New releases and Success

I'm so excited!! I've just gotten clearance to digitally distribute the EP that came out in 2002. That means I can digitally re-issue the album any way I want. So, coming soon to fine online retailers everywhere: the remastered EP with a couple of bonus tracks and stuff. I'm trying to secure permission to re-release the first album as well. That will make this year very exciting for Reclinerland indeed. If I get the go ahead for the first album, I will be releasing records all the way until January 2010. I've almost finished the mastering on Secret Notebook, as well. So things are really productive here at Reclinerland HQ. Everything is running along quite smoothly.

That said, I realized as I read over the blog that it got a bit whiny for a while there. I was supposed to be blogging about the process of creating things and whatnot, specifically, the songwriting process. So, I hereby vow to get this blog back on that tract. To do that, I thought I would start a series of posts which talk about how I wrote the songs for the play. Lest you think I'm being narcissistic, I'm doing this for three reasons: 1) it might be instructive for me to review the process so that I can catch any glitches in preparation for writing the piano score. 2) It would be valuable to get feedback from any of you out there who are songwriters, actors, writers, or who are just fans of music and musical theater. After all, feedback and dialog -- not whining-- is why I started this blog in the first place. 3) It would be nice to reflect on the process because I'm going to be very busy in the coming months with career things, so I won't be doing much songwriting. I find it instructive, when I'm not actually doing much writing, to reflect about writing. That way, when I sit down to write, my imagination will be all lubed up. And I do have my next songwriting project in mind: the Ideal Home Music Library, Volume 3, which will be another set of fictional showsongs, parlor songs, and art songs for string quartet and voice. But that's another post. For now, let me just repeat that reflecting on the creative process is very valuable, and I shall be doing more of it here, I promise.

So, this is the first of a series of posts dedicated to reviewing the songwriting process for the musical I've just written called Success. (By the way, even as I write this, the play is out there being read by people who are going to give me feedback. So entire songs may be scrapped or rewritten as bits of the story are changed and fleshed out. But be still my heart; as I once read: a musical isn't written, it's re-written.) In the posts that follow, I'm going to talk about each song in terms of how I came up with the idea, what the technical considerations are, how I'm going to set it for piano, what I think will and won't work, and what the challenges will be, etc. To begin, I'd like to present to you the first song in the piece. It's called Canon For Cool Kids, and you can examine it here.

In the next post, I'll examine the song in detail. So, as usual, more later.