Higher Ground (lost-&-found home recording #14)
Higher Ground was one of a batch intended to be 2011’s cursed & resurrected release called Our Blood. A first version of the song was demoed around 2009, then lost when my well-traveled Roland 2480 recorder rightly crashed. After a repair, I started over with a second attempt that included pedal steel by Buddy Cage on a house call session while finishing the other Our Blood tracks. But, not long after, a laptop with the mixes was lost in a burglary.
By the time I turned in the reconstructed roughs to be mixed for the album, I left off Higher Ground due to some flighty discontent — or maybe it just aged out from the more recent ones, collected by an ingrown thread — not sure.
I don’t have a mix of it, just a track sheet.
A few years ago, I did an end-times purge of work that I’d done before the great crash, none of which was technically compatible with the now-repaired 2480 anymore. I probably, unintentionally, just threw that second steel session away. At some foggy point, there was also a third stab recorded with a full band in NYC for a friend’s project. I don’t know if it ever surfaced. This final, fourth version of Higher Ground was made in May 2013 with nowhere to go. I found it noted in a binder of backup discs, buried with other abandoned intentions.
