LovethisLife
A Song For All Occasions
© 2004 David Culiner (BMI) (666329812221)
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"Each song on the CD has a kind of majesty to it, aspiring to reach the heavens on waves of lush rock chords and dreamy harmonies. Highly inspiring work."...Jennifer Layton, Editor, Indie-Music.com
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Indie-Music.com Review
Jennifer Layton/Editor-In-Chief
March 6, 2004
With its hippy-trippy, philosophic liner notes about life and art and relationships, I expected LoveThisLife’s CD to be a new-agey, ambient kind of thing. The opening track set me straight. “Everyday” begins with a pulse-quickening, uptempo percussion that leads into intense pop/rock, passionately delivered by a vocalist who sounds like Blind Melon’s Shannon Hoon on the high notes and Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley in the lower range. The song stares down the unpredictability of life (“With every breath and every time, it’s out of bed and into the ring”). This is not laid-back music. Each song on the CD has a kind of majesty to it, aspiring to reach the heavens on waves of lush rock chords and dreamy harmonies.
The CD swirls with introspection and yearning. There’s a pulsing heartbeat even under delicate ballads such as “Were You Listening to the Rain” and “One Night.” And when the electric guitars rise again, get out of the way. The standout track is “Dublin,” an aggressive, staccato, jazz-influenced rock sound that is absolutely brilliant.
Highly inspiring work. With poetic lyrics and music that breathes fire, LoveThisLife offers musical motivation for us to keep getting out of bed and into the ring.
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BAND BIO
LovethisLife - "A Song For All Occasions"
Has there ever been something you've wanted to do so badly that you were willing to risk all that you have in exchange for a non-refundable one-way ticket towards an attempt at it's realization?
Well...moved by the love of holding and playing a guitar...set against the backdrop of the naive belief that we're neither guaranteed or owed another day...an album was made by a group of us who gathers to record music as often as the money can be scraped up to buy some studio time. Over the years, our loosely-woven Los Angeles-based collective LovethisLife has revolved around guitarist David Duncan (By Faith), drummer Pete Maloney (Dishwalla, Josh Clayton Felt), bassist David Sutton (Tracy Chapman, Liz Phair, Tears For Fears), engineer Jeff Sheehan (Nirvana, Black Crowes, Tom Petty), and myself, David Culiner (no cool bands), on guitars and vocals. Never one to wait for opportunity to be served up...I tooled LovethisLife into a self-propelled unit built to celebrate what we have along with what we don't. We roam divergent paths...and when the means arrive...we regroup for short stretches of all-night recordings. Yep...this has been our dance since the seeds to this new album were planted at the first Sound City sessions way back in February of '95.
The tunes are not intended to be revelatory, thought-provoking, conclusive...or even relevant for that matter. They're simply spontaneous photographs caught during those split-second reflex-reactions to life's blind turns. Like varying camera angles of a meteor's first hit. If the lyrics seem vague, veiled, or random...well...it's because they get written during that disorienting heartspin that's whipped up by a good collision (but before the dust gets a chance to settle). As a result, the landscapes and experiences photographed over the years evolved into a stylistically diverse collection of tunes and performances that might require a few listens before they begin to blossom. I hope you dig them.
In making the album, the only real direction we gave ourselves was to be ourselves...for better and for worse. Some sessions were a blissful sandbox of creativity and humor. Others were nothing more than a welcome refuge from our daily lives. Then again...there were some truly highlight-reel moments. Like the day we were listening through the walls as Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers were backing up Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins just across the hall. Or the night that one of my childhood heroes, the legendary guitarist Ronnie Montrose (Van Morrison, Edgar Winter Group, Montrose) came in to play on "Human Shield" (a remarkable LovethisLife story in itself). Even the occasion of gaining the nerve to ask a lovely painter (who for quite some time, I had fancied from a distance) to be the object of my affection for the record's photo shoot was a rockin' metal moment.
Equally (and suprisingly) fruitful were the frequent droughts between sessions...sometimes stretching up to a year or more. Ironically, it was during those dry spells that unexpected reinforcements would fly in. News that several songs were being broadcast by commercial radio stations across Western & Eastern Europe, South America, and even here in the U.S. would add timely fuel to an often waning fire. One evening in particular, a board tape came in from the huge pop station in Sao Paulo, Brazil (Vox FM 90) which had our song "The Garden" being played in between Celine Dion and Bon Jovi (what a threesome). Who would've imagined?
Ultimately strung together in 2003, eight years of experiences, experiments, victories, and mistakes were woven into our independently-released Expanse Recordings offering affectionately titled "A Song For All Occasions." Literally. Taking your allotment of time for granted? We offer "Everyday." Thinking about heading to the next plane? Here...cozy up to what was to be my last time holding a guitar...the delicate blast of "Never Again." Have you been considering cutting them loose so you can reclaim your dignity and grace? Then maybe you'll find a lyric, riff, or drum hit that you'll relate to somewhere inside my personal favorite (a fond memento from a solitary wind-stripped hill on the Greek island of Ios)...the release of "Human Shield."
Thankfully, the ultimate destination of the recordings lied nowhere close to being what or where it was imagined to be when we first set sail back in 1995. By doing it for ourselves and by ourselves...an anchor was subconsciously cut...freeing us from the temptation of compromise during all those nights over all those years. And as cool as it is to have accomplished the completion of our independently-made album...even cooler was the discovery that by living the love (making the trade for that one-way ticket)...the ever-lurking gauntlet of "what if/some day/but the friends and family think" got catapulted to it's rightful place...a distant buriel ground beautifully framed in the rearview mirror.
You rock.