Here in the Citadel is a massive, gorgeous but slightly worn and scuffed grand piano. It’s black, and mostly glossy, and we thank God every couple weeks that it has these giant metal castors on the legs that allow us to scoot it around on the hardwood floor without too much effort. When the lid is up, that piano can really thunder. I put an array of tiny microphones inside to catch the music without the sound of people scuffling, chairs creaking, and doors slamming. It also allows us to play it with the lid closed, which is much easier on the ears of the folks in the Big Room.
I had seen the tiny little red haired lady that plays that usually plays that piano. I knew that she was a fantastic piano player, on the grand, the slightly smaller gray baby grand, or any of the three standup pianos around the walls. I have listened to her “tickle the ivories” before, during, and after sessions, and I know that music lives large in her soul. I knew that she spoke with exceptional diction. Clipped, precise, and always grammatically correct.
What I did not know is that French is her first language. Nor did I know that she could belt out songs like a Moulin Rouge showgirl.
She calls herself Sabreina, and she made a gorgeous album with us not too long ago. [Just between you, me, and the fencepost, that album contains the best song I have ever written – “When Day Breaks.”] We later found that some of the music companies we were contracting with did not accept more than one language on an album, so we had to split in into a pair of twin albums. Both have the same songs, one has ’em in French and one has ’em in English. One pair of songs were not finished in time to get included on those albums. Here they are:
