This guy… I have played with some motherfuckers: Kenny Aronoff
This guy… I have played with some motherfuckers: Kenny Aronoff, Steve Ferrone, Mike Elizondo, Matt Chamberlain, Tim Pierce, Brian McLeod, Rusty Anderson — not to mention Michael Urbano, Geoff Stanfield, Andy Ellis, and Michael Belfer — all among the best musicians in the world.
But I’ve never played with someone like @philipsheppard
, someone who felt like me, like a missing limb over there sawing away at his instrument, making sounds that sound like ME. I’ve never played next to someone with whom it was so easy to throw out the rules — keys and parts and sections and songs themselves — and just play.
The best musical moments of my life have been spent with this guy, just making shit up in the moment as we felt it, with nothing but the moment to move us forward. That’s why I had to have him on my solo album.
He came through. He plays on two of my favorite tracks on This Sweet Life, two songs where what he’s playing represents the life buried there. He elevates the songs and on those tracks we get to sing together.
A Royal Academy fellow, conductor, composer of more than 60 film soundtracks, and one of the finest cellists in the world — not least because of his capacity to loop, improvise, and scream bloody murder through his instrument — I was incredibly lucky and so grateful to have him on my album.
Go check out is work at Spotify or philipsheppard.com
