A Better Place - David Cullen & Michael Manring

Equilibré an album of intimate duets featuring Michael and guitarist David Cullen and includes four new Manring originals: "Equilibré", "A Forgotten Wish", "Homestyle", and "Tie-Dyed and Wide-Eyed" as well as a re-recording of "Gizmo" from Michael's 1991 album, Drastic Measures (out of print) which David reportedly will never forgive Michael for making him learn.

"This recording was a real pleasure to make! David Cullen is an old friend who has been sort of tangentially involved with the whole Windham Hill scene for many years. I've always thought he was a fantastic musician, so when he mentioned he'd like to do a duo CD for the Solid Air record label, I was all for it.

"We each composed several tunes for the project and I even subjected David to a duo re-working of "Gizmo". It's a pretty challenging tune that I'm still trying to learn to play myself, but David smoked it!

"David booked us two days of recording time and a few shows beforehand to get us in the vibe, but since Dave lives in Pennsylvania and I live in California that didn't leave us much chance to rehearse. We traded tapes and written music in the mail, then I flew to Philadelphia the night before the first show. We blasted through the tunes the next morning and then went to play the show. That night and the rest of the shows were lots of fun and were a great warm-up for our recording sessions. That was a good thing, because the two days we booked wasn’t much time to make a record! Fortunately, Dave is a real pro and the recording was a joy.

"We did no overdubs and almost no editing or fixing, so what you hear is just the two of us playing together, having fun. The title track (pronounced "eh-kee-LEE-bray") is named after a nightclub in Sao Paolo where I sat in one night with an amazing forro band called Mafua. It was nice to do a more gentle, acoustic instrumental record again after a bunch of pretty intense rockers with Attention Deficit and Scott McGill. I thought, 'Finally, a record my Mom will like!'" Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.