A Wilson Fifer Rose & Philhelmon collaboration, this cover came about as the result of the very successful Wilson Fifer Rose kickstarter campaign. One of the rewards offered through this campaign was that the band would record a song of the bidder's choosing. Much like our cover of Africa, this is another request from one of our backers. However, when Austin and Dustin heard these covers, they decided that they were too good to remain unreleased, so I put a little bit of additional work into it, that is, recording real drums, spending some extra time on the mixing, and compiling the footage into this "making of" style of video.
With as much fun as we had including Henk Bol on recording Africa, we wanted to have him back for this cover. He brought Pjotr Jurtschenko with him to play some very impressive rock flute that Ian Anderson would be proud of!
Personally, Jethro Tull is one of my favorite prog bands. I've always wanted to do a proper cover of Locomotive Breath, so this was a good excuse to do it and have my bands come together in an international recording project (for those of you who don't know, Henk and Pjotr are both from Holland, while Dustin, Austin, and myself live in the USA).
On a sidenote, Wilson Fifer Rose will probably release these tracks with some other covers we have been working on in the future. No word yet on whether that will be a download, a formal cd, or just in the form of youtube videos.
The next Philhelmon album will definitely feature some Wilson Fifer Rose harmony parts. Those two are just too good not to include on Philhelmon's next album. Henk has been very busy working on the tracks for the new record and these two video sneak peaks illustrate the process a bit. I especially like sneak peak 5 where it shows Henk and John Havermans recording in an old church on a massive pipe organ!
This video also features one of my songs which I co-wrote with Rick Kallen, Cosmic Argonaut. This song was originally written as part of a musical I was composing a few years ago which stalled out. Henk added some extremely cool sonic ideas and musical interludes. Now I can't hear it any other way than as a Philhelmon song!
It was also a lot of fun to record Randy Gerhart this past week. For those of you who don't know, Randy played bass guitar on Wilson Fifer Rose's Letters from Cornelius album. He was a member of a band I used to play drums in called Johannin, and Puddy, the guitarist of that band, wanted me to record Randy for a project he's working on. Since the members have spread out a bit geographically, it's fun to get together with these guys when I can. Randy will be joining Wilson Fifer Rose for at least one live gig where we will play with a full rock band instead of our usual 2 guitars and 3 voices combo.
