Barcelona

Sarah Palin & Other Numbers represents a return to music for me after ten years. It began as a concept album. Remember the TV show Northern Exposure? I tried to imagine the cast of Northern Exposure in a fictional Alaskan town of interacting with Alaska Governor (at the time) Sarah Palin. With that in mind, the goal was to write songs that illustrated these interactions. Unfortunately, the concept only came off half-baked. When I started the project, she was flying high, politically, but a few months in that, inevitably, faded. That suited me fine, politically and creatively, as I was growing fatigued from writing more songs about her. In the end, only three of the 11 songs were in keeping with the concept…hence “& Other Numbers” in the title.

Playtime was a play series created by a group of theater people in Barcelona. My wife was on of those people. I don’t think that’s the reason The Trial of Michael Klein was among those chosen to be performed, but it would be disingenuous to not mention it. In addition to a two-night performance, one member of the production staff was kind of enough to capture one of the performances on tape. And here is the final, original script. It was a blast writing this, and a thrill seeing it performed on stage. Directed by Noah Levin, and starring Andrew Laughton as Michael Klein,  Rebecca Ronayne as Karen, Sofia Smith as Joy, Addya Panayiotou as Lindsay, Grace Swordy as Penny, and David Chevers as Roger.

Normal Data was the second of two rock ‘n roll albums I released in Barcelona under the name Goldeggasse. Goldeggasse was the name of the street we lived on in Vienna, Austria. It’s German for golden goose. This is not a concept album, but it is more experimental. Where the first Goldeggasse release was entirely anemic, musically–Salmon Run, nothwithstanding–Normal Data has at least something for listeners who demand more than verbal diarrhea. There are a couple of songs here that might pass for avant garde, including The Dead Mouse and And Good King Henry. And another one, The Runner, represented my first collaboration–with XXX Jay–on anything with anybody since Everything Must Go in San Francisco.

The Last Days of Logan Legend was an odyssey into trip hop in which I tried to make music that was as moody and interesting as my favorite trip hop artists–folks like Portishead, Massive Attack and Tricky. I, by no means succeeded, but it 100% electronic, with lots of samples, which is something I’ve never tried before. I call this project an album, which is not at all fair. There are nine songs on it, but each is little more than a minute. So I think, at best, we could call it an Extended Play record, but as EPs are generally 15 minutes or more, even that is a bit of a stretch. Nevertheless, it’s a unique sound, and I don’t know that I could do it again if I had to.

Catalunya Barcelona is a documentary series that crams 300 years of Barcelona history into 10 1-hour episodes. It is the biggest project I’ve completed to date, and it took two years. I had hoped it would only take one year. However, I didn’t know when I started it that Catalunya was bubbling with desire to secede from Spain. And that desire boiled over into near daily protests and police actions right in the middle of shooting. And, on top of that, there was also that matter of me never having produced a documentary before, or a series 10 episodes in length. Today is available on multiple platforms including AppleTV, GooglePlay, Amazon Prime, Tubi, Vimeo, Vudu, and Xumo.

Pandemic Companion is an instrumental album I wrote during the first weeks after March 13, 2020, the day we were all sent into lockdown. It was released under the band name Goldeggasse, but was unlike other Goldeggasse albums and songs which were not instrumental, and were in fact, anemic, musically, but for the words. I think what’s most interesting about this project are the song titles. When the pandemic began I was of the opinion that anyone with a creative bent ought to be creating something for the time capsule, the pandemic being a 100-year event. When I read the song titles for Pandemic Companion, they, more than the music itself, transport my right back to those early days of sheltering in place. I also created music videos for each of the songs.

San Francisco Stories were another project undertaken during the early days of the pandemic. Like Old Manimations, it Adobe’s Character Animator was paramount. But rather than use the software as a backdrop for round-tabling pseudo-intellectual and political ideas, it was a a way to present spoken word recollections from my years in San Francisco. I only produced two in all. The first one was about how seeing a South Park episode for the first time in decades triggered a series of San Francisco-related memories, including what brought me there in the first place.The second one is about that time my boss at Bank of America stole my car and disappeared forever.

Old Manimations is an animated web series that I began in the summer of 2020, after Pandemic Companion was complete. I was about to turn 50, and we were all inside, waiting out the pandemic. I produced 24 shorts, in all. And there were a number of recurring characters, among them Hal, Shelly, Perry, Dean, Frank, Otto, and Stu. There is a lot of philosophizing and pontification in these shorts. A part of me is hesitant to watch any of them again because they, like Pandemic Companion, are so tied to a very specific time in history. An interesting thing about this series is that, as I posted more and more of them on Facebook, they garnered fewer and fewer likes, fewer and fewer views. That is when you know you’re really on to something.