“With Me” was written in my Queen’s Garden room in London. I was infatuated with the R&B played at Jungle—Dhar Braxton “Jump Back” was a favorite there for a bright flash.

“With Me” illustrates some of the different directions I wanted to take songwriting and Soul Parish in general. The track is a garbage can of ideas. I have spent many years haunted by it and thought it had merit—until I produced it here and realized, it’s not that interesting. In production I dissected the writing, trashed it, merged it with “Stranger Than Paradise” creating a much more interesting song than either of them individually, and then put “With Me” back together as its own track incorporating ideas I developed in the hybrid song. Weirdly, “With Me” comes out bolder (if not better), and way weirder than it started out.

It’s not a great song. It’s definitely not Soul Parish’ at its best. But it takes risk. What is a good dance track? What is a good 12” track? What is too experimental? Is a song a song if it doesn’t have a hook? There were a lot of 12” b-sides that never got radio play, or were to weird or risqué for radio, (Erotic City for instance), that were hits in the gay nightclubs.

Every time I junked “With Me” I’d have another idea for saving it, not excluding the Radio Vocal, (a surprise addition to this collection). “With Me” had a much longer, much more stripped down sister-arrangement that I long considered the “12” Club Mix” and was the version I wanted to play live. The “Radio Vocal” is not that version, but carries some of the sense of that arrangement—and mercifully, gets right to the point of the track.

In the end “With Me” might have been made a decent b-side, the longer, less-radio friendly version might only have appeared on the back of a 7” where it would stay obscure. The Radio Vocal fits much more easily into the lexicon of the Soul Parish vision of a futuristic R&B groove, which is where this chapter of Soul Parish aims to land.