Volume 4 - Rockin' the Legacy

Volume 4 - Rockin' the Legacy is really a companion album to Volume 3 - Rockin' the Hard Road. I had just completed Volume 2 when I went full throttle into composing more songs, and - as I said in an earlier post - the flow of original tunes coming out of me was phenomenal. It was like an open water faucet pouring out water at full blast. That's how fast the new music was coming out of me. And before I knew it I had enough original songs for two more albums.

Even though Volume 2 has 11 songs, I decided to cap my albums at ten songs each from then on. It was because ten songs together approached one hour long and I thought an album shouldn't be longer than that. Most vinyl albums were actually about 40 minutes back in the day, which was good because as I'm revising my music at this time, I have been cutting down on the length of the songs, bringing the total time to about 45 minutes by average. So it all worked out.

Volume 4 contains one song that I had written for a former school principal of mine. She was the principal who had hired me, and when she left the district to take a position elsewhere I wrote the song called Legacy. It's a short song and has a catchy tune, and it ended up becoming the name of the album, as in Rockin' the Legacy. I felt the picture of the American flag on the moon was an apt cover that captured the spirit of the word Legacy.

The playlist is as follows:

Letting it Go
My Lady
The Greatest
Rule the Day
Legacy
Never the Same
Those Were the Days
Time Out
Wake Up
Crystal Ball

Letting it Go was originally called Holding the Line. But as I revised and rearranged the song, I found myself revising the lyrics as well, thus the new name. What distinguishes this song is that it begins with a killer organ solo. One of the few songs of mine that does that.

The Greatest is about the greatest human being to have ever lived, so that's all I'll say about that song other than the fact that it includes a great double guitar solo. It's another of my personal favorites.

Those Were the Days is NOT the song we heard Archie and Edith Bunker singing on that old TV show. It's a completely original rock song, but it does have a similar theme as the title suggests.

Another favorite is Crystal Ball. The vocals however were so difficult, I could barely sing it. As a result, the volume of the vocals is not loud enough. I will have to redo it one day with another effort to apply the vocals. So good luck to me on that.

My Lady is about my wife. She is, after all, my lady, thus the song's title. It's another favorite. And correspondingly this album has been one of my favorites overall. But like I said before, I have a lot of favorites. Look at it this way. I haven't written a song I haven't liked. And I can honestly say every song on this album is a great song.

Volume 3 - Rockin' the Hard Road

 

As happy as I was with my first rock songs on Volume 2, that didn't mean I was in a phase of kicking back and enjoying it at the expense of getting back to the keyboard and writing new music. It was strange at that point, really. I was entering a phase of my life where my creativity was peaking, and the songs were flowing out of me one after another. And I don't mind saying, that they are all great songs.  Of course, I can't sing, so I just left them on the floppy disc or put them on a cassette tape, and there they sat for years. I couldn't even let anyone hear them. Because with no one singing the songs, (which did include lyrics, btw) they just weren't ready to be listened to.

Which is why I'm singing the songs now. No I'm not pretending to be a singer. And no, I don't play them for anyone still. Just me. Because I can at least stand my own voice. I don't dare subject anyone else to my vocals yet. Another day I will put them on Sound Cloud or Spotify or whatever. The day will come. Right now I just want to finish Volumes 9, 10, and 11. Then I'll put the vocals to them and then I'll put the lot of them online. So stay tuned. The songs are great. Just wish the singing was too.

Volume 3 playlist includes:

Portrait
Long Hard Road
You're My Friend
Show Me the Money
If You Call Me
You Never Give Up
Crazy Days
Gone Already
Dark Society
The Reaper

A couple interesting notes on the origin of some of those songs. I was in the middle of composing the songs for Volume 3 just about twenty years ago. My son was three or four years old at the time. And when I entered my room he was there playing with some toys, and he was singing a song that apparently he had made up on the spot, and the words were "...you're my friend...I know..." and from that five note segment I was inspired to put it into an entire song from there.

And yes, it's the song titled You're My Friend.

Another interesting thing about this album is that during this same period I woke up one day having a dream about a new song. An original tune was sounding in my head, and I thought it was a great riff. So I ran downstairs immediately to my keyboard and played out the riff that had been sounding in that dream. And sure enough, I put that riff into a complete song. After writing the lyrics I called it You Never Give Up. To this day, it's one of my favorite songs.

But I have a lot of favorites. After all, I have 13 total albums and I have even more songs to put on even more albums. Can't wait to get them all done.

Volume 2 - Rockin' the Millennium

Like I said, Volume 2 Rockin' the Millennium does exist and here is the cover design. It's from some image I found on the internet. I don't know if it's a painting or a CGI. I just thought it was a cool image and would work for the title of the album.

This is actually my second choice for the cover design of Volume 2. My first choice was a simple sunset over an ocean setting, but then I thought  it just didn't have enough in the composition to make it interesting. So I switched to this image. It too is a sunset, but it looks like there's a city or some kind of urban environment in there. And there's some kind of tower in the foreground to the right and a smoke stack in the distance to the left. These elements contribute to a better image.

And because it also is depicting a sunset, it gives it pretty much the same color scheme as the first design I had chosen. Another factor that improves the image is the clouds in this design give the impression of an imminent storm. But exactly what that is just above the tower on the upper right is beyond me. I don't know if those are also clouds or is it smoke or what?

But whatever, the image in its entirety makes for a good cover design for my Volume 2.
The playlist is as follows:

The Maverick
Sinister Minister
Certain People
Demon Dance
The Woman
Inferno
Too Late
The Fast Life
Lessons
Rejoin Society
Journey

These songs are my first rock songs, thus the words, "Rockin' the..." in the title. And then I thought "Rockin'..." would work for all my album titles. And I have 13 albums at this time.

On CDs so far are Volumes 2 - 8. With 12 and 13 done before my new technology had been procured. So I will redo those once 9 - 11 have been completed. Stay tuned!