MARTY BALIN: Music & Interviews

• MP3 play whole song, hi-fi (broadband)

MERCY OF THE MOON:
1 Hearts
2.Today
3.With Your Love
4.Better Generation
5.Do It For Love
6.Caroline    
7.Mercy of the Moon 
8.Count On Me
9.Solidarity
10.Miracles
11.Comin’ Back To Me
12.It’s No Secret 
13.Atlanta Lady
14.What Love Is
15.Summer Of Love
16.Runaway
17.Volunteers
18.All We Really Need

Compilation Produced by: Marty Balin & Joe Vertino 
Executive Producer: Joe Buchwald

A man of mystery they call him……he kinda likes it that way…mystery notwithstanding, I like to count myself one of his oldest fans and admirers…Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, and all of his solo work…..
i have vivid memories of standing in front of the stage at The Fillmore East (standing right in front of HIM, mind you), and just closing my eyes and letting THAT VOICE transport me to all manner of other worlds…..
consciousness expanding as they called it in the day…….i so badly wanted a life like his…so when I actually got a call to play keyboards for the “new” version of Jefferson Starship I thought I’d died and gone straight to rock
and roll heaven….. to be blessed with a chance to play songs that Marty has written like “Today”, “Comin Back To Me”, “Plastic Fantastic Lover”,
“Volunteers”….. wow…..
What can I say about these timeless classics that they don’t already say themselves…..you listen to “Miracles” and as Marty would say, “You find the god within”……you listen to “Hearts” and THAT VOICE…..….it lifts you
out of your despair, free of your melancholy, and fills you with such joy of emotion, it’s as if Jesse Barish wrote the song with the full knowledge that “The Voice” would bring it to the world to hear and to love…..
and if launching the psychedelic music movement of the sixties wasn’t enough, he then became the soundtrack of how our lives morphed on through the hedonistic seventies with even more classics of the times;
“Count On Me”, “Runaway”, ”Caroline”, and “With Your Love”…..i guess,
the bottom line for me is that what you hold in your hands here, what you’re popping into your CD player, or walkman, or i-Pod, is one of the truly great collections of one man’s musical statements…..
there are songs as varied and widely divergent as “Solidarity” is from “Summer Of Love”, or “It’s No Secret” is from “Do It For Love”…
every phase of his unbelievable career is represented here and the choice of the material by his friend and producer Joe Vertino is first class throughout…..but for me, it always comes back to THAT VOICE….. if you ask Marty,
he’ll just shrug and say “It’s no big thing…..I just love to sing man”…..but you and I know better….. there’s nobody that holds a candle to Marty Balin…..
he’s simply one of a kind.

Barry Flast – Musician, barryflast.com and Host, artistarchives.net