As promised, below is a link to download Touch The Sky, the first song recorded in the sessions for our third album.  We finished mixing the song on Friday and 3 days later it’s yours to keep.  Let us know what you think!

Touch the Sky

Let’s get the ball rolling with the first song of this new record – Touch The Sky.  The guitar riff at the beginning of the song dates back a few years – I remember playing it in some of the final rehearsals with the Jeunes in 2005 – but I struggled to build a song around it so left it on the shelf.  Then in November 2007 when we were getting ready to record Sunny Days Ahead, I made a very rough demo with the working title Wanted To Fly, but we already had around 20 songs more developed than that one, so again it stayed on the shelf .

Wanted To Fly (2007 demo)

It’s kind of embarrassing for me to listen to that demo now – I only had one line of lyrics (the first line) and the rest was improvised stream-of-consciousness stuff just to see if any other good lyrics came to me (they didn’t), so it’s pretty out of tune and pretty obvious I’m not quite sure what I’m doing yet.  But sharing this sort of stuff is what this new blog is all about

Fast forward to March 2009 and collaborating on the song with SSA! bassist/songwriter/guitarist extraordinaire Gary Miller.  We liked the verse from the original demo but weren’t sure about the rest – it didn’t seem to fit very well.  Gary had some chords and a melody that worked really well for the bridge (the “I held my tongue” bit) and then last week he recorded a really cool bass line.   It’s been through several revisions since then – but finally I recorded some new lyrics and guitars a couple of days ago.  Phew!  So here’s where we are right now:

Touch The Sky (2009 work-in-progress)

It’s not finished yet but we think it’s starting to get close.  Got any comments or ideas?  Just add a comment below or shoot us an email.

We also have some video footage of each of us working on this song which we’ll post in the next few days.

All going well, we should be able to finish it off and release it to you as a free download within a week or so.