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Summer 2009

What else to call this section?

After a long winter, the sun finally comes out one day and lo and behold summer is here.
Okay, so it’s never that clear-cut in Chicago, but it’s more of a psychological state.

One day, you feel like doing some things with drumbeats.
You want some things that are fast.
Some things that have a little of the bittersweet, the reflective, the introspective.
Some things with layers, and more layers, and even more layers.
Some things that are imperfect, that just… get done, and are out there, and on to something else.

But let’s not overthink.
It’s summer.

Enjoy.
Please tell me what you think.

Thanks for listening.

071809-4 (2009)

Too lazy to plug in the big mike, so it sounds like mice-violinists down a well, but I really like this one.

052709-b (2009)

I liked the keyboard.
I was messing with drum sounds.
Voila.

Daydreams of New Shoots (032209d) (2009)

Often, one is so absorbed in something that time seems to compress - the sun makes its rounds, shadows lengthen and fall away, and the day quickly grows shorter without one noticing.
This was one such day.

022109 (2009)

My titles are real catchy, right?
Sometimes, it’s better not to need to read about a piece of music.
It is what is.

I had piano.
I wanted drumbeats - but I’m no drummer, so… they are what they are.
Cut me some slack.

Soundtrack-landscape (2009)

Remember that early-80’s animated movie “The Last Unicorn?” The theme song was by America.
Oh.
Yeah.
America.

Anyway…
God knows why it was in my mind, but I woke up with an image in my head of a Middle-Earthy sorta landscape with rolling fields and unicorns and neo-Renaissance-y harpsichord in my mind’s ear, and hammered this out quickly, thinking of it as an alternative soundtrack opener for “The Last Unicorn.”

Unicorns and me.
I’m not ashamed to admit it.

100608-more-bass (2008)

Friends suggested adding more bass.
I did.

Too much?

There it is.

Blue Light, Red Sky, Thunder (2008)

Late night, a gunshot, the police outside my window… then that great rainstorm.
Still not sure exactly what the story was, but it happened while I was making music, and it changed the piece.

Got to go with the flow sometimes, grasp the moment, and not question too much (just as long as I got to match my mouth-click sounds with tambourine in there somewhere…).

violin loops (2009)

What would life be like without loops?

Listen