece I have made. Bold fashion, several wardrobe changes, and choreography that asked a great deal of everyone in the frame. I have released videos that were beautiful and videos that told a story, and this one is closer to a live show than to either of those. It was built to make you move.
Perfume and Best Of All Time came from the same sessions and they travel in opposite directions. Perfume was about confidence and femininity and the freedom of self-expression, and this one turns outward, toward gratitude and friendship and the kind of joy that survives the difficult stretches. Perfume is what I sound like on my own. This is what I sound like with the people who brought me here.
The Shab Squad hears everything before anyone else does, and that is not a marketing line, it is genuinely the order in which things happen. If you would like to be among the first, you are very welcome to join us.
None of us become our best selves alone. We are handed to one another, again and again, by people who see something in us before we manage to see it ourselves.
Find the ones who remind you of your strength. Keep them close.
And when you are together, dance.
XOXO SHAB