This is obviously a special song for me, as they all are. But there is a nice story behind "We Are Life & Love"...

It was one of the first songs I wrote. The idea of a "happy" song came from a dear friend of mine whom I met when I was about 15. This friend is the one who helped me rediscover my love of playing music - drums, at the time. I started very young at music school and, somehow, at about 12-13 years old, I wasn't into music as much as I was originally. And because my parents were musicians, the just a bit rebel teenager I was didn't wanna be like mom and dad, of course. Short story short, it took me a few years to find music again, thanks to Marc, (cheers buddy) who helped me get there.

A few years passed and I paid my dues as a drummer in different progressive and metal bands. Wanted to try something else, played a little guitar, had a pretty voice like mom. Hey - why not try and write a few songs? So I did, with great help on the lyrics from Mary-Noelle Dana, another important character of this story.

The first three songs were more like the usual stuff I liked, kinda folky-metal-pop with progressive influences. If you listen to the album they are No Evil, Skyzophrenia, Song For Apologies (tracks 2, 9, 3).

I recorded basic demos of those and wanted to meet with my friend Marc to get his feelings about the songs. He told me they were good and that I needed to continue to work on them. But his main comment was that it was pretty dark, and those were the colours I liked the most, at the time anyway. He encouraged me to try to write a more "friendly sounding" song.... He told me about the Beatles (did I mentioned he's a Brit ?) and their anthems about love...Sure they did a lot more than just that, but there were always positive messages. I do love the Beatles..! So with the usual purpose of writing something very different but with melodies that could be appreciated by anyone, I took his advice and made it a challenge...

I had chords, riffs, a structure with lots of changes and rhythms but few words to go with them, only this gimmick thing :"Sing it to me in tune you sing, sing it to me in time again..." So I went down to Mary-Noelle's and told her, as clichéd as it may sound, that I wanted to write something about life & love. I knew she'd come up with something special, with meaning, and fitting perfectly with the melodies. Which she did =)

Only a few months later I started working on the recording of We Are Life & Love, about 4 years ago, and it is this first version which we used on the album. I re-did the guitars and vocals later, but we kept the original orchestration untouched. We Are Life & Love sings about the songs we love, the ones that live through the ages, the ones we love more and more as we grow along with them. So here it is, I hope you'll like it, hopefully the album as well. Listen to it here and get a copy of the album here.