On Eric Harper, the Album: If we don't find a way to get along, we'll go missing in the dark
If I go missing in the darkIlluminate your heart so I can find you'Cause in this forest we call lifeThe howling winds of hate and fear are growing strongerAnd I can't sing this song forever'Cause we're running out of timeIf we don't find a way to get alongWe'll go missing in the dark
The last several days while riding back and forth to work I have been listening to the self-titled 2010 album by Eric Harper . I can't believe how rich the texture of the songs on it are. I've checked out live versions of some of the songs on YouTube. Missing in the Dark is performed with great exuberance and percussion accompaniment at a Nanaimo coffee house up on Vancouver Island where Eric has been recently living.
Eric is, of course, the Baha'i musician who learned as a teenager flamenco guitar technique while living in Portugal where his parents were Baha'i pioneers. Yet his first love, as he told the guests for a house party on Vashon Island I attended last year, was metal music. He combined metal and flamenco performing on Mimosa's Two EP. I played "Layli and Majnun" off the album at the end of the last Area Teaching Comittee meeting, which was held in our home, and had Lisa and Sandy's heads bobbing. Baha'i-inspired hard rock/metal music -- now that's rather uncommon, isn't it? The album version of "Missing in the Dark" is a great example of this rather rare genre.
But that's not the only great song. "Starry Night" with Gergana Velinova starts out soft and lyrical, gets loud and rockin', then back to soft. There is an anthem-like quality to "MIssing in the Dark" but also portions of many of the other songs -- like "Say." To my ears, the album version of "Rain" is a great Killers of a song.
Eric's music has a soft side with "Even Though..." There are two versions of a song good and ready for a Baha'i marriage ceremony entitled "You Complete Me." An instrumental, "Under the Lunar Sky," with its distinctive Spanish-guitar finger technique rounds out the mix. -gw
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