Baby's Got Sauce

This saucy single is the most enduring song in the G. Love & Special Sauce catalog. Part of their first album, it features the distinctive rhythmic storytelling of frontman G. Love (Garrett Dutton), who just two years earlier was busking on the streets of Philadelphia. In the song, he meets the girl of his dreams and is over the moon when she becomes his girlfriend. She's rather controlling though, and one night when he wants to hang with his crew, she puts a stop to those plans by dropping him with a frying pan. Most guys would get out of the relationship at this point, but it kinds of turns him on - he likes a girl with some sauce. In a Songfacts interview with G. Love, he said: "I started writing this rap about a dream girl. I always liked tough chicks, you know, chicks with the chutzpah, and attitude. So I was writing that song about that type of tough woman, and then I got to the chorus. The expression 'give me the sauce,' like 'you're saucy,' just popped, so I had 'My Baby's Got Sauce.'"

G. Love wrote the first version of this song when he was 19, before he formed Special Sauce. He recorded it as part of an album he sold on cassette out of his guitar case when we would go busking. At this point, the song was called "Sause." When G. Love & Special Sauce got a deal with Epic Records, he reworked the song with his drummer, Jeffrey "The Houseman" Clemens, who had him change the music to a groove based on the bassline of the Pharcyde song "Otha Fish." Clemens got a songwriting credit on the track along with G. Love. The original "Sauce" version of the song from 1992 is available on the album Oh Yeah (The Original Demos).

With its dense, intricate wordplay, this song established G. Love & Special Sauce as one of the more unusual new acts, combining hip-hop with jazz. It was a little too off-center to garner much airplay, but with a push from Epic Records, it did earn them a substantial fanbase. Ben Harper came on the scene around this time and often joined forces with G. Love; in the late '90s they both championed a newcomer named Jack Johnson, whose 2001 debut album made him a star. After G. Love & Special Sauce got dumped by Epic in the early '00s, Johnson made them the first signing to his new label, Brushfire Records. Johnson's influence can be heard on a lot of their later material, which relies more on melodies and hooks, lending to more crowd participation.