Volume 7 - Rockin' the Dream

 

After Volume 6 was completed, still no writer's block was setting in. The music was still pouring out. And all original tunes. I had just completed what I considered some of the best music I had ever written, but great music was sill coming out of me. The next song, which is the first song on Volume 7, was so great, I might have even called it a masterpiece. But that category was reserved for only two songs that my friend and I had agreed upon years before. And ever since those days, (which date back to the seventies,) no other song had qualified. 

I might have nominated a song or two since then, but again, my friend would need to second those nominations and we are no longer in touch. Doesn't matter. No one needs another opinion to believe for himself or herself what song is a masterpiece. And for me, the song Dream qualifies. I believed it when I was composing the song. And I still do. I put in lyrics that are reminiscent of Martin Luther King's famous speech. Thus the name Dream. And I named the entire album after that song.

And needless to say, the entire album is great. Once again, every single song is nothing less than a great song. So it's one of my favorite albums to date. But, again, I have a lot of favorites, and this album is most definitely one of them. The playlist is as follows:

Dream

Hollow

Tall Tale

Want to Run

Give It Up

Remember

The Real Thing

On a Roll

In the Future

That number of songs is not an error. This album is the only album I put together that only contains nine songs. It's because when I originally wrote the songs, they were all very long. And because I was at first putting these albums on a 60 minute cassette tape, I was keeping the total running time to that. So when the nine songs totaled 60 minutes I left it at that.

But when I came back to my music recently to revise all my songs, I have rearranged several, and I made most of them much shorter. Some quite literally are half as long as they used to be. So now the total running time for the album is 39 minutes and some seconds. Which now ranks it to be the shortest running time of all my albums. But that's the reason why.

No matter. It's 39 minutes of fantastic music. And the singing? Well, I'll never pretend I can sing. I've said that time and again. But at least it's not bad. Which is the best I might ever hope for. I look at it this way: as long as I can carry a tune and sing in key. And I do.

 

Volume 6 - Rockin' Every Nation

So once Volume 5 was completed, one might think writer's block would set in. After all, I've read about it happening to many big-name musicians and composers. I've heard of it happening after volume 4, to many, and after volume 3, for others, and even after Volume 2. Some bands only put out one great album, and that's it.

But for me, after five albums of great songs, the music just wouldn't stop. Meaning original tunes were still pouring out of me so I kept writing more music.

Volume 6, I might even say, contained some of my best music yet. I mean every single song on there is simply great. It starts with a great song, There's a Way, and it ends with a great song, Fool, and every song in between is great. Sure, I wrote them. And sure I'm biased, but whenever I listen to this album, I can't help but think to myself what great songs these are. They are all intricate compositions of interwoven melodies and instrumental solos that demonstrate music writing at its best.

Song #3, Every Nation, is so good that I ended up naming the album after it. But by no means does that suggest it's the best song. I mean this album is one example of every song being just as good as every other song. I remember appreciating that when I used to buy albums when I was young. And not too many albums actually did that.  But some did.

The playlist is as follows:

There's a Way
Eye Upon You
Every Nation
I Like It
Good Ol' USA
Another Day
Wind It Up
Put That Away
Change
Fool

The ONLY problem I had with this album is that Wind it Up is another one of those songs that was very difficult to sing. I mean the vocal track on that song was so difficult it took me over fifty takes to finally get a cut that was at least satisfactory. I still might want to re-sing it, like I'm doing for some of the other songs on other albums. I probably will for that one too. I hope it doesn't take me another fifty takes. It would be nice if I had a producer and a real studio. It would probably make it a lot easier. No, better yet, it would be nice if I had a real singer. Yeah. Oh, well.

Volume 5 - Rockin' the Big TIme

Once Volumes 3 and 4 were completed and saved on cassette tapes, I decided to purchase a new keyboard machine that would enable me to save my songs on something other than tape. I was still very much a man of the twentieth century, but I was keen to the new digital age and saving my work digitally was the way to go.

This was twenty years ago, as the 21st century had just begun, (the reason I named volume 2 Rockin' the Millennium) and new technology was coming out just as fast as my new songs. So I purchased the latest Yamaha electronic keyboard which enabled me to save my new work on a floppy disc. As I had indicated on an earlier post, those songs have remained on the floppy disc ever since.

But starting with Volume 5, my songs were now digital, and reworking them was far easier than if they were on tape. But that didn't stop original tunes from being created. And so I just kept on going. Several of these songs I am particularly proud of. Evolution is a great song, and I look forward to it every time I play this album. The first song, It Was You, is, of course, about my wife, when we first met. The Playlist is as follows:

It Was You
Evolution
Angel Face
Hiding
This Time
Helping Out
My Life
I know
The Street
Last Word

Unlike Volumes 3 and 4, which I named after individual songs on the albums, I went back to my method of naming Volume 2 and just came up with a name completely unrelated to the songs. I felt that the songs were Big Time and thus the name. Rockin' the Big Time. And depicting the Empire State Building in a view looking up seemed an apt image for the cover.

To me, at least, it's another successful playlist of songs that I can enjoy any time. And unlike Volume 4, none of the songs were too difficult for me to sing. The song My Life kind of was, but not so hard as Crystal Ball on Volume 4. So I won't have to redo any of these, like I will have to do on Volumes 2 and 4. Hopefully I'll be a better singer by then, but I won't count on it.

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!

Volume 1 Rockin' the First Steps

My fist album of original music will be on this CD. It doesn't exist yet, because I skipped it when I decided to put my music on CDs. But I certainly do intend, one day soon, to get there. It's not such a rockin' album really. As I said before, these are mostly love ballads and slow tunes.

No, this is not a painting by me. This is a painting by Jean-Francois Millet and I thought it would make for a good first album design.

You can guess why I might call my first CD of music Rockin' the First Steps. Clearly it's because these were my first steps at writing original songs. But again, it's not really a rockin' album. And that's really not me. Which is why I skipped it.

But I'm on the home stretch of putting my music on CDs right now, and since the world of publishing is on hiatus at this time, (at least as far as I'm concerned,) I'm focusing on my music. And since this CD will contain the fist songs I ever wrote, I thought I'd post it first. So there you are. Next up will be Volume 2 Rockin' the Millennium. That one does exist.