Indie pop group Air Traffic Controller recently released their new album "Black Box" and we asked them to tell us about some of the tracks. Today, guitarist Steve Scott tells us about the song "Are You With Me". Here is the story:

"Are You With Me" began as a short fragment of a song that Dave played for me one day as we were considering songs for what would become ATC's new album "Black Box." He actually played three short songs for me that had been written around the same time, and they each centered around a friend he had who was going through a really difficult patch in his life. Dave came over to my little basement studio called "The Hatch" and we cut three short acoustic demos of the songs. For a couple of weeks after that I played around with each of the partial songs to see what kinds of arrangements, parts and sounds might work for each. As I kept hearing Dave's beautiful lyrics about hope in the face of adversity it occurred to me to try connecting them together into a miniature little suite. I demoed up all the parts and sent it to the rest of the band and our producer Bleu. We all eventually agreed that the full suite was not going to fit with the rest of the songs on the album, but Bleu and the band all resonated to the middle movement of the suite. From there Bleu and the rest of ATC created some really magical parts and composed a new chorus for the song that allowed it to stand up on its own. I'm consistently blown away by the depth of talent in Bleu and my bandmates, and the final version of "Are You With Me" is a perfect showcase of their musicianship and especially Dave's infectious optimism.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, learn more about the album right here!

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