Nothing Expected

In the past, I’ve done all my production in my home studio. Lately, I’ve been trying to get used to working on a laptop so I can be more mobile. The transition has not been the smoothest. I’ve realized that my home setup is vastly superior to a laptop – at least for my working...

This is one of those songs that came after many false starts and unproductive sessions. Sometimes trying to find the right idea – musically or lyrically – is like casting a fishing line. The first few throws may amount to nothing, but finally, you feel tug and you have something to reel in. What I...

Maculele is a Brazilian dance/mock-fight performed with sticks. I’m not going into detail about the dance, but if you’re interested, there are plenty of videos available on YouTube. Several of the stories of its origins tell of a boy named Maculele who died fighting an enemy tribe that invaded his village. Several years ago, when...

I was looking through my archives and I found this unreleased track. I made That’s Dirty several years ago as a favor for DJ Dirty of Sundae Philadelphia. This one was made with the dance floor in mind because DJ Dirty wouldn’t have it any other way. Unlike most of my music, I did use...

Sometimes when I start a song, I have a vision. Sometimes by the end, that vision is realized, and other times it isn’t. The idea behind Pinocchiobot was that all the the vocals would be performed by a computer voice. I figured that I would write some lines, stick them in a text-to-speech program, and...

Lyrically speaking, Summertime Rain is an odd song for me. Instead of trying to tell a story, when I wrote this, I was trying to tell a particular feeling. If you mix feelings of expectation, uncertainty, mortality, and happiness, you will have the feeling I was trying to capture. Musically, I was going for something...

I started this song aiming for something calmer than the others I’ve posted so far, so before I laid down a single note, I set a slow tempo. Proving that music is never simple, this song ended up being relatively energetic anyway. Once I realized what was happening, I made no effort to change it because...

I guess it’s normal for me to come up with music first, then start writing words that seem to fit it. Life of a Mouse started that way. A few lines in, the idea for the final song started forming and I ended up rewriting the lines that had come before the idea. File this...

Valentine’s day is coming up, so I figured  I’d do a song about love. Really Sad Love Song is about an artist who realizes that many of the best songs aren’t about happy love. The music is made up of some of my favorite musical elements – a deep, smooth bass line, lots of keys,...

To come up with the music for Monster, I just added and removed instruments, notes, and parts until I came up with the basis of something I liked. At that point, I had to listen to it a bunch of times before lyrics started coming to me. I didn’t know what the song was about...