Sparks from the Fire

Note: The following is my response to a recent customer question.  Occasionally we print these to clarify to all what might be otherwise misunderstood.  The question from customer was, “Why can’t the sampled songs on your website be full songs instead of only part of the song?” The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Dear Bart,

Your letter came to me this morning from our customer service department.  I’ve asked that these kinds of responses come to me occasionally so that I could help handle them and help clarify confusions.

As CEO of Watchfire Music and one of its composers I would love that you could hear a full sample of my music on the site, but unfortunately we, as well as the rest of the industry, have learned that if we were to put the full sample on the site, then three generations of people would then steal such and never actually purchase it.

Unfortunately I have to eat.  I’m working on overcoming that limitation in life, but I just haven’t gotten there yet.  As it is, we live in a world where now much of what we create as musicians and composers is either free or stolen because of file sharing and hacking.

Your short note came across to all of us here as critical.  We pride ourselves in our giving.  We sell songs that take tens of thousands of dollars to create for 99 cents in a world where music is now even becoming “free” — thereby reducing our much loved occupations to the level of hobbies.

I guess you got me on my soap box here, but when I come across moments like this of such misunderstanding, it usually, these days, puts me right back on that box.

We do offer every possible tool we can think of to help you discover and understand our music.  Perhaps you might rethink this in terms of going to the movies.  Let’s say they were forced to let you see the movie for free and then, if you saw the whole thing and liked it, then, and only then, you would have to pay for it.

It’s a good analogy. (more…)

I’m going to ask each of you to do something personal, something that will cost you, something that you would do selflessly for us, but something that I can almost guarantee will enhance your life on one level or another.  Ready?  Here goes …

Click here and go purchase Julia Wade’s new CD, Silk Road.  If you like, go listen to the samples first, but please don’t stop there – that’s not really fair to either Julia or me.  The samples are meant to be teasers.  Be teased, then buy it.

It’s a CD that we are so very proud of and have worked our tails off completing for this Holiday season.  It is absolutely some of our best work as a team, and actually everything we do – Watchfire Music, Link Recording Studios, Classes that we teach, The Watchfire Music Listening Room productions (I could go on and on) – is centered around the release of new music in CD form.

It’s why we do all the rest, including our very successful WFM Digital Sheet Music division.  We live to produce recorded music.  I know you know that and just want to take this most special moment to re-enforce the purpose of our lives.

What’s the album about?  It’s about a journey that we’re on down an ancient/modern path/highway.

Where are we going?  Forward – into new and previously unexplored territory.

Will it be a totally new Julia?  Yes and no.  It’s an evolution.  It’s a widening of the highway.  It’s an exploration of new ideas while at the same time hammering the old into new shapes and sizes.

As you who read this blog regularly know, I tend to write long.  This time I’m going to keep it short so that you might take that time to go check out and support us in this precious endeavor.

Thanks for reading.  Thanks for following.  Thanks for listening.

We’re now in the final throes of recording and mixing Julia Wade’s new CD, Silk Road – Inspirational Journeys Across Planet Earth.  Some of the material of this new work was actually started nearly two years ago and then the project was tabled when we developed her Solos CD as a farewell gift to the Christian Science community when she finished her tenure as Soloist in Boston.

But we knew we had something really interesting going in Silk Road and we couldn’t wait to get beck to it.

The CD is due to hit the streets in early December and will be our major impetus throughout the holiday season.  She has just two more vocals to complete, all the orchestrations are completed and by the end of this next week I’ll be half way through the mixing.

It’s simply a most special project.  You’ll say, “Aren’t they all?” and I must answer, “Of course, but this one’s, for both of us, particularly transforming.”

Silk Road marks Julia’s arrival at the threshold of a new evolution in her music.  Her departure from her past carries forth her commitment to inspire through song not only on a sacred level, but also with an in depth look at the issues of our world at large and the individual human condition.

So it’s an album of songs that will continue to inspire her growing fan base with fresh new looks at spiritual reach through songs like Thinking Made It So and Julie Gold’s When He Walks With Me, but it also ventures into new territory dealing with the issues of our world today.

For the first time she now tries her hand at lyric writing and scores instantly with her own thoughts on What Peace Looks Like from the perspective of three children of the world from Uganda, the Sudan, and the ghettos of Kingston, Jamaica.  The title song, Silk Road, promises a comparison of the ancient Silk Roads spanning China, Tibet and Europe with the modern day impact of the Internet.

And then there are the songs of love … (more…)

Joe Papp

This is Part 4 of a multi-part series of posts.  I suggest that you start with Part 1 if you have the time and really want to appreciate the full effulgence.

One afternoon about a year into my tenure as composer-in-residence at The Public Theater, Joe Papp called me into his office, sat me down and announced, “It’s time you did a work of your own – a musical.  As part of your education, I’m going to give you the works of three playwrights.  Read their plays and choose one that you think you can convert into a musical.”

He went on, “By doing this, you will have the opportunity to both study and work with the masters.  Have it finished in six months.”  Whew!  A rather heady assignment for a 26-year old man-child who was already pretty busy with everybody else’s works as well.

The three playwrights he gave me were William Shakespeare, Aristophanes and Euripides.  Fortunately, I had aced a terrific course in college on the works of Shakespeare, so I did not have to read all his plays, so I went back to my study notes and picked a few possibilities.  The trouble, of course, with Shakespeare was the language.  It would have to be a modernization of his language for a musical and who would want to mess with the master’s words.  It would be like writing pop songs from the works of Beethoven.

So I turned to the Greeks.  Long story short, after about a month of plowing through Aristophanes, I turned to Euripides who I had barely even heard of.  There I found not only a master playwright, but one of the great creators of the art of the playwright and a weaver of tales that have fascinated me since.

Weeks later I returned to Joe’s office and announced that I had, at last, made my choice.  It would be Euripides’ Iphigenia In Aulis, the classic story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and how, when King Agamemnon, mired with his army on the shores of Aulis because he had no wind to sail his ships to Troy to bring Helen back, decided to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods to get his necessary wind.  He then plans a ruse and orders his queen, Clytemnestra, to Aulis with Iphigenia in tow for she is, he lies, to marry Achilles, his greatest of warriors.  Settin’ her up to let her down and definitely a tragedy!

But musicals are rarely tragedies – usually they have happy endings – so it was my choice to write the show as an opera, and a rock opera to boot. (more…)

This is Part 3 of a multi-part series of posts.  I suggest that you start with Part 1 if you have the time and really want to appreciate the full effulgence.

The summer before my senior year in college I, on a whim, auditioned for a job in the chorus of the St. Louis Muny Opera, the largest outdoor summer stock musical theater in America.  I don’t know why it was called “Opera”, as far as I know they never did anything other than musicals.

It’s an entirely different story, but, as luck would have it, I got the job.  There I learned about musicals, having the opportunity to play and understudy in 10 shows a summer for two summers.

I sat in between two male dancers in the dressing room in assigned positions for both summers and for the first time in my life, got to know and became fast friends with two gay men – one, Michael Shawn, who later became my choreographer for several shows that I wrote and directed in NYC and at whose bedside I sat as he died of AIDS.  The other, Nicholas Dante, like Mike, went on to be a working Broadway dancer and was always dabbling with playwriting.

One evening, after the show in St. Louis that first summer, Nick invited me to participate in a reading of one of his plays.  I gladly accepted, knowing that I would be attending the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater that next fall in NYC and I thought that I might get a little more experience under my belt.

I don’t remember much about the reading – the play was OK and the food was much better.  I do remember that we all got to play actors auditioning for a musical and that’s about it.

Years later, when I was Composer-In-Residence at The Public Theater, Joe Papp asked me to work with the director of a new experimental piece that was work-shopping in one of his theaters.  It seemed that the composer was in Hollywood finishing a film-scoring job and would not be able to attend auditions, so Joe asked me if I would help the director run auditions and sit in for the composer.  Of course I agreed.

The day of auditioning started and just before we saw our first victim, in walks my old pal Nicholas Dante.  I said, “Hey Nicky, what are you doing here?”  He answered, “Oh, this is my play – you know, the one we did the reading of that night back at the Muny in St. Louis.”  He had actually gotten that show on and now was work-shopping it at the most powerful developmental theater in America.  I was so happy for him to have such a lucky break.

In the ensuing years I was to become even happier for my old pal Nick, for the director of that workshop was Michael Bennett, the composer who I subbed for was Marvin Hamlisch, and the show was A Chorus Line. (more…)

In this extremely confusing era of free music where musicians are now finding it impossible to make a living, I often stop and wonder how it’s all going to shake out.  When I walk the streets of NYC nowadays I can always spot a musician.  They’re the ones with a red question mark hanging over their head.

I came across a very interesting set of analytics the other day regarding our business.  Here are a few salient excerpts:

From: Digital Music News

Selling More Than 100 Downloads a Year?

Then Consider Yourself Very Lucky…
Monday, June 18, 2012
by  Paul Resnikoff

Did you sell more than 100 downloads last year? How about more than 1? We spent the morning compiling some statistics related to paid downloads, specifically from 2011, and found some stunningly-lopsided figures…

First, consider these top-level stats, as shared by Nielsen Soundscan several months ago:

• The iTunes Store now has a catalog of 28 million songs.
• Roughly 8 million songs were downloaded just once in 2011, according to Nielsen.
• 94 percent of all songs were downloaded less than 100 times in 2011.

Also it’s a sad fact that of the last 13 million songs that iTunes has posted, only 3 million have sold one more more.  That means that 10 million songs have sat un-purchased.

Times have changed.  We no longer do this for the money.

Most of us never did.

This staggering turn of events has made all of us stop and reconsider our dwindling options on how to eat.

I, for one, have always been most fortunate.  I’m an eclectic writer, I work in multi-mediums like theater, TV, films, recorded music, sheet music and live music, I own my own studio, I run my own record company and I have a great raft of fine musicians and vocalists to work with.  Call it a one-man band. (more…)

Life has its tragedies.  For some they come all too often.  Others seem to live blessed lives, but for all of us, they come.

They’re never any fun, but they do have a purpose in this life on Planet Earth.  They teach us.  They teach us the yin to the yang, the dark to the light, and from this teaching we learn how polar opposites or seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn.

Without tragedy many of us do not appreciate the sunlight.  How often do we hear someone who faced a near death experience and survived say, “I never appreciated my life the way I do now.”

Living through tragedies is often a rehearsal in survival techniques.  Through it we learn how to cope, how to begin breathing again when the breath is knocked from us.

It’s a part of life and it builds muscle.

Tragedies come in all shapes and colors.  Sometimes we see them coming.  Sometimes we don’t.  The unexpected ones are often the toughest.  For me, when Mindy died, I sat in a chair for four hours and looked at the wall in the darkness unable to comprehend.  I was shocked into a kind of coma.  Here yesterday; gone today.

Tragedies stay planted in memory.  They are simply unforgettable.  Where were you when Pearl Harbor was attacked?  What were you doing when JFK was assassinated, when your father died, when you caught your husband cheating?  In a way, we remember them more vividly than the triumphs.  They are simply a huge part of the fabric of our lives. (more…)

American Songwriter Magazine’s music critic and blogger, Paul Zollo, has just thrilled us all with his comprehensive and beautifully written rave review of our CD, Goin’ Home – On Heaven and Beyond. 

It appears in American Songwriter Magazine and is most easily found at their website.  You can go here: http://www.americansongwriter.com/category/blogz/paul-zollo-blogz/
to read it, or read it below printed in its entirety.

Having such a powerful review as this will certainly give us tremendous impetus going forward.  It’s long, but incredibly fulfilling.

I just thought that each of you would like to catch up and hear the good news.

REVIEW: Goin Home

AmericanSongwriter.com
BlueRailroad.com

•May 11, 2012

 Goin’ Home
On Heaven And Beyond
Peter Link

By PAUL ZOLLO

It’s a rare and timeless moment, a moment of grace, a drive-off-the-road-and-stop-the-car kind of moment. A time to turn off the engine and listen. It’s not something people do a lot of anymore; even when people listen to music nowadays, usually it’s while doing many other things. But music like this – and sung by singers like this – well, it’s worth taking a moment. This is something inspirational, something brave and new. It’s called Goin‘ Home. 

It sounds wrong, somehow, to characterize this as a celebration of death, but that is what it is: a celebration of the natural grace of death in our lives. It’s about rising above the fear all humans share regarding this final transition. It’s a cycle of songs about the enduring spirit of man, the spirit that lives on beyond our bodies do, the eternal spirit that exists beyond the easy grasp of words, but lives always in music.

The brainchild of Tony Award-nominated songwriter-producer-singer Peter Link, Goin’ Home is a phenomenal celebration of life really, more than death itself – but within this cycle there exists an elegant and inspirational acceptance of death, and ways by which we can realize a true acceptance of death. It’s an album which crystallizes the idea that death is not the end, but a birth into the beyond. Bravely creating a whole song cycle on a subject that few, with the exception of Lou Reed and Jacques Brel, have approached so fully, Peter Link has created a remarkable exploration of human finality, reflecting musically the full gamut of emotion experienced by those approaching death and those caring for and ultimately losing loved ones. There are sad songs here and  joyful ones, and it’s in that span of emotion that the genuine experience of death comes alive. This is not an easy road to walk, but Link’s songs and spirit go a long way in making you feel less lonely walking it.

Because as well all know, no matter how progressively spiritual one’s ideas about death might be, when the time comes – either for a loved one or for yourself – it’s frightening. It’s more frightening than anything, an encounter with the unknown in the most extreme way humans experience. This collection of songs is directed at those at death’s door, forced to integrate lifelong beliefs with an acceptance of the inexorable reality of this transition, and also directed at those forced to confront one of life’s toughest challenges: helping loved ones make a peaceful, fearless transition. (more…)