When You Pray Collage

Writers

Original song by Falcone, with new material by Davey, Jeter, & Wishart

Performers

Bridget Remembers

I loved singing backing vocals to this. I really like Jerry's voice and was keen to sing alongside him in a supporting role. It was something new and challenging for me, it stretched my vocal range and gave me new ideas on how to use my voice. Playing clarinet on this was great too. Again I wanted to fit in with the mood of the piece and be a musical support.

When I spoke to Alan on the phone after he's sent me the wav's for this and Earth Born he seemed quite amused. He said he'd been a bit taken aback when he'd first listened to Candles because, like me, had never worked on a song in this style before, but instantly had the idea of using his upright and from there he didn't look back.

Don was really surprised and happy to hear Alan's contributions to Candles as he thought I was only sending him the title track, Earth Born.

Don Remembers

My mom always loved Jerry’s voice. He was in the original Spirits Burning (circa 1986) and on our first demo, sang a song I wrote called Loralyn. Almost yearly, my mom would mention Loralyn, saying that it could be a hit and make me famous. Since I’ve been recording professionally, I’ve never found a place for that piece, but Earth Born did become the place to resurrect Candles, along with Jerry’s voice.

A few months before my mom passed away, the Earth Born CD was nearly finished and I had brought a CDR copy with me when I visited her and the house I had grown up in. As I had done when I was a teenager, we played Scrabble in the kitchen and listened to music in the background. This time, though, it was a laptop instead of a cassette player. Instead of listening to Michael Oldfield, or Vangelis, or one of the hard rock bands I used to like, I played the entire almost-finished version of Earth Born. She was very surprised that every song had vocals, and more surprised that every song had a female vocalist on it. She seemed to like most of it. She was happy to hear a familiar voice on Candles, with Jerry. And, of course, she asked whatever happened to that song called Loralyn?

Candles probably has the oldest ‘data’ of all tracks on Earth Born. All of Jerry’s parts and most of mine were recorded in the 90s, before I had a Pro Tools system. We recorded to my old Audicy digital audio workstation. The Audicy only supported 10 tracks, so it was quite a breath of fresh air to have the song in Pro Tools now with more tracks available. Even after Bridget and Alan were in place, I had room to add some subtle and modern synth parts to keep the spirits in the piece burning.

Don's Timeline