About 18 months ago, I met this kid, Des. He's got an amazing gift for playing piano. Watching him perform is like watching God sit at the piano... It's almost like Des isn't even there... just music direct from the Divine.
I was looking for an arranger. For this song, in particular. For a few years - ever since I'd heard Michael Buble's version of "Feelin' Good" - I'd wanted to take "Dream On" and do it in a similar style. The song is so timeless. It speaks generation after generation, and has always been a powerful song - one of Aerosmith's classics.
But not everyone likes the screaming guitars of rock music, so there are a lot of people that have never heard the depth of these lyrics. To me, that's one of the powerful pieces of popular music - the story of the lyrics. This was actually the first song that got me thinking about a style of music that is no seeing a larger audience and a broader range of artists - like Buble', Postmodern Jukebox, and more.
We worked back and forth for several months before we got an arrangement that worked. It's been about a year since we finished it, and it remained unperformed. Written for a full instrumental ensemble, we simply didn't have an ensemble to perform it.
I couldn't stand not letting the world hear it. So I asked Des back into the studio, and he condensed the entire song to a single sticky note, and played the entire piece in two takes.
Yes. Two. He's that good.
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