Friends, we here at Reclinerland HQ are dead chuffed to announce that two songs from the Ideal Home Music Library, Vol. 3 have made the top 150 of the European Recording Orchestra’s 2024 Call for Scores Competition. Wow. What an incredible honor. The submissions were “Quiz Night At The White Horse Pub” and “If Ifs And Buts Were Candy And Nuts (We’d All Have A Lovely Christmas).” Out of 900 entries, these two songs made the semifinals. Thank you to everyone at the ERO and to the distinguished jury for your kind consideration.
Friends, the Ideal Home Music Library, Vol. 3 has gone live as of March 1st, 2024! Please enjoy this latest offering from George Recordings. Lovingly crafted by Yours Truly and mastered by Jarkko Heiniö. Be on the lookout for the Complete Ideal Home Music library coming soon!
Everyone here at Reclinerland HQ is celebrating. Receptionists are dancing on their desks! Papers are flying everywhere! The Skydiving EP has fallen to earth and we couldn’t be more excited to share it with you. Stream it NOW on your favorite online streaming service! You can also get a taste of it here
The offices here at Reclinerland HQ are all abuzz with activity now that the folks at Blurb have decided to feature Success! in their holiday gift guide! Not only that, but they’re making great efforts to promote the book on their social media channels. Like them, we think Success! would make a great gift, too. So, if it’s not already on your holiday shopping list, get your loved ones a copy here!
The Ideal Home Music Library, Vol. 3: Songs for Orchestra
We here at Reclinerland HQ and the dedicated team at George Recordings are very pleased to announce that, with the help of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the third volume of Reclinerland’s enormously unfashionable Ideal Home Music Library series is finally underway.
In a release-as-we-go format, the album’s 10 forthcoming selections will be culled from that titular tome of lost and obscure songs discovered so many years ago in the library of the American Institute of Musicology by the late Dr. Tad Middling and lovingly arranged by Michael Johnson for voice and full orchestra.
The first song in the collection, A Storybook And A Lullaby (Are All You Need To Sail To Dreamland), is available for your aural enjoyment here.
The next song in the collection, London At New Year’s, drops later this month. Look for it over on the Ideal Home Music Library’s album page.
I’m so excited to tell you that my musical comedy graphic novel, or “comic opera” as I’m calling it, is available worldwide at the Blurb Bookstore and on Amazon and other online retailers. Finally, you can hold the comic in your hot little hands, flipping through the pages and scanning the QR codes when the characters break into song. For ages I’ve dreamed of a print copy of the project, and now it’s a reality. Get yourself a copy now!
I’m happy to announce that the writer’s room here at Reclinerland HQ is back at work. This time, they’re on the job gutting and revamping the musical comedy Happy Valley. I really love the story that Rich Rubin conceptualized, and it’s nice to revisit this world and these characters. I’m going to be rewriting both the book and the music. My goal is to finish the new version by November of this year, in time to submit it to the National Music Theater Conference, 2023. Wish me luck!
Myra, Ingrid, and Gary are getting a reboot in 2022. Boy, do they look happy about it.
Every Road I Travel by Parks & Recreation
On behalf of George Recordings and everyone here at Reclinerland HQ, we want to announce that the third Parks & Recreation album, Every Road I Travel, has finally seen the light of day. As of April 1st, 2022, the album is available on all streaming platforms and digital retailers, and we couldn’t be more thrilled. The release of this album marks the end of a very long story.
In 2014 and ‘15, after many months of rehearsing a handful of new songs, Joe, Bob and I went into Sean Flora’s studio on Sauvie’s Island in Portland, OR and recorded the basic tracks for a new Parks & Recreation album. This was already about 5 years after the band had stopped touring and rehearsing together, so it was quite a reunion. We didn’t stop playing, by the way, because we were mad at each other or because we had any kind of problems—or because a sanitized “The Office” ripoff stole our band name (not bitter, just sayin’…) We recorded our second album together, and then I moved to Europe in 2009 and the boys started getting on with having children, raising families and that sort of thing. In spite of all of that, we released that second album, How To Save The World, in 2011, and we thought that was going to be our last album, until 2014, when we reunited to make Every Road I Travel.
After some lovely and super fun recording sessions, Sean Flora being a fantastic and creative engineer and a great guitar player, we vowed to finish the album by overdubbing orchestral instruments using someone’s laptop and then mixing and mastering the whole thing ourselves. But, unfortunately, string players weren’t as easy to come by as they were in the past, and frankly we couldn’t afford to hire the players we required. So time went by.
Last year, 6 years after we recorded the album, Jason Hughes gave me the idea to use other sounds besides orchestral instruments to take the place of the orchestral sounds. I explored some options, including using some harmonium plugins, but nothing stuck. I did, however, come across some cheap or free orchestral VST plugins that sounded amazing. So I learned how to make them sound passably authentic and overdubbed the orchestral parts myself. During this time, I also added improved guitar sounds, overdubbed the vocals, cleaned up the acoustic guitars, added percussion, etc., and basically finished the album. I even asked Jason Hughes to lend his guitar talents to “Juliet” and “Walk in Space,” since we’d written those two songs back in the ‘00s, when Jason was in the band. I also recruited my friend and colleague Anna Lande to sing the Holy Roller parts on “Roll On, Mighty Danube.”
Then I took the whole thing to Jarkko Heiniö, whom we had in mind to mix the album from the beginning, to do the mixing and make the orchestral sounds even better. After another year, Japi, as he’s nicknamed, finished the mixing, adding his own touches that I think make the whole thing, like free NASA sounds from the NASA online audio archives, trademark “quiet third verses” where he just dropped things out to create texture and give the songs shape.
So, for the past year, a lot of work has gone into this album. I am thrilled and excited to make it available, at last, to the public. This album is the result of a lot of time, love, and attention, and I hope it shows. We managed to squeeze in all of the recurring themes of Parks & Recreation’s oeuvre, namely, the cosmos, doomed relationships, “spirituality,” eroticism, escapism, and the dark underbelly of the suburban landscape.
All of these themes interweave into a kind of travelogue, where the efforts of some unnamed protagonist to escape his suburban roots by traveling out into the world utterly fail as things such as lost love, guilt, and box stores, continue to haunt him.
We hope you enjoy this, Parks & Recreation’s swan song, Every Road I Travel.
Hi, Everyone! I’m so pleased to announce that George Recordings has finally released worldwide the entire Reclinerland discography on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, and many many other digital retailers and streaming platforms. You can now acquire mp3 versions of whichever Reclinerland album you want. You can stream them on Spotify or buy them on Amazon or Apple Music and download them to your primitive MP3 player. However you want them, you can get Reclinerland music here or here. You can get Parks & Recreation music here or here.
To save you some time, I went ahead and made a Spotify playlist of the entire Reclinerland and Parks & Recreation catalog. It also includes music by Blanket Music, Super XX Man, and loads of other projects I’ve been involved in. You’ll find lots of HUSH and Jealous Butcher records compilations on this playlist as well. Go get yourself some!
My good friend Scott Garred and I have started work in earnest on a collaboration album: ten songs that explore the themes of spirituality, and, in my case, lack of spirituality. This album will mark the first time, as far as I know, that a Christian and an atheist musician have come together to make music. So far, the songs on the album feature a nice tension between plaintive paeans to the Christian god that celebrate faith, and prickly polemics denouncing religious belief of any kind that celebrate science, reason, and the beauty of the natural world. All in all, it’s a nice, and very important, conversation.
We had been passing ideas back and forth since December 2020, and this summer we got together in Scott’s home studio in San Francisco to lay down the groundwork for the songs. It was an absolute thrill for me to play music with Scott again. We both played all of the different instruments and supported each other to bring out the best in each other’s songs. We even wrote a couple of songs together.
Just to give you a taste, here are some super rough mixes.
I’m pleased to report that Jarkko Heiniö, the genius behind the production of Reclinerland (2011) and How to Save the World is working on mixing the third Parks & Recreation album, tentatively titled Every Road I Travel. Based in Stockholm, the Finnish producer Japi, as he’s nicknamed, has been working hard twiddling knobs to balance all the elements on the long-awaited new album.
Back in 2014 and ‘15, Bob and Joe and I went into Sean Flora’s Suburbia Studios on Suavie’s Island in Portland, OR and recorded the basic tracks. Production on the album stalled when I couldn’t scrape up the dough to pay orchestral players or find guitar plugins. After a while, technology caught up with me, and earlier this year I approached Japi to work on the album. To my delight, he agreed, and I’m happy to say that within a year the album is finally going to see the light of day!
The album will feature myself, Joe and Bob, and Sean Flora playing electric guitar. Jason Hughes will also be lending his guitar talents to the album, as well as my friend and colleague, the lovely R&B singer Anna Lande.
Here’s a sneak peek: the rough mix for the song On The Wet Streets of Seville (Semana Santa)
In a world that seems to be bubbling over with crisis after crisis (I’m looking at you, United States of America), we here at George Recordings have the antidote: pop music! Parks & Recreation are proud to re-release the second album How to Save the World.
The album will once again be available on Tunes, Spotify, and all digital retailers starting December 4th, 2020. Download yours and use it as background music in your underground bunker!
Hello again! Lots of news to tell you about.
First, the song catalog is complete, except for maybe the 28 songs in Happy Valley. Those will come once I get the lyrics. Copying and pasting them from the script creates spacing problems that will make designing the pages difficult. It will happen!
Second, a new EP is available on George Recordings. The Love Letter to the South EP, featuring the poetic stylings of Melanie Masson. The album tells a brief tale of love and loss. You know how it goes. The songs are written in torch song format. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Third, my good friends whom I’ve known for years—Anthony who has been a member of almost every band I’ve ever been in, Chris, who has played guitar on almost every album I’ve ever recorded, and Ron, who has mixed or mastered almost everything I’ve done—and I have reunited in song. We played in a band together in high school called the Hermans Throo Osmosis. During the confinement this past March, we got together virtually and created a new album. It’s coming out on Bandcamp and Spotify and other retailers, but you can listen to it here first. It’s called The Hermans Throo Osmosis vs The End of the World. And isn’t it true?
Other than that, I’m keeping on, my friends. Summerhaven is coming along, I have a book coming out next month, and I’ve got another epic EP in the works called Year Zero. Soon, Chris will be finished with the guitar tracks for the Parks & Recreation album, and I can contact my old buddy Jarkko for some additional dubbing and mixing. Hopefully that P&R album will be finished sometime next year. If you want to read about it, visit the archive blog in the Parks & Recreation section.
That’s all for now! More later.
2016
In the beginning of 2016 I finished basic recording on the Parks & Recreation album with Sean Flora. The problem was, I didn’t have the money or the players to record the orchestral instruments on the album, so I had to put the recordings on the back burner while I figured out a solution. So, the third Parks & Recreation album was placed on hold.
In spring of 2016 I went back to Germany, so I wasn’t working on a lot of new music. I returned to Portland in the summer and married my fiancé. At the wedding, I performed with members of Parks & Recreation as well as my first band from high school, the Hermans Throo Osmosis. We performed songs from This is It! I’ll have some rough demos up in the near future.
2017 - 2019
I started working in France in March, 2017. In a large mansion house in Crecy-la-Chapelle during the spring, I started work on the comic version of Success!, which consumed the next three years. All through 2018 and 2019 it was really the only project I worked on. I kept a tight schedule of 1 page per day, taking about two months to finish one scene. Now, as of March 2020, the comic is finished (at least until it needs to be revised) and I’m searching for a publisher for a print version. Go check it out at www.successcomic.com.
But I wasn’t entirely away from pop music. While Success! was in production I played in a cover band here in France called Fanny & The Chybers, and still am when we get together for a gig. I played keyboards. I also briefly played with another cover band here. The band didn’t have a name and it was a short-lived gig.
I was also playing a fair bit of jazz piano. Anna Lande, a colleague of mine with a velvety singing voice, and I have been working on songs under the moniker Les Californiens. We’re working on recordings of jazz standards. We hope to get a regular gig playing in some dive.
And I was going up to Blvd. de Clichy every weekend to play at an open mic. That’s where I met Dino, a crooner from Morocco who plays guitar regularly with a little combo at the Chat Noir. I’ve gone up to visit him and sit in on several occasions.
2020
My wife and I got officially divorced in 2019, so the This is It album kind of died in the water. Now that Success! is finished, however, I’ve begun doing lots of music.
First, I began work on a new Reclinerland solo album. It’ll be the first album in 9 years. Wow. I’m going to take many of the songs from This is It and put them on this new album. I’m really excited about this next album, because I’ll be collaborating with many of my old and new friends. I’ve called on the talents of my friends here in France. Work on this album will be mostly remote, with me recording guitar, piano, and vocal tracks and sending them to friends for overdubs. Included in this project is the third Ideal Home Music Library, which will include string arrangements. Some of the friends I’ve approached are my friends in Fanny & The Chybers, Fred, Fabrice, Fanny, and JC, as well as my old friends Chris (Stratford 4), Ron (Spidermeow), and Anthony (Reclinerland, Parks & Recreation). Dino, my crooner friend here in Paris who has a regular gig at the Chat Noir. And Anna Lande from Les Californiens. I’m also going to be including some songs from the Parks & Recreation third album.
Second, Summerhaven is now a mosaic of Post-it notes and Fabula cards on my wall. I’m halfway through the first draft, so I’ll get a blog page going on that as soon as I get to the end and start writing the songs.
Third, I’m collaborating on a remote album project with my old and dear friends from high school. Our band, The Hermans Throo Osmosis, is working on a new album, our first recording in 30 years. I’m really excited about what we’ve come up with. It’s so good to work with Chris, Ron, and Anthony again. Doing music like them is like coming back home. I’ve written a few new songs for the album, when it’s finished I’ll have it up here for you to listen to.
Fourth, Chris Streng, my dear friend and mentor, has agreed to polish up the Parks & Recreation album with his guitar talents. Once he’s overdubbed his guitar, I will seek out a way to overdub the orchestral instruments and then get the whole thing mixed and mastered. I’m hoping to get that album done in the next year or so.
Fifth, in January of this year I started working on my 52 songs project, where I write a new song every week. It started out just as an exercise for me to warm up writing songs again in preparation for writing the songs for Summerhaven, but it’s become something much more. I’m using some of the songs for other projects.
And finally, I’m making a full online catalog of my entire song output. It will be available on this very website.
So, that’s quite a lot of stuff. I know it sounds all scattered, but it will all come together. I’ll have more updates on all of this stuff very soon. More later!
I just finished filming a video of questionable quality, but fun nonetheless. It was my submission to NPR's Tiny Desk contest: a rendition of If I Was Your Father from the EP. I haven't played that song, which I wrote in 2000, in years. Enjoy! (Fingers crossed.)
Last week I began work on another musical: Summerhaven. It's the story of an eccentric teacher of an alternative method of education who has a crisis of faith when his school is taken over by the local board of education. I feel good about where it's going so far, even though I'm only just beginning the first very rough draft.
Here's how I started the work: after working out a full sketch of the play using Dramatica, I created an outline. Then I created character sheets for each of the characters.
Now, I have to do lots of research about different kinds of movement-as-healing practices, such as yoga, the Waldorf method's eurythmy, Delacroix's Eurythmics, and others. This is important, because the teacher in my play practices the Lotus Flower method of education, which is an entirely fictional mishmash of such therapeutic methods. It fuses music and movement in a way that nurtures the child's inner spiritual bud as it opens into the beautiful flower that the child will become. It's very woo woo. I'm looking forward to writing about it.
The play opens with Charlotte, a girl of 25, entering a temple in Nepal where her father, Marcus, the play's Main Character, is meditating. They haven't seen each other for 20 years and Charlotte has been searching for him. The two have a confrontation and Marcus explains why he left Charlotte all those years ago. Then the opening number begins. It's hard to describe the opening number, but I'll try in a later post. Right now I'm going to start writing some more. More later!
This past Sunday we had a table read through of Success! Some great actors from the Portland theater community joined me. We had Mike Arsenault, Paige McKinney, David Loftus, David Mitchum-Brown, and Julianne Nelson. Paige, the Davids, and Julianne doubled the parts and Mike read Gregory. I read the part of Nicholas. The cast all did an amazing job. I was pretty floored to be acting and singing with such a talented group of people.
Reading around the table.
Now I'm working on a shorter draft of the play with narration for inclusion in the Fertile Ground Festival. I'll keep you posted on how that goes!
This is my first blog post in five years. Wow. You would think that I've been doing nothing all this time, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Here's what I've been up to, in a nutshell:
2009 - 2010
I left Portland for Mil(iving)wauk(H)e(ll)e to do a training to be a Montessori teacher. While doing the training I recorded a rough guitar/bass demo and staged a reading for Success!, got a regular gig playing shows at an art gallery, and designed the album cover for Secret Notebook, and released digitally two albums: Secret Notebook and The Ideal Home Music Library, Vol. 2. Milwaukee is a real dump.
After I finished the training for my day job and moved to Germany to work in a small school about 20 minutes outside of Frankfurt. There, on weekends and weeknights, I finished the piano score for Success! I also went to Finland to record the latest Reclinerland album. I worked on the vocal and piano tracks in my apartment, playing on a little piano that a generous man named Herr Reinke loaned me.
2011
While living in Germany I went to Finland in the Spring to record the album. Anthony Georgis and I spent a weekend working with Jarkko Heinio, or Japi, as he's nicknamed, in his home studio. We also walked a lot, ate black licorice ice cream, among other Finnish desert delights. For details, check out the albums page. We finished the album and released it digitally later that year.
2012
I returned to Portland and started writing for musical theater. My first ventures were 10-minute musicals, the first of which was Up On The Orange Moon, which was considered for the 4x4 Musicals show. My friend Rachel Sakry, who staged an amazing musical of her own called Whatever Girl got me in touch with Rich Rubin, who wrote the book for Happy Valley. So I spent this year working on the music and lyrics for Happy Valley while also writing songs for the next Parks & Recreation album.
2013 - 2014
These two years seem like a blur. A lot happened in my personal life, but I continued writing the songs for Happy Valley. We staged a reading of the play in late 2014. I also wrote another 10-minute musical, this one completely through-sung, called You Are Standing at the Mouth of a Cave. It was rejected by the 4x4 Musicals show, but I had a great time writing it. I also wrote about 20 songs for the next Parks & Recreation album, which I worked out and rehearsed with Joe Ballman and Bob Ham. Let's see, Happy Valley got a table reading. Oh, and in 2013 and 2014 I submitted Success! to the National Music Theater Conference, where it made the third round of selections before being roundly rejected.
2015
This Is It! first band photo
And now, it's 2015. I've finished the music and lyrics for Happy Valley. Parks & Recreation are going into the studio later this year to record our third (epic) album. I have to get started on the string arrangements. I'm starting a new band with my fiancee called This Is It!. We've already got half the songs for our album written! I've begun work on a new musical play called Summerhaven. I'm putting together a showcase of Success! for the Fertile Ground festival. Whew.
So you see? I haven't been blogging, but I haven't exactly been slacking either.
Hi everyone. On this, the blackest of all holidays, I just wanted to offer a little Valentine to all of the lonely people in the world who don't have significant others to smooch and cuddle and buy flowers for. It's a song called Don't You Know There Are Lonely People In The World?. I recorded it this time last year, and one year later, it's message is still as fresh as the day I wrote it. If you aren't a member of a couple, I hope you enjoy it.
Here lonely people! Download your present here!
Hello all. I was sitting here doing stuff when it hit me why I made the Secret Notebook album. I thought I'd take a little break and fill you in.
It happened that back in May, 2008, I got a message from some organization who was going to give Kevin Sampsell an award for something (being such a stand-up guy, I suppose). The organization wanted a 30 second sound clip from a bunch of Kevin's friends. So I took his book A Common Pornography from my bathroom reading basket and flipped through it. I happened upon the story Vibrator, which was only a paragraph long, and thought, "That would make a nice little song." So my challenge was to turn one paragraph of prose into a complete musical statement. So I rewrote the paragraph as a four line bit of verse, and then started singing a melody. It took me a whole afternoon to get a melody that felt complete, with a beginning, a climax, and an end. It had to have shape.
Anyway, I recorded it in Garage Band with lots of little kid noises and a big dental drill sound (which is supposed to be a vibrator), put some harmonies on, and voila! A 30 second song. Well, the people who honored Kevin liked it a lot. They even synced it to a little film they made in Kevin's honor. So I thought it would be a nice challenge to take all the songs in the book and make an album of short songs. In the end I wrote and recorded 25 songs between May or so 2008 and February 2009. Kevin came over and approved of 20 of them, and I finished the album.
So that's the story. Back to work. I hope you're all well! More later.