Classics always bring a wave of nostalgia over myself, but what do they mean to artists? We were able to hear the inspiration and stories behind trance duo, Gabriel & Dresden's most influential tracks.
New Order – Someone Like You (Gabriel & Dresden Vocal Mix)
We'd love to tell you that we labored over the writing of “Tracking Treasure Down” for weeks and months, but the truth is that the song's lyrics were not only written in the space of 20 minutes, but all the vocals were recorded that same day.
Above & Beyond “No One on Earth” (Gabriel & Dresden Remix)
We were familiar with them because of the remix they had done for Charka “Home” in 2000 which was an instant classic and also their remix for Madonna, “What It Feels Like For a Girl” but didn't know much else about them.That night they told us about how much they loved Motorcycle “As The Rush Comes. They really wanted to remix it but we had already blown our remix budget on the Armin Van Buuren remix. What to do??, what to do!!Tony came up with the idea that we could “swap” remixes. They remix “As The Rush Comes” and in turn we would remix one of their upcoming singles. Sounds fair, we thought. They did their mix, it came out great and then we waited. Waited for the boys to give us a song to remix.
The funny thing about “As The Rush Comes” is that it so easily could never have happened.We had met the vocalist Jes Brieden a couple of months earlier at a club in LA, and really loved her voice. So much so that we invited her up to San Fran to write and record for a weekend in September of 2002. On our first day we wrote and recorded vocals for a song called “Imagination.”On our second day together we wrote another song together called “My Blue Heart”. 2 days, 2 songs. We were feeling pretty good about how things were going, so we decided to record a cover. We did Psychedelic Furs “Love My Way”.Feeling as if we kinda crushed it, we went and had a huge Middle Eastern dinner and smoked the hookah to celebrate our seemingly great studio fortunes. Feeling confident about what we accomplished, we didn't go back to the studio that night. And JES was scheduled to leave around noon the next day.The next morning we all woke up super early. Josh made the suggestion, “let's go down to the studio, maybe we can squeeze another song out?”We loaded up an instrumental track we had been working on and JES immediately got behind the Microphone. We were gonna try and write and record this song on the fly.Josh had jotted down some words he thought of a few days earlier when his friend Lisa K had gotten into a car accident.”Traveling Somewhere, could be anywhere, there's a coldness in the air, but I don't care.”Over the course of the next two hours, we wrote the rest of the song together, and recorded all of the vocal parts needed to make it. We even had enough time to get some coffee before we brought JES to the airport.
Depeche Mode – Here is the House (Gabriel & Dresden Bootleg)
For years before, Dave used to play “Here is the House”, a song from Depeche Mode's 1985 album “Black Celebration” live over other tracks while he was DJing. To him, it was one of the most under-rated Depeche Mode songs. One afternoon in July 2003, Dave was doing a little DJ jam session in the living room of the house we lived in on Corbett Ave in San Francisco. Dave started playing “Here is the House” over another song and Josh was like “Holy shit!! “Here is the House” – i love that song!!” Dave: Oh yeah?? i've been wanting to make a remix of this song for years
Josh: Well, today is' your lucky day, let's do it!! The result of that afternoon's (maybe) 6 hours of work became one of our most loved remixes ever. So much so, that we had Andain make a cover version of it for our Bloom 2-CD compilation released the following year.
Gabriel & Dresden
