One hot Indiana Saturday this past summer I camped out with a few friends in the cooling shelter of the studio to record a remix of an older song of mine called "Mercy Triumph". The original song was built with samples and was recorded at a live show, in which I proclaimed to the audience (and since then to thousands of Underquiet album listeners) "this is a song in the works"....Now, years after the original "in the works" release, it's been fullfilling to complete what was begun.
The new version is a different animal though, sharing only the mood and lyrics of the original release, the "Bala Version" is performed with a full band and has a new melody. It's called the Bala Version due to the fact that my friend Joseph Lehner plays the Balafon (a wooden African xylophone) through the duration of the song, and with Jay Kirkpatrick on bass and Matt Robertson on drums the balafon slowly emerges within this percussive trio until it overtakes the song in the final minutes. Mark Guinn also showed up for a few hours and recorded subtle guitar work for the second verse. All in all the day of collaboration was fruitful, and I had tons to work afterwards, alone in the studio. It's been a joy to work as a "solo artist", yet to find myself functioning within a collective of other imaginative musicians.
