Happy New Year

Here's a note of thanks for the year just past. Thanks for a son who is insatiably curious and who has a fantastic sense of humor. Thanks for a partner who also has a fantastic sense of humor, and is a polar opposite of me (and is thus a marvelous balancing force). Thanks for the elegant and soul-filling experience of recording "Two Hands" this past spring. Thanks for the energy to do the recording, and the fathering, and all the little chores that are a part of this life. Thanks for the support of fans, who allow me to make a living at what I love. Thanks for all the teachers and caregivers in my son's life.

While the year has presented many challenges, it was filled with much light, and I am grateful for it.

May we all be blessed with a good year to come.
Love, Gunnar.

My Romantic Tendencies

I have always been a closet romantic. I enjoy the sentimental side of things.

As a pre-teen, listening to my little panasonic transistor radio every night late into the night, it was almost all love songs, and the music meant everything to me. (Not the love-song lyrics necessarily - I remembering recoiling in 10-year-old horror at the saccharine "La La La La La Means I Love you " by the DelFonics. But most love songs I blithely took in).

My teen years were simmered in Zappa, who sneered at love songs. I learned to sneer, too. I vowed never to write a sappy love song. I laughed at love songs, ha-ha!

Sure enough, in my writing for The Bobs, I kept love at arms length. Well, more than arm's length. And even when I thought I might try my hand at writing something romantic, it just didn't work for me. I was more comfortable being funny. Yet, I still wanted to write beautiful music. Even when the lyrics avoided romanticism, the music to my songs tended to be consonant, not acidic.

When I write for the theatre or for film, where one writes for a character or a situation, I am able to explore my romantic tendencies.

For I am a romantic. I love beauty for its own sake. In the past I loved music and art that was acrobatic and virtuosic and acerbic and anti-sentimental, but now I crave music and art that tries for beauty. I still like acerbic. I don't like grossly sentimental things. I'm bored by virtuosity. But I love good music. Honest music, I like to call it.

Two Hands? It's my first time giving in fully to my romantic side. It's not written for a play or a character or a commission - it's written to please myself. And St. Cecilia. And anyone who cares to listen in.

The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World LIVES!

It's been a few years since The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World was produced. The legal problems which held it back were recently lifted, and an exciting developmental reading is slated for early December at Playwrights Horizons in NYC. I and my collaborators (Joy Gregory, playwright, John Langs, Director) met up in LA recently to look over our acclaimed musical. We came to it with fresh eyes and ears, and while we found many things to improve upon, the overall feeling was of exhilaration at having created such a fine piece of theatre. It's really good (he said with all humility). I'm currently spinning out new music for the reading. While the reading is not big enough to open up to the public, I can tell you that it sports a fantastic cast, including Tony Award Nominee Peter Friedman as Austin, Jamey Hood, Hedy Burress and Sarah Hays returning as the sisters, and broadway veterans Matt Doyle, Kevin Cahoun, Steve Routman and Anastasia Barzee filling out the cast. Returning as music director is the marvelous Aaron Gandy, leading a rocking band. This is, we hope, the first step towards a long run (Off-Broadway, anyone?)!

Recording Bandon at Skywalker (video)

Here's another video taken from the recording session for "Two Hands". It's not the take that is on the CD (that take was not caught on camera). If you compare them you can hear the subtle and not-so-subtle differences in performance. This one has some nice moment (but the one on the CD is deeper and better).

This piece, "Bandon", is particularly poignant for me. In the summer of 1964, when I was nearly 8 years old, I took a two-week trip to visit my great aunt and uncle on their cranberry farm in Bandon, Oregon. All by myself (along with 18 or so passengers, and a very nice stewardess who had very red nails and gave me a pilot's wing pin), I flew up on a DC3 or DC8 or some such old plane. The visit was much more playful than the music suggests, yet this is the music of the memory: Fishing for trout with a spool of thread and a bent pin; the swimming hole with the zip line running from the cliff to the beach; driving a tractor with my uncle; arguments over Elvis vs. Beatles with the local tomboy (in her room lined with posters of the King); picking blueberries; and struggling to sit still while my Aunt Gunny (Gunhilde) painted a watercolor portrait of me. That portrait still hangs on the wall of my parents' house. It's titled "A Poor Attempt at the Beatle - 1964". I must have been a non-stop Beatlemaniac that summer. When they asked if I'd like a souvenir to bring home from the trip (they were probably thinking of one of the locally made toy models of fishing boats) I pulled them to the record shop, where they bought me "Meet the Beatles" - in Stereo! My smile couldn't have been bigger. Their puzzlement couldn't have been deeper (I recall they played nothing but soupy Henry Mancini in their house). Aside from the Beatles, my visit with them was one of the highlights of my elementary school years.

Our Amazing Brains (aka My Sony Tape Deck)

When I was 15, a friend and I worked most of the summer painting my family's house. With the money I earned I bought a reel to reel tape recorder. It was one of my proudest and most useful possessions. Not only could I record my nascent songs, and experiment with sound-on-sound and varying the speeds (the wow when you played something back at 1 7/8 ips was REALLY cool), but at 3 3/4, I could put 2 entire LP's on one 'side' of the tape. 4 LP's on one 7 inch reel! it was an early form of piracy, before piracy was even an issue. But I was a poor teenager, LP's were expensive, and I could borrow records from my friends, tape them, and expand my musical library, while having to live with a modicum of tape hiss.

Here's the really cool part - I had always gone to sleep while listening to LP's. But you only got 20-25 minutes of music that way. But put a tape on, and you got 4 times that amount of music. And the music went deep into my brain, a kind of sleep teaching if you will. And even though my piracy was relatively cheap, tape still cost money, and my listening library was still very small (by today's standards). I listened to the music I had over and over and over.

I didn't realize how deeply this music was in my brain until recently, when I treated myself to a couple of recordings that I'd had on reel-to-reel, but hadn't heard since (the tape deck fell apart from constant use by the time I left for college).

One of the albums, Tower of Power's "East Bay Grease", I got a couple months ago. It was SO great to hear it again. It's a flawed record, but there's great stuff in it, too. I was a devoted fan of them when they first appeared on the scene, they gave a great live show, and I devoured their record when it came out. I've listened to it a few times over the past couple months. And then, while gardening in the back yard a few weeks back, I started humming the sax solo from "Back on the Streets Again". And I kept going. And I realized, I know every squeak and honk of that solo, and all the horns hits behind it. It's all in my brain, every moment of it! That shocked me.

And now, just the other day, I treated myself to "The Bill Evans Album", another recording I used to go to bed to night after night. I downloaded it, heard the first notes, and was instantly transported to my 16 year old self, the joy, excitement, and comfort of this music. I LOVE this album. And as it played on my computer, I realized I know every note of every solo. Especially the bass solos, I love humming Eddie Gomez's lines. But I know every stab and comp of Bill's too. This music is deep inside me. I thought I'd forgotten it. But hearing it just once brings it all back instantly. Aren't our brains amazing?

All in Three Quarter Time

Here's something you might not have noticed: All the music on "Two Hands" is in 3/4 time.

I didn't really plan it that way. I did have it in my mind to someday do a follow up to "Spinning World: 13 Ways of Looking at a Waltz ", and so my sketchbooks of ideas did have a lot of 3/4 time pieces. But for "Two Hands" I did not want to be constrained in any way, so I wrote and rehearsed and even recorded some pieces in other time signatures. But none of those pieces fit on the final album. They stood out awkwardly, interrupted the flow of the CD. And some of them are really really good compositions (they will someday see the light).

Even though the music is all in 3/4, "Two Hands" does not feel whirly, or light-headed. Very few of the pieces are played in strict tempo, and those that are ("Oak Sky" for example), are more moody and insistent than danceable. This is not a CD about dancing. it's a CD of mood and emotion - in any way or form. It just happens to be in 3/4 time.

Desert Rocks and Gunnar - the Connection?

Rob Jenkins - master of the lens.

None of us involved in putting "Two Hands" together can explain why Rob's photo (of the mysterious rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley) seemed the perfect compliment to my solo piano music. It just was. We considered lots of other cover ideas, but none was as soulful and complete.

Rob is a charming and amazing guy (you should see the complex shadow-box creations he's made for his wife!), and when he takes a camera into his hands, it dances and finds the moments that beg to be recorded. His nature photography (like on the cover of "Two Hands") is elegant and fresh. His portraiture, especially of kids, is remarkable for its honesty and simplicity and, again, elegance. I know of no other photographer who is so adept at revealing the complex emotions of those fleeting glances that children have. His sense of color is startling, and he frames everything with a true artist's eye. Check out the work on his site RobJenkinsPhotography.com. He's in NYC.

Marie Antoinette & Gunnar - The connection?

I've known Kent Sparling, the producer of "Two Hands", since he was a young man. I've known his music since he was a teenager.

Back in the early 80's I had a few piano students, and one of them was a wonderful teenage girl. She gave me a tape of her boyfriend's band, Riis Spargo. Yeah, okay, your boyfriend's band, sure, I'll listen...

But it was GOOD. I played that little cassette over and over.

Years later, I hooked up with her boyfriend - Kent Sparling. He was in a monoprint class that my wife was taking (Yes, he's one of those multi-talented types). We became friends. I played keyboards sometimes in his follow-up band, Eyeland. Kent is a wonderful carpenter/electrician, and together with a craftsman pal of his helped us build the studio where I've done much of my work over the past decade.

But besides being a visual artist and a songwriter and experimental musician and electrician and craftsperson, Kent had another dream - to work at George Lucas' Skywalker Sound. To get there, he moved to Vancouver, BC, where he apprenticed in the sound for film world. His experiences there filled out his resume, and he returned to the bay area and knocked on the door at Skywalker, and they hired him.

Nowadays, besides being a visual artist/experimental musician/etc., he's also a highly respected and sought-after mixer for films. He's done many of the the foreign language versions of Star Wars, he helped sink the Titanic, he's mixed a ton of films including some knockout ones you've seen and heard, like "Lost in Translation", "Adaptation" and "The Virgin Suicides" and, yes, "Marie Antoinette". And then, he makes his own wonderful, ethereal/trippy music using state-of-the-art retro synthesizers. And he does his own cover art. And he wired his own studio. And, (how lucky can I be?), he's produced 3 of my CDs along the way. More on Kent at his website.

Miles Davis and Gunnar - What's the connection?

Janet Boye Jenkins is the creator of the glorious design for Two Hands. It is by no means her first CD cover. Straight out of Pratt Institute (where she was my wife's irrepressible roommate) she went to work for Elektra records, where she designed dozens of discs. From there she went on to Sony where she designed yet more fantastic CD covers - Her design for the Miles Davis Quintet 1965-1968 Box Set on Columbia was nominated for a Grammy. She went on to design for a variety of other labels, before branching out and working at Nike and Sesame Workshop. I was able to lure her back into the music business for this project :)

As a young child, Janet was into crafts. Graphic design was a logical career step. But her inspiration comes from many places: listening to architects talk about their work; evocative movies titles; walking in NYC and Tokyo. She says "I once saw an Alexander Calder show that blew me away, he just never seemed to stop creating. This is so not me but it is inspiring, the idea of creating without needing everything to be a perfectly complete piece."

Some of her favorite jobs? In the music business, she claims that I am fun to work with, and loved Keb Mo because he was such a pleasure. "He let you do your job. And he had enough success that the label allowed it." One of her favorite Nike projects was working on a beautiful retail space in Kyoto, which "allowed me to be in Kyoto during Cherry Blossom season. How could I not love that :-)"

Recording Nino and Me (video)

I did not wish a camera crew to intrude on the intimate, sequestered recording process of "Two Hands", but we did set up a stationary camera to capture some of the proceedings. Here is an alternate take of Nino and Me, played by just me (if you look very closely, you can catch the shade of Nino sitting on my shoulder). Click the rectangle in the lower right to enlarge to full screen, or click on the YouTube logo just above that to watch it on YouTube. The audio is from the video camera, so it is not full quality :)

A solo piano recording? From the singer Gunnar Madsen?

Piano is really my main instrument. I taught myself guitar and piano from the age of 15, and then started classical piano lessons at the age of 17 (practicing 4 hours a day), then went to UC Berkeley as a music major, where I took both classical and jazz piano lessons. I sang in the choir at UC because it was required, and while I enjoyed singing, I never took lessons. I was primarily a composer and a pianist.

By starting The Bobs, I did not intend to leave piano behind. But, of course, the Bobs success led me towards singing more and more, and left me with little time for piano playing. (And with all that singing I got serious and started taking singing lessons.)

Before the Bobs, I was doing quite a bit of work as a pianist. My skill set is limited, but I dove in head first to just about any job...

While a sophomore at UC, a professor gave me a score to the Brecht/Eisler play "The Measures Taken" and encouraged me to arrange it and music direct a local production. I had no idea what I was doing, but the show became a huge success nonetheless. Based on its success, I was employed as the music director of the newly-minted center for the study of Bertolt Brecht, "Epic West". I continued to learn on the job, about theatre, about Brecht, about arranging, about actors. It was all rather intellectual for my tastes, but I was grateful for all the experience.

When the noted interpreter of Brecht/Eisler songs, Ina Wittich, came from East Germany to give a California tour (1981 or so), I was recommended as the local Brechtian expert. Hah! One of my rules of life is to almost never say no to a job, so of course I said yes, and became her accompanist for the next two weeks.

Eisler's songs are pretty easy, and Ina croaked them out in a Lotte Lenya kind of way. Piece of cake. But for our performance at UC San Diego, she wanted me to play Eisler's Sonata for Piano. It's dissonant and difficult technically. After 2 weeks of intense practice, I still was nowhere near having it. Onstage at Mandeville Hall in San Diego, in front of 900 or so people, I flailed my way through it, making up parts and then picking up the real notes where I could. After the show, at a wine and cheese deal, a music professor buttonholed me. He looked at me very seriously, and said that my 'interpretation' of the sonata was the absolute best he'd ever heard. Well, he certainly heard the piece as it had never been heard before :)

With the plum job of accompanying the diva of East Germany under my belt, I started to get other piano playing jobs. I got a gig playing for a semi-famous Broadway vocal teacher. Lots of private lessons, lots of practice transposing at sight (I could, at the time, play "Memories", a big hit at the time, up or down any number of half-steps). But I was fudging my way, using the chord symbols to get the basics, and reading only some of the notes.

This teacher took me with her to teach a master class at UC Davis. A student put an intricate version of "I Could Have Danced All Night" in front of me. No chord changes - just thousands of fly specks! And she wanted it down a minor third - Aughghggh!!! I was freaking. This was not like faking my way thru the Eisler sonata in San Diego, these were notes that everyone would recognize. Everyone but me, that is, because I had only a fuzzy idea of the song, so faking it was beyond me. Uhhh...I played it, but I somehow grokked it was a waltz, so I was comping chords in 3/4. The student was totally lost, and stopped me. The teacher was puzzled - she thought I knew how to play, and how to read music. I'd fooled her for a whole year before she found out what a charlatan I am when it comes to reading music!

Apologies for CD Baby problems

Some of you have had problems trying to order from CDBaby this summer - they're the company that have, for years, provided such excellent service for people buying CDs from my website. Well, they were recently bought by another company, and it appears, from the anecdotal evidence, that they've fired everyone that used to work there and have hired one person to work weekends to replace them. It's a shame. I'm hoping they'll get it together, and I'll let you know if/when they do. I'm so sorry for any problems you've had. I recommend for now that you buy your music from Amazon or your local trusted store (if you have one) or whatever your favorite music outlet is (you can get my music just about anywhere, you know - Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc.)

Jobs I've Had

I find it reassuring when I read of someone successful that I admire, and find that they've had a series of 'normal' jobs and lived a pretty much 'normal' life before they found their success. It should be self-evident, that successful people are not born full-fledged successful from the brow of some god, but I can get jealous or envious, thinking that somehow they've been blessed with a special life. I recently read, and loved, Steve Martin's biography "Born Standing", where his slow rise to the top is warmly and honestly told. Yes, magic eventually happened, but it came after years and years of hard work and more or less 'regular' life. So, in the spirit of Steve Martin, or humanity in general: Here are my jobs and experiences. Just in case any of you were thinking that my successes, such as they are, were just handed to me on a silver platter. (Although I must say, I do feel very lucky and very grateful for the life I've been given).

Cutting apricots
Selling YMCA peanuts door-to-door
Paperboy sub
Babysitting
Recycling Center
Garbage Man
Record store clerk
Dishwasher in Fraternity
Custodian
Practice Room Clerk, Concert Hall Guard
Dishwasher (1 afternoon)
Sheet Music Store Clerk
Singing Telegrams
Music Teacher
Piano Accompanist
Video Store clerk (assistant manager, even!)
Music Director/Composer for dozens of theatre productions
Jingle Singer
Actor/Singer/Performer
Jingle Writer
Composer for dance, film, TV, radio, etc.
Filmmaker
Composer for Video Games (Atari, etc.)

Cutting apricots. Age 8-9. Yuch! Lots of worms, lots of cuts on my fingers, 50 cents per 4x8 foot tray. I probably netted 10 cents an hour (I was slow and un-motivated).

Selling YMCA peanuts door-to-door, age 10. I would rather cut apricots! I HATE selling!

Paperboy sub (2 weeks), age 10. I don't think I was a particularly lazy kid, but getting up at 5am for those 2 weeks was murder. I had always envied kids with paper routes. This job ended my envy forever.

Babysitting, age 13-18. Now this was work I could enjoy! 50 cents an hour for playing with some kids for an hour, then putting them to bed and either practicing my guitar for a few hours or listening my way through the family's record collection. Not bad!

Recycling Center, age 13-24. My dad ran the Palo Alto Sanitation Company, and somehow it was legal to hire young kids to work at the recycling center at the Palo Alto dump. I was one of the lucky ones. I liked the work, really hard and sweaty, and it paid pretty well. My weekends were usually spent working. And later, hungry for work after college, a friend of mine ran the El Cerrito recycling center and hired me there, where I ran truck routes and got my forklift driver's license.

Garbage Man, age 18. My dad set the rule that his boys would work for one week as a garbage man, a kind of rite of passage to prove one's manhood and know what real work was. He also refused to pay for any kind of higher education (except Chiropractor College - go figure!). So, I went beyond the rite of passage and worked full time as a garbage man, saving up enough ($3,000) to pay for my first year at UC Berkeley. I worked until my back gave out, then moved on to retail...

Record store clerk, Banana suit, age 18. Working in a record store, a dream come true! Half my money went to buying records at wholesale price, so it didn't contribute much to my college fund, but it increased my record collection substantially. Also provided my first paid job as an actor: The store was called Banana Records, and they had a huge foam banana suit that I would dress in and wave to passerby on El Camino, enticing them to either buy records or go elsewhere and buy a banana split.

Dishwasher in Fraternity, age 18. $3,000 for a year of college ain't much, even in 1974 dollars, so I worked where I lived that first year, Pi Lambda Phi. I was a good dishwasher, and it kept my fingers limber for piano playing!

Custodian, age 19-20. Moved into an apartment for the summer with my good friend Dan Phipps. He had a cush job as a custodian at UC - like $10 hour! These were jobs that were usually reserved for high-profile athletes and other anointed ones, but I pestered the hiring guy so persistently that he gave in and hired me for the summer.

Practice Room Clerk, Concert Hall Guard, age 20-22. Another great couple of jobs. In order to use the practice rooms in the music department, you had to sign out a key. Various students were hired to watch over the keys and the rooms. You could get in a LOT of chatting while sitting in that chair! And, being the guard at Hertz Hall meant having the keys to the hall, letting in famous visiting musicians for rehearsal (Beaux Arts Trio, Tokyo String Quartet, etc.), listening to them rehearse while doing homework, then locking up. If you just happened to be a pianist and the piano just happened to be needing to be put away, you could while away some time playing the 9 foot Boesendorfer or Steinways...

Dishwasher (1 afternoon). age 22. Fresh out of college, I had a vague notion that waiters made good money, and that being a waiter would be a good way to get by until I figured something else out. I dressed in my best clothes and went from restaurant to restaurant one morning, ready to sell my talents. Everyone wanted someone with experience. But, one manager looked me up and down and asked if I had experience dishwashing. I sure did! He handed me an apron and set me to work. Here's a tip - washing dishes for a fraternity is very different than washing dishes during a very busy lunch hour in a restaurant. Believe me. I ruined my best shoes and pants, and got $20 and a stern look that said they never wanted to see me near their dishes again.

Sheet Music Store Clerk, age 22. In a musty shop, where all the sheet music was kept behind the counter in rows of SteelCase file cabinets, I revisited the retail workforce. It had none of the glamour of a record store, it was sometimes hard to stay awake.

Singing Telegrams age 22-24. My dream job. I dressed up in a bellboy outfit and was sent out to sing to people at home, at work, at restaurants, at parties, wherever. Sometimes there'd be hours between telegrams, and I'd stop in at a local library to read, or read a book at a local park. I LOVED the improvisatory aspect, where even though you knew the song you were going to be singing, every circumstance was new and unknown. Some recipients were deeply embarrassed (and I had to somehow make it easy on them), some wanted to take over the show (and I'd have to muscle them out of the spotlight), sometimes you are singing to someone alone at home, sometimes you have to take over a whole sports bar and make them be quiet. I just loved it.

Music Teacher (private piano, Crowden School) age 23-26- present. I've taught in short spurts over the years. I absolutely love turning people on to music, exploring it with them, finding new ways of reaching people with music. But I also tend to burn out quickly. So I teach when the mood grabs me. I just finished two years of teaching choir at my sons school. It was great. Now I need a rest!

Piano Accompanist age 22-26. Sight reading is a challenge for me, but I can read chord symbols and basic rhythms and thus fake my way through most broadway fare (especially if I've heard it before). So I worked for a time for some voice teachers, and learned much of the broadway songbooks. My biggest faux pas? Playing for a master class in UC Davis, and someone put "I Could Have Dance All Night" in front of me. Original score, no chord symbols. I thought I knew it, some kind of waltz, isn't it? So I plowed right in. The singer was totally lost. It is not, I learned, a waltz. Poor singer...

Video Store clerk (assistant manager, even!) age 23-24. The singing telegram company I worked for was going out of business, and I found good work at a video rental store. Got to take home a VCR and all the movies whenever I wanted, and spent my days hanging out and talking about movies with other movie fans. Low pay, but great benefits!

Music Director/Composer for dozens of theatre productions age 20-present. A dear professor in college got me hooked into arranging and writing music for theatre, and I got all kinds of great experience, taking any job that came along and claiming I could do anything (and then learning how to do anything while on the job). It's still the way I work, basically. AND, this got me into an appreciation of and love of acting and performing.

Jingle Singer age 26-present. I'm rather out of the loop these days, but when jobs come up for talented singers, why, I'm available. There were some busy days back in the late 80's and early 90's, when there was a fair amount of advertisement in SF, and when they used singers for everything from Hondas to detergents.

Actor/Singer/Performer age 25-present. I got bitten by the theatre bug when I was music directing a lot in the late 70's and early 80's, and longed to be more in the spotlight. To that end, I started the Bobs, and studied method acting for 4 solid years. The stage is a place where I feel comfortable and free. And I love having an audience.

Jingle Writer (one only) age 29. Whereas I had no problem singing the praises of cattle for the National Beef Council, I found it almost physically painful to write music for commercials. I wish I could have found a way to enjoy it, for the money is useful and very good. But I only eked out one (for H2O, a Pepsi brand of bottled water).

Composer for dance, film, TV, radio, etc. age 26-present. I feel like I'm talented in many ways, but the easiest skill and task for me is composing. Lyrics? Kinda hard to squeeze them out. Writing? Difficult. Performing? A thrill, but hard work. Composing? Sure, sometimes it's work, but it most often feels effortless, and thrilling to see what comes through me.

Filmmaker (for my dad's garbage company, later for Svetlana) age 40-present. I was hungry, poor, in debt, and my father, who used to own and run the garbage company in Palo Alto, offered to pay me to make a series of training videos for his company. I learned a lot about filmmaking in the process. After that, I studied screen writing, and even wrote a screenplay or 2. Then, the farming community my brother was working at in Russia needed someone to make a documentary of their work to help them do fundraising. I jumped at the chance for adventure. It was 3 weeks of adventure traveling and filming. And then 10 months chained to a chair in front of a computer, editing the film. Maybe again someday...

Composer for Video Games (Atari, etc.) age 38-present. I was pretty down-and-out financially in the mid-nineties, and my prospects for employment were grim. A degree in music just don't go that far in the marketplace. But lo, via a friend of a friend, I heard that Atari games was looking for a composer. I applied, and even though I had no computer skills at all, they liked my skills as a composer, and hired and trained me. The first 6 months were learning programming and the arcane way of writing for their hardware (these were coin-op games). I'm SO grateful for everything I learned there. And I enjoyed the challenges of writing for video games. The musical needs of the game, the aurally assaultive environment of the video arcade, having to fit all the music on one tiny 128k chip. Kind of like writing for a string quartet. Or an acapella quartet :)

Best $10 I Ever Spent

There are things, little things, little manufactured things, that I am grateful for every day. They are, like, miracles. They make life so much easier. And none of them require you to win the lottery to enjoy them. Some of my favorites:

Curved shower curtain rod ($40). Our bathroom is tiny, a one-person-at-a-time affair. We dream of someday remodeling our house and making our bathroom more spacious. But that would require winning the lottery. In the meantime, I bought a curved shower curtain rod. When you're in the shower (over the tub), it gives you a mere 5-6 inches of elbow room, but it feels like heaven.

Soft-close toilet seat ($40). Speaking of bathrooms, when our old toilet began leaking and had to be replaced, a plumber friend insisted we go with a Toto toilet. They come with a 'soft close' seat. Meaning, the seat never falls down with a bang. It gently closes - always. Paradise!

Butler software ($18). For the mac. Spotlight has taken on most of its functions, but for years it was simply the best thing I'd ever spent money on, computer-wise. Utopia!

TypeItForMe software ($18?) Again, for the mac. I just make up shortcuts for typing things (like typing "gm" for Gunnar Madsen) and voila! I use it ALL the time. Zion!

Plastic key color-code thingies ($0.25) - What a simple, unadulterated joy to take out my key ring, and know what each key goes to, because I splurged on these little color plastic doohickeys. Shangri-la!

Phone headset ($12) - My neck was getting sore, my arm was getting sore just holding the phone up to my ear. Then I bought a panasonic headset to plug into my work phone. Now, now soreness, and I can waltz around the room, dusting, doing small chores while talking. I bought one for the house, and now we all use the headset. It might seem like a small hassle to put it on (and it is) but once it's on, it's manna.

Enidicia postage ($16/month) - If you run your own business, say a record company, and you're mailing off packages all the time, this program is just fantastic. For years I used a postage meter, and that was too complicated - putting postage in, buying the expensive inks, etc. Now, it just prints out from my regular printer. Rapture!

GPS ($99) - It's not so very cheap, but way worth the money. Especially when you're on vacation or a business trip, this little thing GETS you there. Magical. Transporting. Ecstatic.

Dads in Uniforms

Coming from the library the other day I passed by our local uniform store. Pleated, boring cotton/poly blend workclothes and uniforms were awkwardly displayed behind barred windows. And I suddenly felt comforted.

Comforted? I've always hated uniforms. I never wanted to join the boy scouts, 'cause I would have had to wear a uniform. The military? I have some moral qualms about it, but I think my biggest problem would have been having to wear a uniform.

And then I thought: Milkman, Baseball Player, Garbageman, Fireman, Policeman. The uniforms tells the job. There's no ambiguity. It's comforting.

And then I thought: My father ran a garbage company since the time I was 4. He came home every evening in his uniform. My relationship with my dad was not simple or easy, yet when anyone asked what he did, the answer was simple: He's a garbageman.

Some kids' fathers wore suits to work, and there was no way of telling what they did. It was unsettling - "He's an accountant." "He's a professor." ." He's a stockbroker." The words were vague, the jobs were vague, what did they possibly DO in their suits? They all got on the train to San Francisco, they never sweated, so what did they DO?

I heard an interview with the daughter of Frank Loesser (Guys and Dolls) recently. As a girl, she didn't know what his work was. She saw her father pacing around a room, running over to the piano to plunk notes, muttering under his breath for hours on end. What kind of job was that? What could she possibly tell her friends?

Well, I'm afraid my son may have the same conundrum. I'm going to go over to the uniform store today and see if I can't find a uniform that says "Composer". It might provide comfort to him for me to wear such a thing. Heck, it might provide comfort for me.

Gout? From an MRI?

A year ago, while I was out jogging, I had a strange episode. Coming to a cross street, I glanced to the right to check for traffic, and just then I lost a piece of time. It was just a fraction of a second, I didn't even come close to stumbling, but it was a strong sense of "Where did I just go?" It was trippy, cool, a little unsettling, but I just kept jogging. Then, 30 seconds later, it happened again. That wasn't so trippy, that was a little scary.

That got me to contact a doctor, and a preliminary EKG suggested a small heart attack. So, I underwent a barrage of tests: a stress test, another EKG, Carotid artery scan, heart scan, and an MRI. According to all the tests, I'm in great health, nothing discernible to be concerned about, no heart attack, brain looks like it should be firing on all 2 cylinders.

A week or so after all these tests, my thumbs began really hurting. I couldn't remember injuring them, I hadn't been doing a lot of computer work, but they both hurt tremendously whenever I tried to do a pinching motion. Helping Quinn with Lego's was impossible. Lots of things were impossible. I went to a hand therapy center, and we did weeks and weeks of acupuncture and therapy, but my recovery was very slow. My entire summer was proscribed - no boogie boarding, riding a bicycle hurt my thumbs, everything hurt.

In the fall, my sister, who is an MD and anthroposophical doctor, saw me and gave me an injection which gave me the first relief from thumb pain in 5 months. It was great! I had to learn to give myself injections, but it was worth it. My local doctor, who also knows anthroposophical medicine, commented that the injections she prescribed were for gout, and that gout attacks the thumbs and toes.

Gout? Isn't that one of those ancient Elizabethan complaints? What the heck is gout? I looked on the web, read up on it. One of the triggers for it, apparently, is the dyes they inject when you have an MRI. Whoa. Sure, they gave me a phone-book sized sheaf of papers to sign before I did my MRI, and I'm pretty good about reading through anything before I sign it, but if it mentioned gout I must have missed it.

My thumbs hurt only mildly now, I'm grateful for the medicines my sister gave me. But be aware, that seemingly non-invasive things like MRIs can have strange and sometimes big consequences.

Scat Attack

Back in December, my pal Tito Uquillas, who has a hip rock group for kids called The Hipwaders, asked if I'd do a guest vocal on his upcoming EP release "Goodie Bag". I love Tito and his band's work, they have a real groove goin' on. Tito digs Captain Beefheart and other 'other' musical genres, and it all bubbles up into the stuff he's doing.

So, he came over to my studio and had me improvise a bunch of scatting over the tracks for his song "Goodie Bag". It was a blast, and in an hour we had some pretty cool-sounding vocals. Here's my part:

The Titan of Tenors? The Gepetto of Falsetto? I'm happy with those monikers...

I feel like a king. A good king. I had such a royal time recording at Skywalker Sound. When you drive through the gate, your jaw drops at the beauty of the place, the rolling green hills, longhorn cattle chewing grass, hawks circling above. Nestled against a hillside of olive trees and surrounded by grapevines is what appears to be a 150 year old building, some kind of huge barn of stone and wood. You walk through the doors, and the smell of fermenting grapes is noticeably absent. Something's different, off. Go through a few sets of double doors, and you're in heaven - If you love recording, that is. The smell of quality electronics giving off their heat, metal and plastic and glass, that's the smell in here. Yes, fermenting grapes or aging cheese is a 'better' smell, but if you love recording studios as much as I do, that technical smell can be quite heady, too. Through the huge wall of glass, you can see it -Acoustic Nirvana. A huge room the size of concert hall, made expressly for recording. It's a 5 minute walk just to get to the piano sitting in the middle of it. A lovely piano, fit for a king. Polished, gleaming, every note tuned perfectly, the pedals operating effortlessly and soundlessly, the keys giving way as if they were in love with your fingers. You sit. The red light turns on, you play. You play again, the red light glows red, you play and play and play, losing track of time. Eventually, your stomach tells you it's time to eat something. Reluctantly, you pull yourself away from the piano, and walk out the doors...

Hawks circle, cows chew grass, it's peaceful and beautiful. This is not a parking lot in Burbank blanketed by a brown hazy sky. This is paradise.

So, apart from feeling like I'd spent a few days at a five-star resort, I also got some great work done. I had prepared, and we were able to record everything in 2 long days. I'm now editing the takes (some pieces are one-take wonders, others will benefit from a bit of slicing and dicing) and working up the song order for the CD and writing the liner notes and etc. The CD will be done by this summer, as promised, but due to the exigencies of distribution, it won't be in stores and downloadable until late summer or fall.

Santa Cruz Concert Saturday!

I'm taking a break from practicing to REMIND you of my first solo concert in over 4 years: This Saturday at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz. April 11, 4pm. I'll be performing songs from "I'm Growing" (for the 1st time ever) and from my entire catalog of musical stuff. The Show is geared towards kids (that's why it's at 4pm) but, like all my shows, it's really for EVERYBODY. So get yourself to Santa Cruz, enjoy that wonderful town with it's wonderful ocean, and grab a rare concert appearance by yours truly. I will LOVE seeing you there!

BTW, the recording sessions at Skywalker were marvelous - we recorded 18 pieces in 2 days, and everything just felt right. We'll be editing and mixing over the next month or so, and it really should be out by early summer.

Yours, Gunnar

1st Concert in 4 years, Piano Fingers on Fire!

I've been sequestered, not pestered, alone with me and a piano for weeks now. For a few hours a day at least. Then it's time to pick up our son from school and do daddy time. I mentioned a couple months ago that I was gearing up to record an album of solo piano pieces, and it's all coming together. I've researched pianos and studios around the bay area, and settled on the concert Yamaha at Skywalker Sound, on their scoring stage. Lush, baby. My good friend Kent Sparling will be producing. We've decided to record 18 pieces, and 3 of them will have violin on them as well (played by the wonderful Irene Sazer).

Also on deck is my first solo performance in years - at one of my favorite places to play, the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz. April 11, 4pm. A show for the whole family (geared towards kids, enjoyable for all). So, in addition to practicing the piano for the upcoming recording sessions, I'm dusting off my guitar and voice, and playing through old favorite songs and working up some new ones for the upcoming concert. It feels like spring!

Cock-a-doodle-doo! love, Gunnar

The Ultimate Rejection Letter

I used to dream of being on a major label. When I was with The Bobs we dreamed of it, and held out for a few years, waiting for the offer that never came. (That's one reason there was such a long wait between our 1st and 2nd releases). When I left The Bobs and 'went solo', I was still pretty green as a songwriter and singer, and my demos from back then are, in retrospect, not great -The major labels were wise to pass on me. But I had chutzpah, and I sent my demos out in the world with confidence in my talents. I was going for a major label deal!

Some people in the record industry were kind, and recognized my potential while politely declining a contract. A few were more brash and brutal in their dismissal, and most simply didn't return phone calls. But one guy in particular sent a form letter that purported to help me (and countless others) figure out what was 'wrong' with their music.

So nice of Tom to offer his assistance!

Performing as Catharsis

I was watching Janis Joplin in "Festival Express" recently. She was cathartic. I don't think she knew how to hold anything back. Performing for her seemed like an all-or-nothing thing. I was thinking how other blues singers "know" that they're putting on a show. They're not faking it, but they know it's a show, they save a bit of themselves, in the best sense. They deliver the message without hurting themselves irreparably. I get the feeling Janis was really going through hell up there, even if the release and catharsis felt good to her.

Performance used to be catharsis for me, too. If I didn't go through something real, if it didn't somehow hurt, then it hadn't felt or been real. I needed to break through, or break, something. Performing was about salvation, breaking myself so that I could be real. I had no other way of being true to me.

Nowadays, performance for me is about being present, being real. I no longer have to go through primal therapy onstage. I don't have to sweat to be a good performer, tear my vocal chords raw or make my fingers bleed. And I'm not knocking what I used to do, those days had a special something to them. What would rock and roll be without sweat? And I don't mean to say I hold back now. I simply take care of myself. I give from a quieter place. I feel like now I "give" more, whereas before the performance was about me gaining release, and appreciation. Now it's about giving of myself to an audience.

I went to a harpsichord recital a couple weeks ago, Davitt Moroney at UC Berkeley. He has chops to burn, one of the most respected harpsichordists in the world. But there was no flash on display, no pyrotechnics, nothing virtuosic. He attended to the music, he made it clear, and he had tremendous patience, giving each note all the time it needed to sing out. The attention to what the music needed was stunning. I suppose that's more of where I'm at these days. My "Janis" days are behind me. Now I aspire to the kind of musicality of a Davitt Moroney. Rock and roll, baroque music, it's all music, eh? I would love to witness some sweaty, cathartic Baroque music - that would be pretty damn cool.

New Year, New Hope, New Stuff...

I promised in my last blog entry, some time back, that I would be working on new piano instrumental pieces. I have been, eagerly, and I'm very pleased with the results. All I need now is a few weeks of practice time before I can get them all recorded. Which won't happen til February, most likely. Because I've got a few other fish to fry:

Over the past year I've been talking with novelist Barbara Quick, author of "Vivaldi's Virgins", about a musical adaptation of her book. We hadn't gotten anywhere substantial on the project, but I had some thoughts about how it might work, using Vivaldi's music to construct songs that would work in the context of a musical. Yeah, I know, Vivaldi's music is already pretty good, why mess with it? Well, because I'm just not into Opera, and that's the genre that Vivaldi's vocal music falls into. And, I don't really have an interest in just compiling a bunch of Vivaldi's music. It's just not my bag. But the idea of using his music as a springboard into writing new material is intriguing to me.

By a grand stroke of good fortune, we find ourselves enrolled in the Theatreworks Writer's Retreat this month. They put us up for a week, provide us with singer/actors, and we pound out ideas and try them out. A week of solid work should reveal to me whether or not my ideas of adapting Vivaldi's music will work. I'm excited about it. And I'm very much enjoying listening to the wealth of great music that Vivaldi has written. Don't worry, I don't PLAN on ruining it :)

I rented a FANTASTIC movie recently...

Jazz on a Summer's Day - A documentary film of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and the America's Cup that went on concurrently. A documentary, you say? Snooze-ola. Of Jazz? Double snooze-ola. Au contraire, my friends. I confess, I like jazz. I rented it for myself, and it took ME a while to get around to putting it in the DVD player. As I did, I apologized to my wife, saying "you probably won't like this, but I'm curious to watch just a bit of it, okay...?". From the first moment, we were hooked. The images are stunning, like Richard Avedon portraits come to life. And while it takes place at a jazz festival, and there's lots of fine and fantastic performances therein (a young and un-guarded Chuck Berry, a stunning Anita O'Day), half of the film is of the audience, all caught unawares, and all tremendously fascinating. It's one of the most beautiful and unique films I've ever seen. I guarantee it.