Download the full song – click here

Ahh Wild Spirit Lodge – wildspiritlodge.co.za/ – Home to all – from the weary traveller, to groups of rastas, to Azlan the cat – home to the fire and the spirit and upside down umbrellas.

On the 17th of August we owners, we earth angels, we workers, we community, we friends, we travellers and backpackers, sat down and jumped around to create the Wild Spirit song.

Stories and experiences were shared about the lodge and lyrics were written inspired by these stories. What quickly emerged was that this was a place of intense personal transformation and and also of giving. In my opinion this could be equated to the old sacred idea of personal transformation through service. The chorus so poignant and so true to the spirit of the place: “I serve the world – what an amazing place”.

We then proceeded to create human sounds inspired by our lyrics. This started with stomping our feet together, lying down to create tones, and proceeded to improvising vocal parts in a circle. Then we sang the chorus! Everything was recorded.

From here it was about adding the verses. Verse 1 was spoken word recorded by a former England Shakespeare Company member and by Jenny Lawrence the owner/visionary of the lodge. Verse two – sang by a group of drunken backpackers at 1am and verse 3 by Simon (me) and Jay.

Then it was instruments – piano, guitar (Jared Boetha) and of course opera singing (Margy) and some electronic beats. A bassline was added by Dustin Bookatz (my ex-bandmate) who sent it all the way from NYC and drums were added when I arrived in Berlin by my housemate there. So yeah a truly collaborative effort.

All these sounds were mixed together to form the final song.

The video too has been an international collaboration of sorts ! haha – we had to get the massive gigabytes of video files out of Wild Spirit to the USA to Taylor Ames who was were to complete the editing of the video – The awesome staff at wild spirit crossed every hurdle including post office strikes, lack of technology to export the files and more to get her the files – Nice one guys! Once Taylor (ex Wild Spirit staff member who since moved back home to the United States) finally received the files in the U.S. she did an amazing job at editing the video.

A big thank you to everyone who took part in this collaboration. Bask in this song and video in the same way that every traveller does Wild Spirit.