Innermost Being

I came up with the chord progression first on “Innermost Being”. I wanted this song to be very percussive. I wanted it to stir up, express and explore the inner world that we all live in, our innermost core or innermost thoughts and desires, and mostly, the universe of the inner part of us that is so powerful and shapes our actions and thoughts and experiences. Our innermost being can be a dark and vulnerable place where we are alone with ourselves. It also could be a place where a spark of hope and peace that we don’t understand resides, maybe even be a place of spirit, interaction, connection and fellowship, a source of life.

I wanted to capture the power of our innermost life and our inner being, and how it guides and shapes who we are and then forms us in our outermost being. Our outermost being impacts our innermost being with maladies, flaws, heartaches, failures, wrongs done to us, sorrows, loss, sicknesses, injuries and aging. Our innermost being is a place we need to quietly visit and be at times so we can open ourselves up so that we can endure, maybe become new, retool and rethink, be rewritten and re-molded, recover and be re-built. These are tough and challenging ideas. I wanted the song to mirror the challenge.

I recorded that song by singing the melody to the recorded chord changes in the mid 90s when my voice was pretty good and I could hit the notes. It was funny—when I first came up with the song, I had all these different ideas and phrases and then Joe said, “Would you just pick the ones you want?” I replied, “You are right, sorry.” Joe, being the expert transcriber learned my phrases flawlessly. We used his little distortion amp to get the tone.

I saturated my voice in reverb to kind of denote the innermost place. I wanted the vocal to be a shadow of what the harmonica was doing. This was a difficult melody to sing and for Joe to perform exactly, which again is a testament to Joe’s agility and expertise, as you many who follow Joe know. He is a master transcriber.

The bass part made me smile too because it was a full slap style. I used my Fender Jaguar on that one. I was shooting for Louis Johnson light. I strove for a strong foundation for the soul of this interaction throughout the song. For the bass solo I was inspired by Paul Simon song’s You Can Call Me Al fast bass solo. I’ve always loved that solo. It was a great target to have in my sites.

I also had a vision of having percussion solos in this song. Larry did an outstanding job on everything percussion, the timbales, the congas, the drums and shakers in this song. I jumped out of my chair when he played that first timbale solo. Honestly, it was one of the most rhythmically expressive timbale solos I’ve ever heard. I was going for the Afro Cuban vibe at the end with the beautiful interaction of the timbales and the congas soloing over the groove and the melody. They were talking with each other and I think we captured it well. We had a lot of broken sticks and blisters from that moment. (I have some pictures.)

I feel like I captured the angst of inner life, our inner universe.