On my first visit to San Francisco, in September of 2002, as I was deciding that I would never leave, Barton showed me the music studio he had set up in his garage. I expressed that I'd always wanted to make music and he invited me to sit with him while he worked on a new song. I was thrilled and intimidated. We worked together a few times during that initial trip, and he wrote a pretty song that we, for some reason, titled Don't Stop. A few weeks later, on my second visit, I wrote a poem that would become the basis for the lyrics, although the lyrics in the initial version of the song were mostly provided by Barton. In the beginning, I was mostly ornamental. Barton wrote the music, Barton wrote the lyrics, Barton did the production, and I sat, and I watched. I continued to join him in the studio and observe, and for the moment, it was all I wanted, to just observe.
It took us a few months to complete the first version of Don't Stop. Shortly after we finished that, a friend of Barton's died unexpectedly, and he wrote Gone as a response. I helped a bit with the lyrics, and was beginning to offer suggestions about production. We finished that version of Gone in two days, which was surprising, given how long it took to finish Don't Stop. In February of 2003, we started work on a new song, originally titled Something To Call My Own but that title was later shortened. Again, my contributions were minimal, though I provided some lyrical tweaks and more suggestions about the production.
We also worked on refining a few of Barton's existing songs, Something Good and Take Me Up, but then something changed. A computer crash left us without a computer to make our music and we went a few months doing nothing. When we returned to production, with a new computer, Barton has purchased a number of additional hardware and software upgrades which meant that while he was still the veteran musician, and had a decade of experience on me with production concepts, he was no more experienced with the new equipment than I was and so we learned it together and in doing so, became a little bit closer to true partners in the musical endeavor.
It showed in our next track, Don't Let Me Go. What also showed in this song was the contrast and conflict between us that would cause our music to keep getting better and better, driven by that tension, but would ultimately cause that taut cord to snap. We both wrote separate versions of the lyrics that had completely different vibes to them, and ended up compromising, using half his bright and cheerful lyrics and half my moodier, darker ones. The song doesn't know quite what it wants to be, but the production values on it are light years ahead of anything we had accomplished previously.
We followed this up with another reworking of Take Me Up, and in the spirit of resurrecting old material, Barton played me a track he had written many years earlier but felt he had never been able to properly produce. The mixes he played me were flawed and messy but there was something in the song that I loved, something that spoke to me, so I enthusiastically suggested we give a new production a shot. That song was Tonight. We did a mix that was, again, so much better than what we'd accomplished before, that I think it surprised us both. We got caught up in the endless possibilities of the track and produced three additional remixes. The first one, the "Dimensional Mix," came easily, but we struggled a bit with the "Endless Sky" mix, repeatedly changing diretion. Later we would also produce the "Manifestation Mix" but only after some other things had happened.
Barton approached me about releasing Tonight. It was scary. I'd never given meaningful thought to the idea that we might actually put this music we were making out into the world for strangers to experience. Barton contacted a dance music promoter, Sergio, and I made some album artwork and we pressed CDs and vinyl. Scary. Once we had all the materials in hand and were ready to begin promotion, Sergio and his partner told us that they thought the "mix package" wasn't strong enough and we should hire a remixer for additional mixes. We hired Eddie X and it was also around this time that a record store owner named Victor introduced us to DJ Manny Ward, who loved our track, especially our "Endless Sky" mix. He agreed to work with us on a remix as well. With Manny's new mix, Eddie's five mixes, and our own new mix, we had enough for a second CD.
Tonight premiered at #48 on the Billboard Hot Club Dance Play chart, and ended up going as high as #38. We had charted on Billboard.
To follow that up, we decided to release Take Me Up. It was, honestly, never my favorite song, but we thought it might have some club appeal and therefore a good choice. We released two mixes of our own, plus a mix with Manny, and one from Eric Kupper. It wasn't doing as well as we'd hoped so we were forced to rush-hire Norty Cotto for an additional two mixes which we released on a second CD. Take Me Up peaked at #37 on Billboard, a tiny improvement over Tonight.
I dont recall the exact sequence of events, and would need to consult the dates on the archive tapes to be sure, but I think by this point we had written almost an entire album's worth of material, which we planned to release with the title "Visual Perception." Alongside Tonight and Take Me Up, we had Don't Let Me Go, and by this point I believe we'd already written and produced versions of Nothing Lasts Forever, Fill My Eyes, Moving In Darkness, a new production of Gone, Flying, and Honestly. I had graduated to full production partner, and had contributed lyrics to almsot all those tracks. I believe Honestly and Nothing Lasts Forever are the only exception. I wrote all the lyrics for Moving In Darkness and Fill My Eyes, though in working them into the music they were tweaked sufficiently to allow Barton a co-writing credit. I also started doing some production on my own. It was more efficient for me to lay down production groundwork and then tweak it with Barton, rather than wait for him to do it together, as he was in school for his Master's and working almost full time. In a number of these cases (Flying and Nothing Lasts Forever come to mind) I did a lot of the production work while Barton as out of town, and expected he would scrap everything I'd done, but most of it remains in the versions he will be releasing. I know I also did a lot of the production work on Moving In Darkness, and since I also wrote all the words and sing in it, I've always felt like that one, versus the others, was my song. Barton never liked when I referred to something as "mine' or "his," but my desire to take ownership of things stems from the fact that our partnership was so unequal when we began, and that the group was named after him. I always felt like it would be very easy to forget me, and in my way, struggled to make my voice heard, probably more than I needed to. And to Barton's credit, he did everything he could to assuage those feelings in me, occasionally to his detriment.
Moving In Darkness was in the running to be our third release, but we decided on To Call My Own instead. I'm going to skip the part about our ill-fated partnership with a female vocalist that delayed this release by months. We got mixes by Alan X, Josh Harris and Alex Santer, and of course our own takes and the Manny version. We also shot our first video for this song, which I directed, filmed and edited. Almost everyone involved in the project experienced some intense personal difficulty during the process. But it made it to #15 on Billboard.
Our last release together, fittingly, was a new version of Don't Stop. We gathered some strong mixes, our own and Manny's, as well as Josh Harris and Jaimy. I made a new video with a slightly bigger budget than the first. But the song failed to chart and some long-simmering personal problems caused Barton and I to split up. We didn't speak, really, for almost a year and a half. I signed a legal document relinquishing all rights and possible royalties to everything we ever did, but encouraged him to go ahead and release whatever he saw fit.
Recently he released a new version of a song he'd written before he knew me, one I'd never worked on. I thought that was nice but I was wondering if he'd also eventually produce new material or at least let out some of our work together.
Yesterday I found out that Barton is moving away, to Berlin, and I decided I should contact him to hopefully reconnect before he leaves, but he beat me to it, inviting me over for tea last night. It was really wonderful to spend time with him again after so long. It turns out he has the next release all queued up, and I'm not going to be the one to announce what his next single will be, but it's a song that, while written before he knew me, is one that we worked together on a number of times. I realize, coincidentally, that I've failed to mention the name of that song throughout this entire post, but it's one of the first songs of his that I ever heard, the first one that I fell in love with. It was supposed to be our fifth single and we had almost completed our own mix of it when things fell apart. I heard the final version of that mix last night, and while of course I am biased, I think it's really fantastic, the best work we ever did. I'm very pleased that he's going to release it. It's a bit sad, really, that this adventure had to end but it's been better for both of us, an it's sad that it ended just as we were improving so much, but I'm also happy to know that such a good song will be my final contribution. Making music was always a dream for me, and now I've done it, but I've also learned that just because you have a dream doesn't mean that you can or should make it real. My talents lay elsewhere, and listening to our last collaboration, I remember all the exciting adventures we had, the endless frustrations, and come to peace.
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