Catalog Complete

Volumes 2 and 3 are now up and ready to go on SoundCloud. And you can click on them on the sidebar if you care to. The music is great if I say so myself. My only regret is that I am not a singer. Nevertheless, the music is complete. It would be a dream come true if I had a real band and a real singer performing this music. But alas...

I was in a rock band years ago. It was a real rock band, with two guitarists, a bass player a drummer and a real singer. I was on the keyboards, of course, using an old-fashioned Vox Jaguar electric organ, and an upright piano.

But it worked. Unfortunately, my music writing at the time was in its infancy. I was only a teenager, and during that period of my life I had just begun writing my own songs. And I will admit even now, some of those songs were pretty darn good, even for a fourteen year old. (Which is when I wrote my first song.)

And during my teen years, I had written a small collection of songs, most of which I still remember. They are recorded on a cassette tape somewhere. Eventually I'll put  this collection of songs on another CD and call it Volume One - Rockin' the First Steps. They number about sixteen songs, which I wrote over a ten year period. From age 14 to about age 24. 

By then the band had dissolved and I focused on fine art instead of performing art. It wasn't until I was over forty when I went back to writing music again. I have chronicled what happened on this blog. To reiterate, it was after my fifth novel had been completed and published, I just got the music bug again.

So I bought new keyboards and got busy. And in the next three years or so, I wrote 120 more songs, which I put on volumes 2 through 13 and can be heard even now on SoundCloud.

I may get busy on my Volume 1 songs soon. But I'm getting back into my novels right now. I'm revising John Dunn; Heart of a Zulu and hoping to find representation or another publisher. I think that novel has the most potential, because it's a true story. And true stories are even better than fiction.

That's what I think anyway. We'll see how that goes. 

 I'm getting all of my music posted on SoundCloud. And now Volume 4 is on there. For a long time, Volume 4 was one of my favorites of all the albums I had written and arranged. Because of songs like Letting it Go, My Lady, and The Greatest, the first three songs on there, it held a special place in my heart. And then followed by songs like Rule the Day, and Legacy, I was particularly proud of this one.

Of course, that's not to say that the songs Never the Same, Those Were the Days, and Time Out were any less favored. And concluding with Wake Up and Crystal Ball were particularly encouraging to me. In fact, I was thinking Crystal Ball might have been the best of the lot.

The bottom line is they are all great. 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

I talked about this album in depth on an earlier post. I'll just conclude here by saying that I have redone the songs that needed to be redone. Particularly Letting It Go and Crystal Ball. Still I would prefer a real singer singing them. But I've talked about that too. It is what it is. Great songs, but less than great vocals. Oh well. It is what it is.

Volumes 5, 6, and 7 now posted

 I have Volumes 5, 6, and 7 now added to SoundCloud. I must remind anyone who happens to listen to them that I am not a singer. I only do the vocals on these volumes because, not only am I not a singer, I don't even KNOW anyone who is a singer. No relatives, no friends, and no colleagues or acquaintances of mine are singers. So what are you gonna do? You do it yourself.

Which is okay. No one knows my music as well as I do anyway. And maybe if I did know someone who was a singer, who says they would want to sing my songs anyway?

So whatever. If anyone can PRETEND that a real singer was singing these songs, then MAYBE they could use that imagination to appreciate the real music behind those songs. That remains to be seen. But if you are able to do that, then by all means, check out the music.

Volume 5 is filled with great songs. Volume 6 is filled with great songs too, but Volume 7 is filled with songs that can be called masterpieces, especially the first song, Dream. And even if I never write another song, these volumes would stand the test of time.

But who says I won't write another song? I'll get back to writing new music soon enough. Just have to post what I have up there first and then get Volume 1 finished. We'll see how it goes.

Volume 13 - Rockin' the Afterlife

Volume 13 - Rockin' the Afterlife wraps up my catalog of music. It's another concept album that didn't begin that way. It was just like Volume 12 in that I wrote all the songs independently of each other, but after the tenth song, when I sat down to write the lyrics, it became a concept album.

Song #1, Soul of Liberty is about life after death, but in the form of reincarnation. I do not necessarily believe in reincarnation. But the words were about that, so I went with it. And just like for the songs in Volume 12, each ensuing song became another song about that general theme.

It's a very controversial theme, I know, but it lasted right up to the final song on the album, Looking Back. Actually, both the music and the lyrics turned out to be very compelling. And just like for Volume 12, it's quite an adventure to sit and listen to this album, no matter how many times I have already. Sure there is mention of God, Heaven, Hell, different religions, and alternate realities. 

The bottom line is I don't care what anyone's religion is, or if they have or don't have one at all. But what is sure to come in everyone's life is death, as song #8 Sideways makes clear. And what happens at that point or after that point is basically what the lyrics are about. Come to think of it, the songs on this album explore that topic very deeply. 

So the playlist is as follows:

Soul of Liberty

Living in a Mirror

Not Your Show

Drum Beat

Time in the Sun

Kings Will Rise Up

Now You're There

Sideways

What Did You See

Looking Back

And Volume 13 in its entirety is already posted on SoundCloud. Just check the right margin of this blog. I had said I planned on posting all of my thirteen albums on there. And at this point volumes 8 through 13 are now up and running. (I just put Volume 8 on there this morning.) Just have to get 2 through 7 on there next, which I will in the very near future.

Volume 12 - Rockin' the Cosmos

 

So after 11 great albums of all original music, I created Volume 12 - Rockin' the Cosmos with one minor difference. It became a "concept" album. But it was not as if I wrote each individual song with a concept in mind. I wrote the songs like I always did, one after another and completely independent of each other. And after ten songs, like all the ones before, I decided to stop and write the lyrics. And it was then I started to realize I had a concept album in the works.

Song #1 turned out to be about an astronaut blasting off into outer space. I really didn't write the music with that in mind, but as the lyrics came into my head, and as I wrote them down, I realized this was going to be a concept album.

So Sensurround began the journey of a lone astronaut being launched into space and then getting lost "in a warping hole of time" as the lyrics explain.  And from there anything and everything was possible. Including the hallucination of a Green Lady dancing "along the edge of the wing" in song #2.

From there our space traveler laments the fact that he had been cut off from humanity In This Place as in song #3. And in song #4, his engines are dead, and he is drifting in a solar wind when he witnesses the Death of the Supermen, as he sees from his spaceship window a huge fleet of alien starships get wiped out by some unknown cosmic force.

But the alien space fleet was not the only thing affected. Our lone astronaut, being in the middle of the onslaught is somehow absorbed into the force and finds himself Merging with it in song #5.

In song #6, our protagonist realizes he is no longer what he used to be: a simple Spaceman. He is something else, with omniscient and omnipotent abilities to see everything and go anywhere.

And yet it wasn't so wonderful to him. In fact it was more Like a Curse, as he realizes in song #7 the consequences of being part of a life force that was so completely different than what he had known, that he has no ability to control its actions or the subsequent results of those actions.

And it was a realization that was most troubling in song #8. Because although this entity had the limitless power to create, its actions were almost always destructive. And considering the vast expanse of not only the galaxy, but of the universe, these actions were going to be Never Ending. 

Which meant there could be only one end result. Sooner or later this cosmic entity of which he had become a part would find its way to earth. And when it did, the fear of the consequence was a sobering thought to our protagonist. When that inevitable day occurred, he realizes in song #9 all he could say to his fellow human beings would be I'm Not the Bad Guy. 

Yet that day was years away. And after So Many Years, that day would finally arrive. But how many years had passed? So many, in fact, that the human race was hardly recognizable to our man. And thus the album ends in song #10 with that day approaching.

So even though I just listed the songs in italics above, the playlist is as follows:

Sensurround

Green Lady

In This Place

Death of the Supermen

Merging

Spaceman

Like a Curse

Never Ending

I'm Not the Bad Guy

So Many Years

Yes, this is the album I had in the right margin over the last couple of years. But the singing was so bad, I'm hoping no one listened to it. I have remade the songs now, editing a couple of them and re-singing all of them. That doesn't mean the singing is all that much better. Maybe it is a little bit. But I did eliminate that annoying saxophone track that had been on there.

And the album is available to be listened to now, posted in the right margin of this blog along with Volume 11 and my only other concept album, Volume 13, which I'll write about next.