Not Your Typical N.E.R.D.: Pharrell Williams, Bound by Chords

"It's like some Christmas carol, and it sounds like Lucy and Charlie Brown doing figure eights on the ice," Williams says. "But it was summer when I heard the song first, so I knew it wasn't a Christmas song. I was like, what the [heck] is this?"

There's a knock on the window of the SUV.

"We're ready for you," says a man with a clipboard.

It's time for Williams's close-up. Or maybe it's a long shot, because for the next hour he chases a bus down a street over and over again, feigning distress, pausing a moment, then taking a right turn and sprinting up the rec center's lawn. He threads through a handful of extras, who do their best to look as if they're not in a video.

Before he trots off for this new round of filming, an agreement is struck. The interview will recommence at 10 p.m. at the Four Seasons Hotel, where Pharrell has a suite for a few days, registered under the name Luke Skywalker.

Williams spends the rest of the afternoon and much of the evening finishing the "Maybe" shoot. A crowd of Latino kids huddles around him when he has any down time. Once everyone has an autograph, Williams launches into a long monologue with a prematurely tough-looking 8-year-old boy in a black T-shirt. Evangelically against drugs -- Pharrell says he doesn't use them, nor does he drink or smoke -- he lectures the boy for 15 minutes, until it's time for another take. Then the lecture resumes.

Williams won't give up, it seems, until he's won the youngster's soul.

Tangled in Chords

As promised, Pharrell is in his suite at 10 o'clock. After pulling up a chair, he starts loading up the hotel's CD player, looking tired but ready. Right away, he identifies a key theme of the eight remaining cuts.

"All of these songs will get you [sex]," he says, sincerely. "Your girl can't be mad at you when you listen to these songs, because it comes from such a warm and genuine place."

Other themes emerge: Pharrell calls himself a "chord fanatic," and every song here has some progression that sends him into a reverie. He also is a sucker for what he calls "fearless melodies," by which he seems to mean melodies that don't flinch from tenderness or accessibility.

But Pharrell spends much more time singing along to his favorite songs than dissecting them. Each number puts him back in that oblivious zone, and at various points Pharrell's eyes roll back in his head as he listens. Music is his heroin. When he says anything, it's usually just to fawn like a fan.

"This record right here," he says, shaking his head as he introduces the Gap Band's "Yearning for Your Love." The voice of lead singer Charlie Wilson astounds him. "He doubles his vocals at the end, and listen to that [vocal] riff. Got you running in and out of my life. He sings it over and over just to show you he's dope."

Williams marvels, too, at Donny Hathaway, one of the kings of '70s gospel-style soul, who died an apparent suicide at the age of 33.

What do you like about this one?

"The chord changes," Williams offers, when nudged to discuss Hathaway's "Take a Love Song," from an eponymous album in 1971. "And the time signature is great." He's singing again, and you can tell that the commentary part of this exercise, which requires him to stop listening and start talking, is a chore.

He's mesmerized by "Don't Disturb This Groove," by the System.