Sparks from the Fire

I’ve just spent the last two and a half weeks working on Julia Wade’s new Inspirational music CD, Every Day. (Read more about Julia’s new CD at her Inspiratus blog.)

She took a “vacation” from her job in Boston where she is the soloist at the world headquarters of the Christian Science Church.

It’s one of those jobs where people think she shows up on Sunday and sings a couple of services and that’s about it, but, in reality, it’s pretty much a full-time job considering all the preparation, research, rehearsal and administrative work she puts into it.

So the perception in Boston is that Julia is on vacation, but the reality is that she moves from one difficult, totally time consuming job to one that is probably at least twice as intense.  That’s the job of recording an album.

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As creative director of Watchfire Music I usually spend my time touting our own artists, but recently I downloaded two CDs of inspirational music that are out of the WFM box and now deep in my waking and sleeping consciousness.

Two of my absolute heroes are Peter Gabriel and Bobby McFerrin and their music has been coursing through my brain now for days.

Ten-time Grammy Award winner/vocal innovator Bobby McFerrin surprises us yet again with VOCAbuLarieS, his first new release in eight years. Like his #1 worldwide hit song Don’t Worry Be Happy and his multi-platinum duo album Hush with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, VOCAbuLarieS is based on Bobby’s experiments with multi-track recording and his ceaseless exploration of the potential of the human voice. (more…)

Just got an iPad for my birthday.  Amazing toy, tool, whatever…  Watchfire Music is developing an app for the iPad, iPod and iPhone that will blow some minds and bring further inspiration to the masses, so I thought I ought to own one.

I had heard that it was an unnecessary toy – a sort of in-betweener somewhere between the iPhone and the computer, a toy for rich kids, but I’ve had it for a week and excuse me if I now write an ad for Apple.  This thing is fabulous.  Try to wrestle it from me and you’ve got a fight on your hands.

The Missus got a Kindle about four months ago.  She just about sleeps with it under her pillow.  She won’t leave home without it.  She’s a big reader on the train she rides to Boston every weekend and swears by it.

I downloaded the free Kindle app for my iPad.  Now we can share some of the books we read.  I dropped my book I was halfway through reading the other night getting off the plane.  Never knew it until last night when I settled down to read for an hour or so.  Couldn’t find the book.  So I downloaded it in literally 15 seconds into my iPad and got cozy. (more…)

Just thought our readership would enjoy some of the responses to a recent post entitled Subway Chanteuse.

As a fellow new-yorker, i’m right there with you on the train, peter. i’m sure i’ve seen that woman, or someone like her, many times, and like most of my fellow subway riders, have, in most cases, chosen to look away. after reading your moving account, i realize now that the reason people do things like that is because they are reaching out for recognition, and love. perhaps we are embarrassed to look at them because these folks remind us so much of ourselves. we may express it in a more “socially acceptable” manner, or hide behind a sophisticated demeanor, but bottom line is, we are all hungry for the same.

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I’m writing you from inside the music.  I suppose I’ll come out sometime, but I don’t know when.  It’s pretty safe in here and I’ll have to admit, I rather like it and sometimes wonder if perhaps I just shouldn’t stay here the rest of my life.

I just spent the last 4 days immersed in the otherworld of notes and sound, strings and woodwinds, Logic and Kontakt, push and pull.  ‘Immersed’ is a shallow description of where I have existed for the last 96 hours.  ‘Lost’ is perhaps more accurate, but I can’t say I was ever lost, but rather ‘found’.

I came halfway out occasionally to grab a quick bite of something to eat or drink, check the Yankee game scores on espn.com, but even that would only be a quick half hour and the song would still be raging through my brain, the ideas still formulating, the desire to rush back into the studio and sketch the next 4 bars overwhelming.

I did sleep in spurts – far from my normal schedule – sometimes in mid afternoon, sometimes catching two hours at 8 and not knowing if it were PM or AM.  I didn’t read my email; I did not answer the phone except to talk to the Missus who was away for 4 days.  I did not go out.  I simply lived in the music.

Even as I write I feel myself slipping out of that world and back into the normal one.  I don’t like the feeling.  It’s really good in there.  There’s no pressure, no sense of time, no sense of place, no interruption of thought, only pure problem solving on the most creative plain.  It’s 96 hours poured into 4 minutes and 30 seconds of song.  It’s building a house from the bottom up.  It’s a kind of madness perhaps, but an exquisite madness.

Perhaps I should explain myself, but to do that would be to further stand outside the experience and I’m not sure I really want to do that yet.  But here goes.  I’m orchestrating and sometimes composing a new album for Julia Wade.  We’ve been really slow to start mainly because of her far too busy schedule and my own duties at Watchfire U.  The CD is long overdue.  She hasn’t done an album in a couple of years and that’s a sin.

How can a singer be too busy to do an album?  Ridiculous!  But I lived it.  I saw it happen and I’m partly responsible.  But cast the past aside; we’ve started – I think.  I know I have and she promises to be not far behind – still clearing out a world of responsibilities.

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A World Of Friends
Here’s a word whose meaning has changed over the last several years – “friends”.  When in the course of human history did people ever keep count of their friends?  Well, we seem to be doing so today.

First MySpace, then Facebook.  At first I laughed at the joke of all this – everybody on this mad dash to collect friends like dollars.  “How many friends do you have?  Oh, are you really that popular?”  Sort of high school revisited…

But then Facebook sort of came along and developed the concept to a higher level.  Rather than just friend counting, it actually gave us the ability to renew old friendships, to catch up, to find related ones.

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Well, it’s truly just around the corner.  I know we’ve been promising this for a long time now, but finally I can say for certain the immortal words, “Coming Soon!”

We’ve been talking about this widget/gadget/app for over a year now and I’m more than happy to report that we’re in the last stages of production.  It’s so “done” that I’m finishing up the programming for each genre this coming week and you should see the first beta tests this April.

We’re excited here at WFM because you’ve been asking for this for some time now.  People I speak to every day have said repeatedly, “I go to Watchfire Music every day just to listen to the samples.”  This has actually been somewhat frustrating to me because as a composer/producer I want our customers and fans to hear the whole song – not just a 1:00 sample.

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I first met John Lennon when I was in college.  Actually, we didn’t exactly meet face to face – just heart to heart.

I was on my way to lunch one day when I heard I Wanna Hold Your Hand on the radio.  My life was changed that day forever.

What followed was the greatest musical upheaval of my life – greater than the advent of rock n’ roll, greater than the Kennedy assassination, greater than the Berlin Wall coming down, even greater than Haagen Daz.  The Beatles – a goofy name for four goofy guys who changed the world through music.  Once I heard that song the very first time, I was hooked forever.

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