Well, my “blog” seems to be more of a yearly communique! I’ve been working on a lot of great things of late, and wanted to let people know who happen to come upon my little site here, and are curious about what I am up to!
I’ve just finished mastering Madeleine Peyroux’s next album entitled “Anthem”, and I am very excited about it. It was written by a group consisting of Madeleine, myself, David Baerwald, Brian Macleod, and Patrick Warren, with us actually sitting in a room (Patrick’s studio) and writing songs together. The same band also played on the album, augmented by Pete Kuzma and Dean Parks. It’s a big step into a somewhat different direction for Madeleine and I, as you will hear when you BUY it from your local INDEPENDENT RECORD STORE! : ) We loved making it and writing it, and I think that you will hear that. Along with the songs that we wrote there is one cover; a version of our dear friend Leonard Cohen’s great song “Anthem”. Anthem turned out to be a great title for the album, as it is really a composite picture of how we see what is going on in the world at the moment. Yes… dark times indeed… BUT, we are not taking it too seriously in our philosophical examination of the State Of Our Species. No, you won’t find us bellyaching about how terrible everything is. You will instead find us trying to muster up the will to fight the tide of stupidity, decay and amoral disenfranchised apathy that gnaws at our souls, all the while laughing about the profound cluelessness of our culture and species in general. I hereby guarantee that you will love it if you hear it! (he said, surrendering to the hucksterism and general lack of humility that permeates everything these days!)
I am now finishing up mixing my wife Luciana Souza’s album. She has put to music a group of wonderful poems. There are four poems by our friend Leonard Cohen that his estate (actually his son Adam Cohen, who I have known and worked with on and off for years) allowed her to put to music, an Emily Dickinson poem, an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem, and some of her own poetry. It is a very stark and beautiful record, with Scott Colley playing bass, Chico Pinheiro playing guitar, and Lu playing percussion herself. I am very excited about this album. It will be on Sunnyside Records.
In addition, I find myself working with the great actor Jeff Goldblum on a project that will feature him both playing piano with a group of great musicians, as well as bringing his smart and self-deprecating comedic sense to bear, in an album and accompanying TV show. More to tell about this soon! Well, I have succeeded in boring myself half to death, so it is time to send this masterful blog out into the webisphere, like a pedestrian and mundane message in a bottle! More to come. Hopefully sooner than a year from now!
