A 1979 song stretched to seven minutes: an Italian duo has rewritten the Earth, Wind & Fire hit as soulful house
The original was written by Maurice White, David Foster and Allee Willis.
Micky More & Andy Tee, together with Gianni Bini and the singer Angela Johnson, have released their own reading of ‘In The Stone’.
The Apple Music catalogue records it.
The single came out on 31 October 2025; the version is called 12 Inch Extended Mix and runs 7 minutes 5 seconds.
The original is an Earth, Wind & Fire song, issued as a single in 1979 on Columbia Records; it rose to No. 23 on the Billboard Hot Soul Songs chart. It was written by Maurice White, David Foster and Allee Willis.
How the original was written
Allee Willis and Maurice White described the work on the song differently.
“But ‘In the Stone’ was supposed to be the song that’s got all their philosophy in there, so I never understood it as we were writing,” Willis recalled.
“One thing that I wanted Allee and all the people who collaborated with me to understand is that non-conformity and curiosity always lead to a heightened creativity,” White wrote in his autobiography.
The song went on the album ‘I Am’; the horns were arranged by Jerry Hey and the strings by David Foster.
The credits also reveal the duo’s real names: the producers are listed as Michele Mingo, Andrea Tonici and Gianni Bini, and the three of them did the arrangement too. Lead and backing vocals are Angela Johnson’s.
It all came out on Groove Culture — the duo’s own label, through which both their own and other people’s work is released.
Micky More and Andy Tee have worked together long enough to mark a decade of the duo with a record of its own — ‘Ten Year Anniversary’ (2016). Then came ‘Remixed with Passion’ (2017), ‘In Our Groove’ (2022) and ‘The Music of Your Mind’ (2024).
Their sound is soulful house with live horns and piano, built to work both in a club and on the radio.
The 1979 original reached number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 39 in New Zealand. The Italian version makes no claim on the charts: seven minutes in a twelve-inch mix is made for the person putting on the record, not the one switching on the radio.
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