My most recent music project consists of 8 new songs that meditate on the art of aging gracefully. It was written as a 63rd birthday present to myself – in fact, one of the songs is called “When I’m 63”. There is also a song included that was written when I was 15 called “Why Do we Abandon the Old People” which I finally found the right arrangement for. The project is called Old Mannish Boy.
We spent a few weeks in northwest Tanzania in the summer of 2024, visiting schools and meeting the teachers and students. We stayed at hotel overlooking Lake Victoria where I curated the photographs and video I took on the trip, and composed a set of new music capturing my impression of this wondrous place. The project is called the fist from below.
While in Santa Fe the summer of 2023, I pored over Carl Sandburg’s 1920s collection of American folk and minstrel songs, The American Songbag. Laptop-free, I took lots of notes and did a lot of sketches on how I could contemporize some of the songs for the America of today. This resulted is a set of 9 songs and videos narrated by an evil American devil, and is called Today’s American Songbag.
One of our film projects is a collaboration with Texas photographer (and good friend) Mark Schnur. It combines his photography with a soundtrack I composed to tell the story of the year he spent as an Army reservist in Afghanistan in 2003. The final product is a half hour documentary called Ancient Lands, Eternal Souls – The Year I Spent in Afghanistan.