This is already up on the mp3 of the week page, but it deserves to be repeated here. Here is what Hari has to say about how the song, “higher than I thought” came about:

sometime in december 2003, in that limbo that is the week after xmas but before new years, jason hacker, dev dutt, kahlen freeman, johnny baldaray, and myself
holed ourselves up in the basement of dev’s house. dev laid down the beats after johnny suggested he play an indianesque beat. johnny recorded the guitar parts. we were having difficulty about exactly what the song should be about when hacker suggested mountain
climbing. i thought that was brilliant and ran with the idea. i’d always been keen on hackers approach to writing lyrics. i wrote the chorus and johnny and i recorded the vocals for it. i took the song home with the drums and guitar parts recorded. sat up late one night and wrote the rest of the lyrics. i recorded the keyboards, percussion, and vocals over the next week. while mixing down the song, my dad walked by and heard the verse riff and asked me to loop it for him, which
i did. he then started singing a song he had been trying to interpret for a while. its in sanskrit and i believe its a ganapathy bhajan (ganapathy is the name we call ganesh in india’s dirty south…hes the guy with the elephant head for all you icon freaks). i was totally blown away with how much the song fit and recorded a whole version of the song with my dad singing (my mom doing the backup vocals on the last line of every stanza). i then took one line and sampled it into “higher than i thought”. thats pretty much it. just goes to show the possibilities of group effort. if anyones interested in hearing the mix with just my parents singing let me know, altho it gets pretty repetitive if you dont understand sanskrit….but im sure you all do anyway. after all this is america.

Thanks Hari for letting me post the song, for your always entertaining sarcasm, and for your utter lack of Capitalization. Quick! Go to the mp3 of the week page to download the song and check out the lyrics! You can also check out Hari’s site here.