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 “The Hunter”.
“Alex doesn’t have any problem with going to talk to you in the middle of a rehearsal or even live, just to explain an idea, to the extent of literally putting his fingers on the neck of your instrument and hitting the drums. It’s always very organic and instinctive. So when Alex realized that Ben was completely stuck on guitar at a certain section – Ben kept making signs of “no” with his head to tell Alex he just didn’t know what to do, that he was still digging to find something… And there we were! All playing, keeping the noise and the vibe alive, while Alex and Ben were kinda trying to communicate/argue about parts, until we all saw Alex jump off our rehearsing stage, run across the church, bring back a drum kit piece by piece on stage while telling us to keep playing. We were all like… “What is he up to now?” He then quickly built back the drum kit and invited Ben to jump on it and play some drum solo or whatever he told him to trigger the whole thing.
[…] Alex kept pointing the drum kit non-stop calling out ideas, doing all sorts of signs – a lot of new ones! – hoping this would be enough of a reason for Ben to let go but he just stood there, moving his head from left to right and right to left, as if trying to say “I’M LOST! HELP!” or something maybe a little less polite… That’s the good thing about playing loud; we don’t necessarily hear all the whispers! So guess what happened?
I’m sure you guessed it! Alex went behind the drums himself! And the guy never played drums before! He just looked at Moose and screamed 1-2-3-4! And started to hit the floor tom super loud, telling Moose to complement his pulse, and for us all to keep playing what we were playing before we got confused…! It was amazing to watch Alex just hitting the tom with so much passion! We all laughed at the beauty and the purity of this child-at-heart moment, which brought Ben to drop the act and the pride and just let go into the vibe so we could embrace it all… So Ben started playing, and what followed was just magical! We played that part for hours again non-stop. Alex wasn’t too worried about our other musician friends who were set to join us later that night to keep rehearsing. They didn’t know they were about to find out a new 20-minute section of an already pretty long song! It must have been ok, as here we were all that night of July 5, the 11 of us playing as one, all being the vectors of pure emotions designed to invite others to dwell on. And what a moment The Hunter has been…! Magical!”