Jefferson Starship Cover Jefferson Airplane

Jefferson Starship have covered a Jefferson Airplane song on their new album.

‘Embryonic Journey’ is an instrumental originally recorded in 1966 for the Jefferson Airplane’s biggest album ‘Surrealistic Pillow’.

The song was written in 1962 by Airplane lead guitarist at the time Jorma Kaukonen.

“One period in time while Paul (Kantner) was still around, for a whole tour we would play the entire ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ album, all the songs on it. That song was one of them,” Jefferson Starship’s David Freiberg tells Noise11.com. “Paul said ‘Jude (Gold) do you think you can play that’ and Jude said ‘do you want me to play it like the album and get out an acoustic guitar’ and Paul said ‘no, play it like you’d play it’. That actually is a live performance recorded last year. It wasn’t artificially made to sound like a live performance. It actually is”.

Another link with the past is ‘Don’t Be Sad Anymore’, a song written for the late Marty Balin’s solo album ‘Blue Highway’ with current Jefferson Starship keyboard player Chris Smith.

“Marty was playing with Paul’s band at that point. He was making an album and asked Chris to help produce it so he flew out to LA,” David says. “They were in the studio and they played this instrumental that Chris had written. Marty immediately started writing down words and it was on Marty’s album that came out in 2010. When we were about to make this album somebody posted that song. Chris and Cathy heard it and said it would be great to put on this album. They asked if I could sing it. I said I’d love to. Rather than do it like it was done then with a regular jazz band it was Cathy’s idea to do it with just piano and vocal, just like Tony Bennet”.