Greatest Bass Line Ever Ep. 6 - ‘About Damn Time’ Lizzo

Every decade has its funk-inspired bass guitar anthems. The ‘70s had Good Times and the ‘90s had Daft Punk, but the most memorable riffathon of the 2020s has to be Lizzo’s pop-disco hit, About Damn Time. Plus, it has a bass part to die for!

In today's lesson, we’re giving you a note-for-note breakdown of Lizzo’s best-selling bass line.

Lizzo: About Damn Time

A blueprint for countless funk-inspired bass lines to come, the lead single of Lizzo’s 2022 studio album, Special, could very well be the finest pop-disco anthem of them all. Released on April 14, 2022, it hit No. 1 in the United States, becoming Lizzo’s second-ever No. 1 song. It also won Record of the Year at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards.

The bass line was played by producer Ricky Reed. “I believe it started with (co-writer) Blake Slatkin playing the piano chords that would end up being our pre-chorus,” Reed told Variety Magazine. “As soon as he did that, I heard an E flat minor ninth chord. What’s really interesting about that chord is it doesn’t have a third in it. Now, usually the third in a chord is what determines if it sounds major or it sounds minor. If you omit that third entirely, you get a chord that you’re not quite sure how to feel about — ‘Is this a happy feeling or a sad feeling?’ It doesn’t spell that out for you. And building the song around a chord like that, to me, was going to be the vehicle for Lizzo to give us the right kind of message.”

Buoyed on by a Nile Rodgers-esque guitar line, Reed’s bass part combines plenty of low end thump with some fantastic small-speaker translation – essential for a production that wants to cater equally to both clubbers and joggers! Bass highlights include the four-to-the-floor disco foundation (eg. the first six beats of the intro). Also look out for the melodic fill in the second bar of the verse, and how the bass line doubles the vocal in the chorus (under ‘I’m gon' be OK… it’s about damn time’).

The song is in the key of Eb, so you’ll need to tune down half a step to play the transcription as written in the PDF workbook.