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.

New Piano Works in the works

A couple of years ago I got a case of pneumonia. NOT the rockin' pneumonia. Just the too-tired-to-get-outta-bed-and-my-lungs-hurt pneumonia. A shot of rhythm and blues did not, alas, cure it.

But as I slowly began to recover, I spent some time at the piano. Just 10 minutes at a time, then back to bed. I still didn't have the energy to confront emails or serious business, but I did have the energy to languidly noodle at the piano for short stretches. It was midwinter, I was really sick, and I enjoyed writing pieces that expressed the mood. I recorded these pieces on my little voice recorder, and later transcribed the ones worth keeping.

I added them to a folio of instrumental pieces that I'd been intending to record someday, a kind of follow-up to Spinning World: 13 Ways of Looking at a Waltz.

The folio sat on the shelf for a couple years while I busied myself with yet further education in "how to be a father". The folio continued ripening on the shelf, while my first major creative act since the birth of my son turned out to be recording and releasing of "I'm Growing" (in 07-08).

Only now, this fall, has that folio of material tugged at me for attention. I opened it up, and liked many of the pieces there. It got me in a mood, and I wrote a bunch more pieces. The idea of recording a follow up to Spinning World: 13 Ways of Looking at a Waltz had seemed daunting - It's a lot of work to score all that music for an ensemble, and it costs money to hire the musicians and rent the studio. But, I suddenly reasoned, why not just do a solo piano recording? It's cheap - Free, even, if I record it at home on the 1927 Knabe I inherited from my grandmother.

So, I set up some mics, and settled into practicing and then recording some of the waltzes. I'm very excited, the music is, if I do say so myself, and, heck, who else is going to say so since no one else has heard it, beautiful. Was that a sentence? Never mind. I really like what I've written, and I like the way I play them.

My piano is a decent, solid piano. Not a gorgeous piano, but a nice, upstanding kind of piano citizen. Hearing it in a recording, as a solo instrument, I have my doubts about whether it will be good enough. I want to hear a better piano. But I've got an emotional attachment to it. My grandmother's father bought it for her back in 1927, and letters from my Grandfather at the time were full of warm appreciation for his wife's constant playing of it. At the time of my grandmother's death, in the mid 80's, the piano had spent 25 years in the enclosed patio in her back yard. It was a mess. I had it totally restored and refinished. All the instrumentals I've composed were composed on this piano. It's a rare thing to hear music performed on the exact instrument that it was composed on. The limitations of the piano itself inspire me to play in certain registers and use certain voicings. A different instrument would inspire other music, other keys.

I may end up finding a better piano to record on. My inner jury is still out on that. But I'm really enjoying practicing and burnishing these pieces, many of which were still unfinished, and finding the structure that they call for.

I'm hoping to be able to post some of them in the coming weeks, to get feedback from my friends around the world as to which pieces move you, and why. It'll be fun to share the music while it's being made. A CD will come, hopefully in Spring of 09.

Tibetan Book of Balding

When you start to go bald, you face yourself squarely. You didn't cause it, you didn't earn it. It is not retribution or karma. It is simply destiny rising up in front of you. You can try to hide it with implants or fine woven rugs of hair, but you cannot escape it. It's like an early death. Except that it's only a loss of hair.

But it was, in my case, good practice in getting used to the concept of mortality. Baldness. Mortality. They both are final, non-judgmental, and jam-packed with unavoidable destiny. If you can learn to accept baldness and get on with your life, you can probably learn to accept death. It's coming; that's a no-brainer. Why worry about it? Hey, once you've gone through the grieving stages of losing your hair, you've got all the practice you need in dealing with the grim reaper. He carries a scythe, right? First he shorns you of your hair, later he comes back for the rest. Relax, already.

Reminds me of the guy who was afraid of relationships and commitment. Someone suggested he start with a pet. But even the idea of caring for a goldfish was more than he could take on. So he started with a houseplant. Got used to routine plant care, moved on to fish, than reptiles, then mammals, finally fellow humans. We should get used to mortality in baby steps, too. Include and accept all the little 'passings' that are constantly presented to us. Then when the 'big one' comes, you've got some skills to deal with it.

Of course, check in with me when my time comes. See if I'm so gosh darn sanguine about it.

(and even though 'shorn' is the past participle of 'shear', it just somehow sounded right in the sentence above. So sue me. You can't shear me, that's already taken care of.)

The thing about Singing Telegrams is...

Okay, so you've just graduated with a bachelors degree. You studied music theory and composition. You've somehow got to make some money. You've got to get a job.

You write music for (and direct music for) theatrical productions, but it's not enough money, and it's not steady work.

You dress up in your best clothes and go around trying to get a job as a waiter - no luck, but you do get hired for one lunchtime rush of dishwashing, at which you are horrible and which ruins your only good shoes.

You get a job as a sales clerk in a musty sheet music store, where all the music is stored behind the counter in dozens of file cabinets. Minimum wage, but at least it's a job in the music business.

You try your hand at teaching piano to kids. But you're just not the kind of guy who can get excited about "Hot Cross Buns", and you're not really the kind of guy who knows what to tell a kid who says "I hate practicing". Your instinct is to tell them to give it up if they don't like it. Heck, I did, and look where it got me...I ended up being a musician anyway.

Then you get your dream job. Singing Telegrams. Oh, it may sound hokey. It may BE hokey. But here's the thing about it...

Me and my brother, circa 1980

Every situation is brand new. All you've got is an address. You've got your bellboy outfit on, and you have to go find a particular person and sing them a witty song (memorized beforehand). You may be singing to a couple sitting at home watching TV. You may be singing at an office party where you've got to grab attention as if it were a bull. The recipient may be mortified - You've got to tone down the performance and work it to minimize their sense of embarrassment. The recipient may be thrilled - Give them the thrill of their life. The recipient may want to sing with you and take over your job - You've got to maintain control of the situation in the most friendly and funny way possible.

It was improv at its best. No, you're not making it all up, but you're paying attention to your own performance, you're paying attention to your audience, there is no fourth wall, the people you're singing to need to be reassured, your presence may embarrass them, but you have to take the sting out of it, and yet make it as funny and sweet as possible. I loved trying to take all that in and make the situation work.

And there was the down time between telegrams. Sometimes you'd drive 20 miles to deliver one, and then you've got another one in that neighborhood in 3 hours. You go to the local library, read some books. You go to the park, stretch out under a tree and write some music. The down time was a wonderful gift, too.

Nervous? Almost never. Singing to celebrities? No problem. Amazing to think that when I sang for Mrs. Walter Mondale (the Vice President's wife), I was not vetted, did not have to sign a loyalty oath, I just went to the restaurant and sang to her. Different times, eh? The one time I got nervous was when Jim Henson sent a telegram to Frank Oz on his wedding day. I was given an Ernie puppet, and was to sing a custom wedding song in the style of Ernie. I was out of my depth - I don't know puppets, and I'm not an instant mimic. I was nervous. I showed up at Frank's parents house somewhere in Oakland, and it was just Frank, his new wife, and 2 or 3 others. They looked at me like I was from another planet. I warbled the song, feeling foolish with the puppet on my hand. I was glad when that was over.

I got my biggest tip in the same neighborhood some time later, At a house where there was big party going on. The telegram was addressed to "Stoney Feeney". The sweet smell of pot was everywhere. I was offered tokes, but Bellboys don't do that kind of thing. I found Stoney sitting on a bench in the semi-darkness of the back yard. I sang my song, and held out the telegram for Stoney to take from the silver tray. He took the telegram and, reaching into a large brown grocery bag, put a heaping mound of vegetable matter on my silver tray. It was the biggest tip I ever got (in terms of dollar value), but it was rather awkward trying to get it home. I ended up putting it in my leather "mailbag", and later spent an hour trying to get all the seeds out of that thing.

The singing telegram gig only lasted 2 years at most. "Western Onion" (aka "National Onion") was bought up and mismanaged into insolvency. But really, the days of the singing telegram were numbered anyway. Pet Rocks, singing telegrams, dance crazes- they all have their time, and then fade away.