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Lea came to me from San Francisco, California and her vision was to record a Country CD that was a cross between contemporary country music, but would also have elements reminiscent of her roots which were Southern Soul Music. She also loved a lot of different styles of music so we tried to incorporate everything from Pop to Rock to Country all in the same album.

This was recorded here at Palette Studio in Nashville with musicians like Troy Klontz on Steel Guitar, Steve Stokes on Fiddle, Jay Verne on piano and Armond Morales, former bass vocalist for the Gospel Group The Imperials.

There are a lot of songs on this CD that were written while my mother was fighting her two and half year battle with stage 4 cancer. At that time in my life, I was very saturated with thoughts of our mortality, or about passing on, or about crossing over to the “other side”. “The First and Last Breath of You” and “I Don’t Want To Dance Without You” explored those subjects.

Lea came to me with an idea and a vision. We started out with a blank slate and ended up co-writing 7 songs together and Produced her Indie CD, “Lea Sweet – The Black County Queen”. 

The song “The First & Last Breath Of You” was inspired by Hellmut Wolf, who is a very good friend of mine from Australia. We were talking on SKYPE one evening and Hellmut told me the story below. It is so inspirational that I felt I wanted to include this in his own words.

Note from Hellmut Wolf:
“The First & Last Breath Of You”

This song has a personal story, in that I went to Hawaii 8 years ago to be with my dear friend Frank Natale while he was dying. He had been on dialysis for such a long time, he told me he had enough. Due to his terrible quality of life and no hope for getting better, he strategically and without fear, planned on stopping the dialysis so he could die on the summer solstice, 21st of June after 6 PM. I flew over to be with him, and we spent 7 days together with about 10 of his other closest friends and loved ones, while he grew weaker and weaker. He finally passed on as planned on June 21 at 9 PM.

I was holding him when he took his last three breaths and I talked to him while he was going out. At one point, I felt his soul struggling to let go, so I took my flute and played for his spirit to make the transition easier. There’s much more to this story, but this gives you the general idea of what inspired our song.

I sent the long version of this story to Jeff Silverman, a friend of mine who is a world-class producer in Nashville, Tennessee. At that time, he was Producing and co-writing many of the songs on the new Lea Sweet CD. Almost immediately after Jeff showed Lea the story, they asked me if they could write a song from my story and “The First and Last Breath of You” is the result.

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“Her voice is raw and powerful!
A combination of Tina Turner, Gladys Knight and Aretha Franklin. Her music is original – outside the box!”
Scott Hugger
Promoter – Nashville, Tennessee