I like this one a lot. I hope you do as well.
I've written here before about my friend Clark Vreeland, but in case you missed it. . .
Clark is, I say without the slightest hesitation, a true musical genius. He's been playing so many styles for so long that his hands are on automatic half the time, leaving his mind free to explore different ideas and approaches. A far-from-complete history of his artistic journey can be read here.
We do a bit of co-writing, mostly at long distance, passing fragments and ideas back and forth via the miracle of the intertubes, mucking about with them and then tossing them back. Some pretty good stuff comes out of the process. (Examples can be found here and here).
A couple of weeks back, he sent me what he called "a really good bottom." And, man, was it. Almost instantly, words started rolling out of my mouth. It was all I could do to get a mic in front of me and get 'em down. I sent what came back, along with some ideas for the track.
He took what I tossed him and stirred it up good, as only he could, yielding this incredible song, "Stories in My Blood." The basic groove is still strong, with roots/world overtones I never expected, including an internal hook that is one of the wickedest ear worms I've heard in quite a while.
In the meantime, I started going through a bunch of stuff I'd shot recently and scouring the web for public domain and CC stuff that would work with the song and piecing together this video.
All in all, not a bad bit of collaboration, in my quite less than humble opinion.
et voila:
(In case the embed don't work, here's the direct link:
Clark Vreeland--Stories in My Blood
A parting thought:
Last night, GF and I watched the fascinating PBS/National Geographic special on the Leakey family and the still-unfolding of our remarkable species, "Bones of Turkana."
Toward the end, Richard Leakey was discussing what differentiated our little sub-family from all the hominids and other animals that preceded us. The three elements he felt confident in saying marked us apart from our ancestors were bipedalism, language and compassion.
(For the moment, let us set aside discussion of that last and its implications for species differentiation among our country's political parties; grist for another mill).
To Leakey's list of purely human qualities I would add one more: we tell stories.