This page contains the English translation of the booklet corresponding to the Love of my Life album.
1. CRUISE CONTROL – Harry Sacksioni (Guitar: Sacksioni Martin)
Since I don’t always need to have an instrument with me to compose, it sometimes happens that a new composition comes to life in my car late at night while I’m driving home after a performance. This was also the case with this composition.I had just finished a wonderful show and got into the car full of adrenaline. There wasn’t much traffic on the road at that time, and probably due to the adrenaline, I suddenly felt the urge to create a new song. I turned on the cruise control, put my legs up on the other seat, and with my hands loosely on the steering wheel and my left shoulder leaning against the left door, I apparently ‘hung’ just relaxed enough to let the magic do its work. By the time I got home, the song was nearly finished, and I already knew the title: Cruise Control!
2. LOVE OF MY LIFE – Harry Sacksioni (Guitar: Martin OM)
Besides my love for my immediate family and a few friends, I have one true great ‘love of my life.’ She is pure and an undeniable product of nature, with whom I spend nearly every day of my life and to whom I unconditionally entrust my feelings. I can read and write with her, and I know her inside and out, but she still teaches me something new every day. At times she’s stubborn and resistant, but more often than not, she’s willing and cooperative. I always want her, and she wants me. I can’t walk past her without touching her. She drives my imagination wild. Without her, I might have become a footballer or a criminal. Who knows? But one thing I do know: my guitar is without any doubt the love of my life!
3. ODE AAN JJ CALE – Harry Sacksioni (Guitar: Fender Stratocaster)
The day American singer/guitarist JJ Cale died (July 26, 2013), I was on holiday in Italy. When I’m on holiday, I don’t read newspapers and mostly ignore my phone. But that afternoon, I was called by a journalist from the Volkskrant who apparently knew about my love for JJ Cale’s music. The journalist wanted to write an obituary for the next morning’s edition and asked me if I had any anecdotes about Cale that he could include in his article. I did. It was a pleasant conversation, partly due to the anecdotes, and it was only after we hung up that it really sank in that this sincere singer/guitarist had passed away. I immediately grabbed my guitar and wrote this Ode to JJ Cale. But because of the song’s universal nature, I also see it as an ode to all the musicians who died too soon from the ‘Twenty-seven list.’
4. CUBAN NIGHTS – Harry Sacksioni (Guitar: Sacksioni Martin)
Our daughter Jessa is a flight attendant, and in that capacity she once invited me to join her on a flight to Cuba. She was wildly enthusiastic about the country, particularly the evening and night culture, with very swinging music and lots of dancing. I could already imagine myself enjoying those Cuban rhythms in the inviting, sultry evening temperature! But… I never went! The airline suddenly decided to stop flying to Cuba. So, I had no choice but to use my imagination to turn those never-experienced Cuban night hours into music.
5. HET STOND OP INTERNET – Harry Sacksioni (Guitar: Taylor 914 CE)
I wrote this piece out of irony. It came about because since the COVID period in the Netherlands, we suddenly gained about 80,000 extra scientists on social media. Personally, I find it a bit laughable because many people who distrust Science don’t seem to realize that the algorithm will always confirm the viewpoint you’re looking for. Anyone can post their knowledge on the internet, whether it’s accurate or not… so the more answers you search for online about a particular subject, the more you are ‘fed’ and thus confirmed… You’ve created your own bubble. In discussions about a ‘scientific’ topic, the most common sentence became: ‘It was on the internet…!’
6. IN THE MOOD W. Manone, A. Razaf, J. Garland – Arr.: Harry Sacksioni (Guitar: Taylor 914 CE)
The first music I ever heard in my life – as a baby, that is – must have sounded incredibly pleasant to my ears because… I became a musician, and it can’t be a coincidence that the foundation was laid back then! I thought it would be a nice idea to honor that moment with a guitar arrangement of one of those songs! I asked my father if he remembered which music was played when I had just been born. Phew! It turned out to be an orchestral piece: In The Mood by the Glenn Miller Orchestra! Well… to play an entire orchestral piece, with all those different parts, on one guitar… ‘That will never work,’ I immediately thought. But something in my character found it a challenge to start anyway. And the challenge became even greater when I decided to play all the improvisations that occur in that song while the accompanying parts continue underneath. And then the title is In The Mood…
7. SUNNY SIDE UP – Harry Sacksioni (Guitar: Sacksioni Martin)
In these times of rather negative changes worldwide, which have a considerable impact on me and, clearly, on the people around me, I felt the need to write a piece with a positive and optimistic character as a counterbalance. When it was finished, I was absolutely happy with it, but I didn’t yet have a title. One morning during breakfast in a hotel, I heard someone order a fried egg, and he added: ‘Sunny side up, please.’ And I thought: wow, you can apply this expression to people too! Especially in these times! And so, I immediately had the title for my song.
8. SEPTEMBER HEAT WAVE – Harry Sacksioni (Guitar: Sacksioni Martin en Gibson Les Paul)
That the climate is changing is a fact. And we must do everything we can to try to temper it. One of the things that will now occur more frequently as a result is a heat wave in months where this isn’t normally the case in the Netherlands. For example, in late September 2023, we unexpectedly had a seven-day heat wave. Since this (so far) is unusual, I wrote this piece: September Heat Wave.
9. THE BUSY BOYS (OF POWERPOINT PARADISE) – Harry Sacksioni (Guitar: Taylor 914 CE)
In the large offices on the ‘Zuidas’ in Amsterdam, also jokingly called the ‘Golden Kilometer’ or ‘PowerPoint Paradise,’ almost exclusively young people work, whose highest goal is: making lots of money. Now, I have nothing against making money, but setting that as the highest goal feels like a form of poverty to me. I had cartoonish images of all those busy money makers in mind when I wrote Busy Boys. A song with a wink…
10. FUNKY RHINO – Harry Sacksioni (Guitar: Sacksioni Martin)
This piece came about in a rather special way. Our daughter Jessa is now a flight attendant, and so it happens that she sometimes invites me to a place she thinks I might really like. That’s how we ended up in South Africa, where we visited a beautiful wildlife park the very next day. There we saw the most beautiful and pure wild animals. Suddenly, we found ourselves less than ten meters away from a rhinoceros family, where the mother got into a fight with another rather bossy rhino. That ‘battle’ sometimes looked like a funky dance. That image became the foundation for this song!
11. EMPTY NEST – Harry Sacksioni (Guitar: Sacksioni Martin)
Although I travel a lot for my performances, I am still very much a ‘family man.’ We have two children, and from the moment they were born, I’ve enjoyed their presence and watching them grow up. Despite my busy schedules each year, I managed to experience all the important moments in their lives with them. I was a swimming dad, gym dad, soccer coach, school reader, treasure hunt planner, and creator of exciting trails during birthdays, and much more. I enjoyed all of it immensely. And then, suddenly, a moment came that I hadn’t expected to affect me so much: the oldest of the two left home at seventeen to do an internship in… South Africa for half a year. That’s when I was hit by something that is well-known in psychology: the Empty Nest Syndrome. Of course, I didn’t let our daughter know, but I struggled deeply with the fact that the years of ‘being together’ would never come back. At that moment, I had to write this piece…
12. NOMAD SAPIENS – Harry Sacksioni (Guitar: Martin OM)
Over the past few years, I’ve been working on a major musical project called TIMELINE. (It hasn’t been performed live yet.) It’s a one-and-a-half-hour musical event that, through significant global events that have symbolically caused a ‘ripple in time’ (the assassination of Kennedy, the moon landing, Chernobyl, etc.), creates a vivid portrait of the 21st century. In the first part of TIMELINE, I musically translated the development of the Earth, from the Big Bang to the first human: Homo Sapiens. This piece, Nomad Sapiens, I wrote for TIMELINE and is my musical translation of the first, wandering, and searching human.
13. WILDFIRE (LOPEND VUUR) – Harry Sacksioni (Guitar: Gretsch 6119 – “The stolen one”)
Although I had already recorded this song on CD before, played on acoustic guitar, it also seemed very fitting to perform it on electric guitar. Especially on the Gretsch guitar that was stolen from me 50 years ago. Mysteriously, I recently got that guitar back, and after a thorough overhaul, it still has an incredible sound! For this version, I invited a few musical friends to give the song even more depth.
14. INNER WORLDS – Harry Sacksioni (Guitar: Sacksioni Martin)
I have always been fascinated by the power of our inner world. For example, when one of our children sat quietly staring off into the distance, you could see that worlds of fantasies were unfolding in that sweet little head. And even closer to home for me: composing is also an expression of that inner world. This song is a result of that. I was reflecting on an event, with my guitar in my lap, and before I knew it, this ode to imagination came to life.