Full disclosure: my day job is technical writing. Like many, many musicians and composers, I need to work to support my art. Most of us have to do this. It’s the nature of the business. In that capacity, I have worked on many things, both hardware and software, that flew, went into space, were fired at other things and occasionally exploded. I have worked with engineers, physicists, scientists and programmers for a long time. Sometimes I understood what they were saying to me, sometimes I had no clue. I often felt like I was walking in thick mud. But I had a knack for taking what they said and making it intelligible to the rest of us.
That technical training on a day to day basis made me a research hound. I read–and still do read–as much of the science as I can on a given subject and avoid spin as if it had the plague. If I don’t get something, I look it up. If I still don’t get it, I ask someone. If I still don’t get it, I go for a walk.
In college, I was a bio major and psych minor, headed into animal behavior. The natural world and its creatures have always been a fascination and safe haven for me and I have spent many, many days and nights wandering among the living, ancient native creatures of our home world.
Between classes I would often sneak off to one of the practice rooms in the music department or to a local piano store to play and sort myself out. Music was my other haven and I surrounded myself with it as often as I could. I could throw myself headlong into it with the abandon of a madman and it accepted me and bore me up until I once again found peace. On such a day my chemistry professor walked by the practice room where I was banging out my frustrations.
He stopped in the door.
“is that you playing like that?” he asked.
“Uh, huh.” erudite even then.
“You’re in the wrong program.” he said and left.
His wife, my animal behavior professor, did the same thing the next day.
For various reason, I left school and went straight to work, first as a lab technician in biochemical research (They were right. I was in the wrong program.) then as a technical writer when my father called in a favor with a guy he used to work with at an aerospace firm.
Music and words have always been my deepest passions. Combining them into something truly meaningful; my bliss. I grew up with the lyrics of Bernie Taupin, Cat Stevens, Harry Chapin and Roger Waters. With the words of Bradbury, King, Twain and Shakespeare.
Musically, I was suckled by Beethoven, Handel, Strauss, Dvorak, Liszt, Elton John, Pink Floyd, Genesis, The Moody Blues, Eric Clapton . . . the list is so long.
I also saw a number of broadway shows as a kid: Godspell, Man of LaMancha, Jesus Christ Superstar among them. Each touched me deeply and in very different ways.
When Christine Hull and I were introduced during the writing of The Children of Children, she brought a whole new influence into my world. Having graduated the Hart School of music with a bachelor in musical theater, she straightened out the rough patches, gave rhythm to the lyrics and vastly expanded my personal and musical horizons. We shared many of the same tastes in both authors and music and she introduced me to many others. We worked on the blending of those disciplines. Not musical theater; the stories are often thin and the music predictable and not rock for pretty much the same reasons, but more along the lines of opera with all of the Wagnerian overtones that carries with it. We founded Madmen and Dreamers on that fusion of real story, rock music and theater and decided to do it the hard way: by picking stories that we feel need to be told.
The current story in development is about the natural world that has always been a haven for me. It is about what we’re doing to it and the consequences of our stupidity.
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