While Santa Fe this summer, 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 latest 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.