Artist

The Free Design

United States • 1967 – 1972

The Free Design is a music group from United States, active 1967–1972. Their discography on Gatefold includes 11 records.

Start your shelf →Open in app

Albums tracked

In collections

1967

Since

Biography

The Free Design were a Delevan, New York-based vocal group playing jazzy pop music. The members were all siblings of the Dedrick family: Chris Dedrick (who wrote most of the songs), sister Sandy Dedrick and brother Bruce Dedrick were the original lineup. Younger sister Ellen Dedrick joined the group later, as did cousin Jeff Dedrick for a brief time, and youngest sister Stefanie joined near the end of their initial career. Their father, Art Dedrick, was a trombonist and music arranger.

The Arc of The Free Design

The pivots — what forced The Free Design to reinvent.

The Stereophonic Launch
Enoch Light pushed the group into the studio in 1967 to show off his new command of multi-track stereo pan pots, resulting in their debut album Kites Are Fun. Chris Dedrick laid down incredibly dense, four-part family harmonies that ran parallel to shifting time signatures and sudden tempo changes. You can hear the physical layout of the studio in the stereo field, with the siblings panned hard left and right to frame the brass and woodwinds. It was a commercial success that set up a grueling, unsustainable pace for their writing sessions.
The Psych-Folk Shift
By 1969, the squeaky-clean image was cracking under the weight of the late-sixties cultural shift, leading to the darker, more experimental tones of Heaven/Earth. Chris Dedrick began utilizing fuzz bass, recorders, and unconventional chord voicings to steer away from the straightforward bubblegum tag. The arrangements on tracks like '2002 A Space Odyssey' became incredibly dense, almost overwhelming the vocal tracks with sudden orchestrations and jazzy shifts. It was a pivot away from AM radio friendly hooks toward a highly insular, progressive studio sound that confused their remaining label heads.
Children's Songs and the End
In 1970, under pressure to find a market, the band pivoted to recording Sing for Very Important People, an album marketed directly to children. The shift was more than a gimmick, as Chris used the kid-friendly themes to hide some of his most complex, jazz-influenced modal chord progressions. The group moved to the LHI label for their final 1972 stand, There Is a Song, where the production thinned out into soft-rock territory as the family ran out of steam. The siblings disbanded shortly after, exhausted by the industry's inability to market their hyper-literate brand of sunshine pop.

Influences

The Association — The Dedricks frequently pointed to this group's intricate, multi-part vocal arrangements as their direct blueprint. You can hear this in the way Chris Dedrick stacked four-part harmonies on 'Kites Are Fun' to mimic the massive, wall-of-vocals approach of hits like 'Along Comes Mary'.
The Hi-Lo's — The intricate jazz-pop vocal group of the 1950s was a massive influence on Chris Dedrick's formal arrangements. Their signature close-harmony style and chromatic vocal runs are stamped all over the dizzying vocal lines of 'I Found Love'.
The Beach Boys — Brian Wilson's modular writing style on Pet Sounds served as a direct inspiration for the Dedrick siblings' studio experiments. The use of unconventional instruments like harpsichords and sleigh bells alongside complex vocal counterpoint on 'Proper Ornaments' directly mirrors Wilson's late-sixties studio production techniques.
Johann Sebastian Bach — Chris Dedrick's classical training at the Manhattan School of Music was heavily rooted in baroque counterpoint. You can hear this rigorous, mathematical voice-leading on 'Daniel Balloon,' where the vocal lines weave in and out of each other like a formal fugue.
The Four Freshmen — This group's pioneering use of open-harmonic vocal arrangements directly shaped how the Dedrick siblings spaced out their notes. The distinct, lush vocal jazz chords on 'Umbrellas' utilize the exact same open-voiced fifths and ninths that the Freshmen popularized in the fifties.