I had to track this song over hill and dale, river and wood, and finally across the Atlantic Ocean and down to South America to get it. I started by hearing a melody in my brain, and as I usually do, I worked it out in the upper register of the electric bass. It sounds a bit Celtic to me�maybe Welsh. Then I finished the chord structure on keyboards, and made a beat and played a rhythmic bass part. Deciding maybe I had something, I called John Mader out here in the San Fransisco Bay area, and he put a cool groove over my wee shaker-kick pattern. Then for dynamics I had John redo the first half on the frame drum, which is a conga-like drum favored by the Irish and Scottish.

That intro melody part I started with wasn't quite sailing tho, so I played it as a string part on the keyboard�and there was the direction. So I called Shira Kammen over in Berkeley, who plays a lot of medieval music, and she brought her veille over, which is a medieval violin, and played the melody in the intro. I loved that�.the haunting qualities were accented, and I asked her to play throughout. I had played a melodic bass part also throughout the as yet instrumental, and at first I took that out. But she wanted to play to that part, and so the piece became a bit of a duet between the violin and melodic bass, with a swampy groove underneath.

So now I'm in Nashville recording with friends, and we think maybe this is a piece we might do. So I ask friend Paul Ebersold to help me with lyrics for this unusual mystical sounding groove, and we write lyrics about a search for mystical love call "She Breathes", and the band records it as such�.and that version is sitting in the can, awaiting possible release in a two-guitar rock band format.

Now I go to Scotland, because I wanted to visit without being on tour, and because I have Scottish ancestry. While there in the Highlands, I visit Stirling Castle and the battlefields where William Wallace fought for Scottish freedom (remember Braveheart?), and I am touched by the price those people paid for their freedom. So now the violin version of that melody comes back, haunts me, and I know that I should re-write the lyrics and call it "Free", in honor of William Wallace and those long-ago warriors.

The new lyrics need more of a singer than I am, and I think it needs a female singer as well. It just happens that my wife Mickie has been trying to help a young band she found in England, who are currently in South America. So I send my rough vocal to Ana Maria Botero in Bogota Columbia, where her guitarist partner in the band RottViolent, Pablo Andres, records her singing the new lyrics. We go back and forth a little, and she does a wonderful job. Michael Scott's (from Sonia Dada) voice adds just the right touch to the chorus word 'Free', and after adding some horn chords that I hope conjure up the vibe of a call-to-arms, I'm ready to mix.

I try to take out the melodic bass dueting with Shira's medieval violin ( I love saying medieval violin), because it has one rhythmic bass part grooving with the drums, and the extra melodic bass part is �well I'm not sure�but when I take it out, the haunting atmosphere is reduced�so I keep it. It's a bit unusual, but I like that.

The "Free" video, using this music and my photos of the Scottish Highlands and William Wallace monuments, are heard and seen here.

So as you can see, the shortest distance between two points is not always a straight line. This is just one of many interesting stories about the creation of a piece of music�check out how Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys made 'Good Vibrations ' sometime. Cheers, erik