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Executive producer and songwriter Allen Ling is the seventh generation descendent of Lin Zexu, a historical hero in China (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Zexu), thus he named his first Album Gen-7 short for Generation Seven. A body of music compositons from 1984 to 1988 was exhumed in 2009 after encouragement from Bryan "Brain" Mantia, one of the premier drummers in contemporary music.
We present to you eleven tracks after hundreds of hours of work by the production & performance team of Brain (drums, production), Melissa Reese (Lead and background vocals, production and keyboards), Patrick O'Connor (guitar and male vocals on Breakthrough) Bryan Kehoe (lead vocals on Mystery), and Victor Little (electric bass), and five-time Grammy nominated engineer & producer Cookie Marenco. Mandarin Lyric translations by Tony K. Ling. Allen Ling as lead and background male vocals on Chemistry, Miracle Man and Closer.
Allen dedicates Gen-7 to Brain's father, who passed away suddenly as production began, and to his own father, who actually thought the music here was "pretty good, but not my kind of music" (although "Closer" met with his full approval). My father eventually helped coach Melissa with the Mandarin translations of I'm Free and The Way It Was which he labored over without complaining too bitterly.
