A few years ago Steve Vai had rejoined the Sony team which gave us the freedom to release in it’s entirety the DVD filmed at the Nokia theatre called “Stillness In Motion”. The timing was great because we were also approaching the 25th Anniversary for his most beloved album “Passion & Warfare”. Of course it was necessary to honor that album with a special release and we didn’t want to just do a simple “re-master”. Steve has so much unreleased material that exists in the vaults. Some of the tracks had been entirely finished and some had been abandoned in the early tracking stages. If you’re a big enough fan you’d have known that Steve had an entire albums worth of music that was recorded just after Flex-Able and before Passion & Warfare that never got released. The 25th Anniversary was an obvious time to unveil that lost music. We decided that we were going to compile that music onto it’s own disc and treat it as it’s own album. One of the highlights for me was when we got to the tracks “Mighty Messengers” & “The Lost Chord”. Those songs were performed in a band Steve formed called The Classified which consisted of Tommy Mars, Stu Hamm, Chris Frazier, & Sue Mathis. Those particular tracks only existed from live recordings as they had never gotten around to recording them properly. So that meant we got to bring all those musicians back into the studio and record fresh versions of those old songs. It was amazing to see Steve and the band pick up where they left off and tackle this music with the upmost care. Linked here is “Mighty Messengers” & “The Lost Chord” which on the album seamlessly flows into eachother. There’s so much more about this project but not enough time to share it all here. If any of this interests you I urge you to pick up the physical CD so that you get the full story in the booklet. Enjoy! 🙂
