Johnette Napolitano – Riding the Moon (feat. Benjamin Woods & Jesus Montoya)

Johnette Napolitano

"Riding The Moon"

A very special collaboration between artists living in different hemispheres: Mexican-born animator Gerardo Ceasar aka Kemelyn, a resident of Auckland, New Zealand, and Concrete Blonde's American founder and face Johnette Napolitano, resident of Joshua Tree, a small community in the California Mojave Desert. How did this happen?

"Riding The Moon" was actually recorded a long time ago" says Napolitano, "but coming and going on and off the road year in and year out, a lot of things get put aside. I had some amazing musicians on the track, Benjamin Woods, who appreciates flamenco/metal fusion as much as I do –  we may be the only ones – and Jesus Montoya who is originally from Seville in Spain and I like to call the Gypsy Godfather. He's an amazing Flamenco singer and quite famous, I've been a fan of his for decades."

"Kemelyn is a big Concrete Blonde fan, and had asked me to do a voiceover for an animated short film of his, 'Lilit', a little gem of a film touching on child abuse. It took me forever during the summer in the desert, because I could only record without any noisy fans going which meant I only had about 2 hours before sunrise to work. He was incredibly patient."

"I loved his work, and it hit me I should have animation for this, which inspired me to finish it. The first thing I ever drew when I was a kid was something called a waterbear – something I didn't know really existed (tardegrades). Kemelyn was really inspired by the idea. Since we started collaborating on the video I lost my brother and then another almost exactly a year to the day later. I love the idea of the water bear – the tardegrade – just going on forever, sleeping through a few lifetimes, waking up 10 or 1000 years from now. When I saw the final animation, I cried."

 "What made me crazy for a long time was that the vocal is the 'scratch' vocal, that is, the words weren't finished and I was marking the arrangement. Something about that vocal was impossible to get back, and although I did go back and try to re-sing it I just couldn't capture that feeling I got from the scratch, so we kept it. Still makes me crazy but I seem to be the only one who cares."

"There's something about this song that deserved perfection, or as close as I could get, and it took years." 

"I've been to Australia several times, we (Concrete Blonde) got our first Gold Record down there but I've never been to New Zealand. New music, new people, new places."

www.johnettenapolitano.net