Singled Out: Ike Reilly featuring Shane Reilly's Dance Hall Beats

Ike Reilly featuring Shane Reilly just released the new album "Blind and Surrounded" and to celebrate we asked Ike to tell us about the song "Dance Hall Beats". Here is the story:

I think I need to tell you about Ed "Silvertone" Tinley before we get into "Dance Hall Beats." I met Ed before my first album, "Salesmen And Racists," was even recorded. I had a studio around the intersection of Armitage and Elston in Chicago called Diamond City. My partner at Diamond City was the late, great Blaise Barton who did a lot of work for Alligator Records and many great Chicago artists.

Wait, I gotta tell ya this Bob Dylan story. Blaise recorded a Bob Dylan album produced by David Bromberg. He worked with Dylan and Bromberg for several weeks one summer, and he even went to a Cub's game at Wrigley Field with Bob and David. The music they recorded never came out as far as I know. Blaise told me that Dylan asked him to erase the two-inch tapes, and Bob watched him as he did.

Anyway, Blaise introduced me to Ed while Ed was working as an engineer at Chicago Trax and other studios around town. Ed worked with Liz Phair, Smashing Pumpkins, R. Kelly, and just about anybody who was making music in Chicago. I knew none of them.

Ed and I were working on some boring corporate sh*t one day when I told him I had written some songs. He didn't know I was a songwriter, and I didn't know yet that he was a really great musician. Our initial bond was over weed, Tombstone Pizzas, and drinking at Marie's Riptide Lounge. Soon though, we began tracking my songs, and Ed would fill them out any way we saw fit - drum beats, drummers, session guys - but mostly Ed played lots of instruments on my early sh*t like piano, organ, guitar, bass, and backing vocals. In a few months, we had a ton of songs recorded, and within a year I got a record deal from Universal and "Salesmen and Racists" was released. Ed toured with our band, The Ike Reilly Assassination, for years, and he's worked on everything I've done in some way since then.

Recently, Ed sent me a note that he had come across an unfinished song that we had recorded on our old MCI 16-track 2-inch machine. He sent me a rough mix of it, and I barely remembered recording it. The vocals and lyrics were incomplete, but the track was sonically mesmerizing and very thoughtful. We figured out that Dave Cottini is playing drums, I'm singing and playing acoustic guitar as a guide, and Ed is playing bass. It's hard to imagine, but he was likely hitting play on the tape machine or at least triggering the tape machine via ProTools and playing on the take. Ed overdubbed the electric guitars, but I never finished the lyrics, so that's why the song sat dormant.

I really dug what he sent me so I revisited the lyrics - I heard some sh*t I sang on the version Ed sent me, and I found some notes that I had previously written down, so I cobbled it together to what it is now. The lyrics were based on a half-assed farewell tribute that I was writing way after the death of Joe Strummer. I think the lyrics stalled because I was hesitant to be so honest with my public admiration for Joe or for anybody. Now that I'm closer to the end of the road, I don't give a f*** who knows what I love or who knows what I hate. My admiration for Joe is still intact, but final lyrics are far less specific to Joe and more of a sketch or a composite of someone searching for something in a strange or foreign place - stoned in the streets with strangers, a little chaos, and Dance Hall music blasting from torn-up speakers as the searcher never ascends from being a tourist. Yeah, I've spent A LOT of time in Jamaica - strictly as a tourist.

One more thing, I recorded strings and backing vocals in Libertyville, Illinois (where I am not a tourist). My friend, Phil Roach, played all the string parts, and my friend, Corrine Anderson, sang the choruses with me. Once the recording was completed, I do what I always do - I send it to Ed "Silvertone" Tinley, and he fixes it and mixes it. Here's to the great Ed Tinley!

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more here

Singled Out: Ike Reilly's F*** the Good Old Days

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