David LaFlamme speaks with us about the joys of the David LaFlamme Band's, Beyond Dreams CD. More from this conversation with David LaFlamme coming soon!

Yes, indeed. I think people are really going to like the album and are going to be really surprised with it. The music is really just so beautiful. It’s really quite something. I’m just tickled to death. When we had finished the recording, without any mixing or effects, we listened to it on our way back to the airport to fly home and we just loved it. It was just a flat, rough mix of things yet it sounded real good. Without dressing it up it sounded so good so we new we had something special. That’s when you know you got something, when you can listen to a flat mix and it sounds really good. The performances are there.

Yes. On this new album we do a beautiful new recording of, “White Bird” and the reason is because I wanted to have a good recording of the song that I owned versus one that Sony owns or somebody else owns. So this is the third time I’ve recorded it. I recorded it once for Sony, or Columbia, years ago. Then in the mid-seventies, I recorded it for Amherst Records. And now I’ve recorded it for myself. I had been trying to make good recordings of my old stuff for myself so that, since I own the copyright, I can put my own recordings out of my own material. And that way, I don’t have a Mathew Katz problem, or a Sony problem. I don’t have any of those problems. It’s my own music and my own recordings that I own.

Well, it’s a departure but only a slight departure. A lot of it is similar but different. It’s different in that I wrote a new ending for the song. It has real different ending now. While we were up there (in Santa Cruz) I kind of surprised the guys in the band when I told them I wrote a new ending for “White Bird.” They were all like, “Really?!” So, I played it for them and sang it for them and to my surprise they just loved it. Everybody was really excited about. This new version really takes the song to a new place.

No, it’s about the same length. It still has the plucking in the beginning and the acoustic guitar part playing with the violin. Most of the parts are just as they were, nothing complicated or anything, just a really nice recording. Since we first recorded that I mean you can make things sound so much better nowadays. So much cleaner. Funny story about redoing that song. We recorded it and then Linda and I sang it and then we listened to it and said, “You know, we can beat those vocals. Let’s do it again.” So, the very last thing we did was we sang the whole song once again and when we finished everybody just looked at each other and said, “That was it. That was the one. You guys just nailed it.” We were beaming!

We recorded seventy minutes worth of music in five evenings. That’s a lot. Val (original It's A Beautiful Day drummer, Val Fuentes) spent a very long Saturday and Sunday doing his part. I told the guys I wanted to do something kind of like I did with the first IABD album, which was kind of just play live. Nice thing about nowadays is we just have the drums all miked up live and everybody else was direct. So, we tried to play everything just like we play it onstage. That same kind of energy and commitment, but the only thing you’re really recording in the room is the drums and the rest of us are with phones on and going direct so it doesn’t matter. It was just like we were on stage and playing them just like we do. Of course you do a scratch vocal and some scratch solos and then go back. 

It was recorded in a place called Aroma, which is down near Watsonville, California which is where the keyboard player lives and where his new studio is. So, it was exciting for him because it was his new studio and he had spent months and a fortune putting this studio together in hopes that something would come of it and so he was ecstatic.