My new single, ‘Echo Chamber’, officially releases on all platforms Friday, February 18th.
You can pre-save the song here – https://show.co/HVQnihA
Pre-saving a forthcoming release really helps indie artists like me have our songs exposed to a wider audience on streaming platforms like Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify and others.
I’ll be going live on Facebook and Instagram on Friday, February 18th at 7pm Pacific Time to talk about the song and the video and the long-standing musical collaboration with my pal Ron Yamauchi. Tune in at https://fb.me/e/1iYxl7dZE
I’ve created a brand new music video too and it’s up on my Youtube channel – https://youtu.be/rjmRJlDsGqs
Here’s a sneak peek!
Video production by Kele
Song written by Ron Yamauchi & Kele Fleming
Kele Fleming – Vocals, guitars
Aaron Trory – Bass
Tony Lee – Drums
Ron Yamauchi – Piano, keys, vocals
Recorded, engineered and mixed by Sheldon Zaharko of Zed Productions at The Warehouse Studio in Vancouver, Canada.
Mastered by Andrew Spindor at Railtown Mastering.
Single cover by Matt Laforest of Laforest Creative
About the song
“So long in an Echo Chamber, I’m getting into danger.”
Some say that social media is the ultimate echo chamber. It can give us the ability to connect with like-minded people while shielding ourselves from divergent viewpoints. I think we’ve seen some dangerous outcomes of living in a time when we are able to surround ourselves with only beliefs or opinions that agree with our own. When all we hear are our own voices and ideas reflected back, this can do tricky things to our sense of reality and truth, not to mention self image.
Social media has been a connector during the pandemic, but we’ve also seen it can be divisive. It’s not a pretty picture of our present and future if we’re all hurling through space isolated in our own little echo chambers, with no opportunity to consider viewpoints or beliefs or identities different from our own.
Written as one of the key songs for a new scifi musical I’m co-writing with longtime collaborator Ron Yamauchi, we weren’t initially thinking of the idea of the world of social media creating an echo chamber. Rather, we were envisioning an AI character who has been entrusted with the care of a spacehip crew while they are in hypersleep. The AI is alone with their thoughts for too long and that becomes a little unhinged. Ron dug a half-finished sketch of the song out of his songbook and we finished it and earmarked it as one of the character vehicle songs in the musical.
The song opens with the hammering of a single note like a Morse code signal. Musically, it’s a melodic plaint driven by a syncopated piano rhythm. The drums, bass and keys fall in step to create a mesmerizing tiktok or robot-like vibe that gives the lead voice lots of space to play with.
More about the musical…The musical, still being finished, is centered around a small crew on spaceship on a deep-space mission to find a suitable home for humanity, a ‘Planet B’ because Earth is becoming unlivable due to climate change. What scifi musical would be complete without a synthetic life form with artificial intelligence? ‘Echo Chamber’ will be performed by the AI character in the musical.