Unconditional Love

Click to hear a sample

VC: lead & harmony vocals, Fender Precision bass, Fender Strat , Yamaha CS1 Synth (electric piano,& strings), drum programming; Suzie Kirrane: harmony

The oldest of all the songs on the CD is a fitting finale. You have to stretch your (and my) memory way way back to March of 1985. I had just put together my band The Coffee Achievers to perform my rock opera The Artist for my senior thesis at Cal. It was also a time where I was very much under the influence of various and sundry mind altering chemicals not to mention one very attractive young lady. She was one of many who lived on the north side of campus in a house we all affectionately referred to as “The Zoo.”
The original inspiration for this song came directly from a button many of the zoo residents were wearing at the time. It simply said: “Unconditional Love”. So, the first line was both tongue in cheek (I didn’t have one of these buttons and very much wanted one) and symbolic of the fact that I had yet to win the love of that special young lady. But I did win her affections quite shortly after conceiving of that first line and then went about writing this song for her. It was, to say the least, a very tumultuous relationship and this was my attempt to persuade her that I was worth the trouble. When finished it was a slow, spacey piano ballad and a far cry from the “Espresso Rock ‘n’ Roll” that the Coffee Achievers were playing. I was spending quite a few hours in the practice rooms at school honing my piano playing skills and the music was written in one of those small rooms on a beautiful grand piano. I believe I performed it once at the house of one of my professors for a poetry writing class I was taking. My classmates never much cared for my surreal and romantic poetry, but my professors always did. The Coffee Achievers soon took off and my very passionate affair ended within a few weeks. This song was simply put on a shelf and gathered dust. That is until a year or two ago when one day a strange thought entered my head: Hmmm…what would happen if I took “Unconditional Love” and turned it into a modern dance song? A strange thought indeed. When I began recording the CD I put that strange thought into action, rearranged the music a bit and the result is what you hear now: what I like to call “dance-a-delic.”
I had planned for this to be an entirely solo tune, but I kept adding harmony parts and one day while Suzie was over recording I played it for her and asked her if she’d sing on it. She agreed and I’m glad she did for the combination of our voices gives it that extra other-worldly sound that it needed.

So…”Zooites” all across America…this song is for you and those glory days of 1985.

And that finishes the CD. I hope you have enjoyed it.