CCMusic.com

• Track Listing

The arrival of any new VAN STEPHESON music is met with huge anticipation. This release is just a little different from the norm, but no less exciting or musically brilliant. This is Van Stephenson, but with a little help from his friends. As most will be aware, over the course of the last couple of years, I have been archiving Van's vast collection of unreleased songs and demos. There are more than 500, covering all styles from 70s singer/songwriter, 80s AOR and pop to 90s country... and then some. The ultimate goal is to pay tribute to Van with some form of all-inclusive box set/s. During the course of sorting the archives into categories, a certain number of tracks were found to feature vocalists other than Van. I decided that the box sets should be dedicated to just Van with his songs, so the idea came to put together a separate release that featured these songs - Van's own or co-written demos and the various vocalists used on those original sessions. Hence the title - 'Same Pen, Different Voices'. And while Van's voice may be absent from this release - his spirit and his style are all over it, with some absolute melodic classics about to be launched. This is a double disc of lost Van Stephenson tunes written with many of his regular writing partners such as Dave Innis, Sam Lorber, Robert White Johnson, Bob Farrell and Dave Robbins. But that isn't all. Lost among the hundreds of songs were a set of session tracks written with Dann Huff for the classic Giant 'Time To Burn' album. One of those songs has already been featured on the 'Van's Versions' release ('Get Over It'), but I'm excited to announce the others will all make their debut on this release, and they all feature the voice of Dann Huff himself. Three of these tracks have never been released before and I must thank Dann for his co-operation in this release and allowing the tracks to finally see the light of day. It doesn't stop there - there is a trilogy of songs co-written with Jaime Kyle (previously released), two featuring vocalist Robert White Johnson and another featuring TJ Seals, son of Dan Seals. The awesome cover art is the brainchild of Arnaud Leger.