Heavens! by CHEER-ACCIDENT

Included on our debut album, "Sever Roots, Tree Dies" (released in 1988) was an anomalous little number entitled, "Heaven." Even though it stuck out like a sore thumb on that "primarily prog" release, it received very little attention at the time. Given that it truly is a one-of-a-kind song in our catalog, it has been a pleasure whenever it's reared its head in our live performances over the years; and so seldom are these instances that they can easily be enumerated here: We played it in its nascent (and instrumental) form at our second show ever, in 1988, at a fancy little venue in Chicago, called "Limelight."Jef Bek stepped in on drums (and killed it) on 8/26/92, at Metro in Chicago, where Thymme sang it live for the first time; and then we played it at Empty Bottle, on 4/26/97, with Pat Samson on drums; and, finally, fast-forwarding more than a decade and a half later, we whipped it out at Mayne Stage, on 6/22/13, with Sacha Mullin handling the vocals. And that's it! Suddenly, in 2023, we began to play the song with some frequency. An entity known as "DroneLayer" began to inhabit the song's ghostly vocals, and the band (with a few more members than can be heard on the original studio version) turned every rendition into an adventure (making good use of the "free" moments in the song).

As we rehearsed for a show on 5/2/24 at Robert's West Side (in Forest Park, a nearby Chicago suburb), it was striking how each performance of the song took on a life of its own. Via five and a half iterations of the tune (recorded dirtily at practices in the CheerAx Basement), we bring you this Bandcamp-exclusive: Heavens!

Born during the first few seconds of 1981; many decades later: still here.

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