Eric is visiting us in our Topanga hideaway for a week. On the weekend we played a conference in San Diego, last night a bunch of neighbors came over for food and music, and tonight we fleshed out a song that’s been sitting around since we were in North Carolina last spring. At this rate, we should have some good things happening by the weekend!

The Badasht Project is dedicated to the development of the arts as envisioned in the Bahá’í Writings, particularly music, which is described as ‘a ladder for the soul’. The project’s first endeavor was a series of public devotional gatherings centered around various art forms, and this CD was born from that experience. A lot of blessings have come from it in its first few months, and among them is that it’s brought me together with the perfect musical brother-in-arms.

Eric Dozier and I have known each other for awhile. We met in Atlanta in 1995, and ran into each other every few years after that, but we never had a chance to do any music together because we lived on opposite coasts. I was always blown away by his songwriting talent and his ability to motivate large groups of people to sing. Eric is like the Johnny Appleseed of Gospel choirs; they sort of spring up in his wake.

In 2005, a twist of fate landed us both on Vancouver Island. We figured there was a reason we were in that corner of the world at the same time, and eventually Eric and I started working on the songs for a devotional CD called Badasht vol. 1 – While the City Sleeps. It was partly a compilation of songs that each of us had already written, but by the end of the project we found a groove as a writing team and started collaborating on new music from the ground up.

The purpose of the Badasht CD was to present the Bahá’í Writings in a musical context unlike other projects we were aware of, and to combine our different backgrounds – musical and cultural – as an expression of the central Bahá’í principle of unity. The music itself is on the mellower side of what each of us does, as we were going for a meditative tone in general, but we couldn’t help ourselves – the Gospel and rock tendencies rear their heads at a few points, and inject a little bit of adrenaline into the proceedings.

It’s a pleasure to work with Eric, because he has a natural way of taking religious texts and making them sound fresh, relaxed and natural in a musical setting. His is a rare gift, and I’m learning a lot from Eric in that regard. One of the central purposes of music and art in history has been to illuminate the meaning and beauty of Sacred teachings, and we’ll always be looking for ways to contribute to that process in our work.

The odd song out here is the title track, ‘While the City Sleeps.’ It doesn’t quote the Writings, but instead tries to capture the moment when a burst of Divine Revelation hits the earth without anyone noticing but the most spiritually attuned. The song opens with the sound of the Persian ney, a flute used in Sufi whirling-Dervish music, and the lyric describes how every new spiritual Message is rejected when it doesn’t conform to our literal, physical interpretation of prophecy.

We’ve been playing this music at concerts more and more over the past year, and have noticed that some of the songs are becoming well-known enough by audiences for them to sing along note for note. People have contacted us from all over the world describing the different ways they use the Badasht CD in their devotional lives, and we’ll be doing more of this sort of thing in the near future – hence the ‘Vol. 1′…

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