Life Its Own Self

I may have outdone myself this time… going a full seven months between blog posts.  That may well be a new record for the World’s Laziest Blogger.  Alert the folks at Guinness!

It’s not like I’ve not written anything in all this time.  Or thought about anything.  Or done anything.  (Well, if you consider the pitifully lonely life of a writer actually as DOING something…)

Let’s see…

I wrote a pretty cool song, titled “Undone.” It’s unlikely that anything will ever become of it – because it’s not at all what is considered marketable these days. But I wrote it anyway. Then I rewrote it.  After that, as is my habit, I rewrote the rewrite another four or five times before I finally demoed it. I sang it myself because  paying someone to sing a song nobody is gonna ever sing seems a bit silly.  But you can listen to it on YouTube for free, Here.

Then in back in January and February, I did a few orchestrations for a new show that will run in an independent theater in Indiana. An interesting gig – to say the least.  And I re-worked an old song from my very first serious musical to make it work as an SATB choral anthem. Still waiting to hear if the publisher that controls it wants to re-promote it.  If they don’t, I may chase that opportunity with my own catalog.

On a lark, I re-worked a ridiculously hard a cappella arrangement of “Swing Low.”  It’s as if I was deliberately trying to write something nobody was ever gonna sing…

To make up for that silliness, I wrote a really nice, very playable orchestral arrangement of “Sweet Hour of Prayer.” You can look that over right here.

March brought a rather significant surprise: After four years of being “on hold’ with a big Easter project (thanks largely to Covid), the work was suddenly on again.  So the months of March and April were consumed with writing, arranging, orchestrating, and programming new material to expand my very earliest theatrical musical – THE CHOICE.  It’s all being commissioned by a church in suburban Detroit. More details will come as the project unfolds.

Then a few weeks back, my friend Gene Wilkes – who is not only a genuine theologian but also a creative writer, sent me a poem he had written.  I thought I spotted a song hiding in the poem, and he agreed to let me play around with it. We ended up with something that is very different from his poem — but kinda cool, I think.  It’s called “The Same,” and I’ll get it posted one of these days.  It still has a little work yet to be done, I think.

Right now, I’m recovering from a week of teaching in Austin at Joseph Martin’s annual Composer Symposium.  This was the 20th anniversary of the Symposium. I’ve been involved with it since 2006.  Over the years, we’ve seen lots of new composers make real strides in their writing. Literally hundreds of new pieces of church music have made it into print for choirs, all as a result of the Symposium.  Plus, I’ve gotten to know some really wonderful folks thanks to this event, and I believe it’s a terrific opportunity for growth for an upcoming creative writer. 

So, this should catch us up for now.  If the pattern holds, I’ll post again sometime around Christmas.  But who knows? I might surprise us all, and have something vaguely interesting to offer sooner than that. But I wouldn’t bet on it.