My best friend and bandmate Jeff, and also host of The Club, is sharing never-told stories only to The Club members. Here is an excerpt of the story about the song “Summertime Departures”.
“Therefore, a little more than 20 people involved in the show – yes, it was an enormous production crew – gathered at our church-studio that evening to put everything in motion one last time before showtime. Everything ran as planned and very smoothly for the first five songs… until we hit “Summertime Departures”. Knowing Alex, I immediately knew something was bugging him. We nonetheless reached the end of the song and as we were slowly getting into the following one, which was Lavender Sky, Alex asked everyone to stop playing, that he’d love to play Summertime Departures again, as he “just wanted to validate something”, he said… Nine times out of ten, when Alex says “Let’s do this again, I just want to validate or try something”, that means, “I feel this part isn’t right at this point in the song”, and also, that he wants to bring it further, to try something different.
[…] EVERYONE had a “48 hours before the show” shivering sweat for a split second. Even the technical team was like “have I heard there might be some last-minute changes?”, knowing the whole show was perfectly aligned and everything felt at the right place… The balance of that crazy puzzling “thing” we’ve all been working on and implementing since December 2018 that we had recently figured out? Everyone looked at Alex, who didn’t budge one bit, and then said: “Let’s do “Summertime Departures” again from the top please… 1, 2, 3, 4″. And here we go again…! Everyone plays their charts and we’re all looking at Alex nonstop, trying to figure out what’s on his mind, what he heard that we hadn’t.”