“Guiding Light” is a collection of song that Soulfeenix has been recording these past 4 years as side a side project to get away from his soulful deep house trademark. In this labour of love we can find Soul, pop, reggae, R&B crafted with special care, where all the instruments were performed by Soulfeenix and whose production approach is a clear tribute to the stereo mixes of the seventies and eighties. 5 of the 9 songs are covers of songs that have guided Soulfeenix spiritually and musically at some stage of his life. The rest of the songs is pure songwriting done by the man itself.

Credits :

Soulfeenix : Vocals, Guitar, Bass, Drums, Keyboards, Fender Rhodes, Programming.
Recorded, mixed and produced by Soulfeenix
Cover picture shot by Jean-Claude de Clamaje


Track Breakdown:


1. Walking on a Dream (Luke Steele, Nick Littlemore, Jonathan Sloan)
“I wanted to turn this Empire Of The Sun’s powerful anthem into a powerful 80’s track, with sharp and tight early Prince-esque rhythm guitars backed by a gated drum-machine. Playing with a time machine was the purpose of the album, in this case picking a song from 2009 and make it sound as it if it was released in 1985. Creating sonic landslides is a stylistic exercise I am really fond of as you have to take the best out of your equipment to get the sound of a certain time period”.

2. My guiding Light (Soulfeenix)
“Sometimes you walk, you work, you breathe and you think everything’s OK and then someone comes and you see the real forms of life in the Platonistic and/or Gospel sense. That’s what this song is about…Old Soul music was often blended with Gospel messages and images so I decided to build a vintage sounding southern soul tune, with hard-panned guitars and pianos…"

3. The Woman in You (Soulfeenix)
“To be honest I am not used to write real love songs especially in major chords, cos I’ve always found my slow jams attempts very cheesy, so that’s why I started this one with an mid tempo beat and I think it sounds alright, I omitted the bass during the verse, I wanted the bass to give strength only in the chorus and to contrast with the high pitched vocal parts.”

4. Dreams (Stevie Nicks)
“I remember listening to this Fleetwood Mac’s gem in my elder Brother’s room when I was 7 or 8 , I was haunted and seduced by Stevie Nicks’ voice…The album “Rumours” was my first contact with Fleetwood Mac and what a contact ! Top-notch production, high quality songwriting, brilliant arrangements…So how could I do something interesting with “Dreams” ? I started singing the song I realized that the song had a lot of soul in it, so I did a sonic landslide from 1977 to 1969…I wanted my Motown/Abbey Road song, I played the typical Motown backbeat on drums and bass, I added mellotron flute and strings, an organ, a heavily compressed upright piano, some distorted guitars with spring reverbs, everything’s hard-panned and then I could deliver vocals that I processed at a later stage with plate reverb and tape saturation. I wanted the cover to sound older than the original!”
5. My love is waiting (Gordon Banks)

“I am an unconditional Marvin Gaye’s fan, when I heard for the first time this song I had an instant crush…but I had too much respect for Marvin and for the song to cover it…then I one day I wanted to study its chord progression, I also realized how powerful the harmony was, I realised that the songwriter, Gordon Banks is a pure genius and I decided to take it to another musical territory, speeding it up, replacing its drum machine beat by live drums, I tried to respect the guitar and bass ( with some slight variations) whose parts are priceless works of art…this is my tribute to Marvin Gaye in one of my favourite song of his catalogue, my intention was, with all my respect to Marvin, to give a live-sounding feeling to the song ”

6. Ascension (Musze, Itaal Shur)
“This song is taken from Maxwell’s first album, I’ve sung it a million times live in its original format; once I was in the shower and thinking about this hypnotizing bass line I realized that the same bass melody could be backed by a reggae rhythm; being a big fan of Reggae I decided to cover the song in the Roots Reggae format…This is my first Reggae song, ever”

7. Back To Heaven (Soulfeenix)
“This song simply started with a guitar riff the I used to play for months while lying on my couch…I decided to write a song out of it…the lyrics are inspired by Gil Scott Heron’s Save the Children”

8. Cool Stuff (Soulfeenix)
“I named the song “Cool Stuff” cos I have always found the Blaxploitation movie soundtrack tunes so cool because you could hear the funk in them…I recorded all the instruments of the tracks as if musicians were jamming together in the studio.”

9. Engaño (Soulfeenix)
“I wrote the song some years ago for a short movie made by local artists. One of the producer said to me that he had just discovered a song by the Stranglers called “Golden Brown” and he wanted a song in that atmosphere…I said to him “ I know this song for more than 20 years thanks to my elder brother so you don’t have to say anything else”. So I so was excited because it was the first time I could write a song in ¾, also because I could include elements that I had not used that often like brushed sticks and upright bass. The song was for the last scene of the movie, I thought it could close perfectly my album too…”