Full Circle
in Gigs Photos Posts
My first CD, Full Circle, is five years in the making; it’s not that it was terribly complicated, it just took a while to find the right people to put it together. So let me tell you a little bit about it. There are eleven tracks, nine of which are my original songs. I’m going to bite off each song separately and post my thoughts on it as they come up.
Soul Dancing is one of the first songs I ever wrote and performed in public (I’ve written a lot of songs that never find their way out of the shower), and it’s also the first song I ever wrote that I thought had the potential to be on the radio. It’s also the song of mine that has gone through the most changes. I think there are four completely different iterations of the song recorded at various times by different producers and/or musicians! Perhaps one day I’ll post the different versions on my website for kicks, or I’ll do a remix of it (like Kenny, my friend and bass player) did and turn it into a groove-based smooth jazz instrumental. My favorite one, however, is of course the one that will end up on the CD.
I was into dream interpretation at one point; I guess I still am, but I don’t keep a dream journal anymore. I had started reading a lot of books about dreams and how different cultures and analysts translated the symbolism within them. In an introduction by one of the authors, I came across a passage about the often-held idea that our spirits actually leave our bodies when we dream, tethered by an ethereal thread like a lifeline that allows them to return whenever the dream is done. The thought of that fascinated me as I began to find other references to that concept from different schools of thought. Come to find out, it’s pretty much accepted around the world as the way we travel through dreams; even if the “flight” is considered more symbolic than literal. Even in quantum physics, experiments on the nature of consciousness and mind-travel have proven that we are, indeed, able to be in two places at once. (And yes, I’m really into quantum physics.)
And so Soul Dancing was born. I usually develop music and lyrics simultaneously; I hear a phrase and I’ll sing it with its own melody all at once. But in this case, the “ooh” line of the song came to me first, on its own and out of the blue. So I hummed it for a couple of days, put a bass line with it, and then created the bridge and chorus — all long before I had the words in mind, which is so different than how I usually write music. So this song is different in that respect, too.
I hope that you enjoy it. I’ve performed it thirty or so times over the years and it’s always one of my audience favorites… and mine, too. In a quantum physics kind of way.
