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Been thinking about SoL lately. Good times.

Here’s some recordings of songs at a practice in the China Alley studio on August 10, 2003. A keyboardist named Kevin (I believe; friend of Brett’s) was sitting in.

This is Soul Shade Mechanic, one of the top 5 best original songs written by Rodriguez and Aguilar, and this was one of our best performances of it (in my humble opinion):[quicktime]http://jimblog.net/wp-content/uploads/solshademechanic.mp3[/quicktime]

At one point, a bluesy jam ensued. Some good stuff in this track:

Probably the most popular song Johnny and Mike wrote was “Strong For Today,” and that practice session produced one of our two finest recorded performances of it:

The proverbial “encore” song, “Brothers Back Home”:

One of the band’s favorite tunes, “Welcome Back Eloise,” showed development in the areas of harmonies and bridges/transitions:

This unnamed jam tune brought out the versatility of each instrumentalist, and always put me in a very Mahavishnu mood:

Strangely enough, one of the best recordings of “Strong for Today” was the very first one, at Artworks:

One of the tunes we played at Artworks started as a very uptempo number, but just kept getting uncomfortably faster, due to our nervousness at our first gig. I used an advanced sound editing program to slow the tempo down while keeping it at the same pitch. The first selection is “before” the tempo change; the second is my “slowed down” version.

Another duplicate, but this version of “Brothers Back Home” also rivals all the others for the best performance:

Finally, “Whuut!” was one of the first songs I learned to play with SoL as we formed. It became a trademark number of sorts, and represents another of our “jam” pieces:

Don’t forget, the menu link above gets you to lots more info about SoL, and this link here will take you to an mp3 player with all the recorded works of SoL in one place.

This is my favorite picture of us; I photoshopped it to look like an oil painting; the original is below, and it is linked to a photo album of more SoL Pics.

From SoL

From SoL