I'm excited to announce my first solo album is close to release. You can hear the opening track here:
I've been working on it for over 5 years, since my last set of songs with The Echo Falls. My original plan was to release it when Brave came out in 2012. Needless to say, that didn't happen. The main reason was I didn't have 10+ songs that I felt justified making a record. But there were also a lot of cool projects that kept me busy, the ones described on this blog -- scoring three movies, performing around the country with Snap Judgment, even writing a musical about Norman Rockwell. The album always came last.
The question arose: why release the record at all? As Bob Dylan wrote in the 1990s, the world doesn't need any more songs.... There's enough great music to supply a never-ending playlist from now until our dying breath. Any given the state of music business, chances are it won't make any money. So why complete it, especially when there are other interesting projects that will pay me to compose music, and allow me to collaborate with other talented artists?
The first encouragement was when my Brave songs got accepted by the Pixar Brain Trust. The second was the response that audiences around the world had to the songs.
Browsing the comments on YouTube and online, I read a lot of comments like "this is the greatest song ever," "this song makes me happy to be alive," and the inevitable, "what kind of music is this?"
It was the last question that caught my interest. "Touch the Sky" was my synthesis of a bunch of music that moves me. I put them together that way, because I figured even if the song got rejected (the most likely outcome) it would be something that I would like to listen to, and something I could say, "well, I liked it." I've learned that beats the hell out of making something you THINK someone else WOULD like, and then adding insult to injury, it's rejected anyway.
Millions of listens later, the song is still enjoyed around the world. And that got my thinking - what if I made an album of the music I like? What would happen? Well, we're about to find out.
The time has come to release the first song. More songs will follow in the coming weeks. To stay updated, please like my Facebook page, or follow me on Twitter, or submit your email on unlock.fm to download the first song, "Way To Go."
When Mark asked me to write the song that became "Touch the Sky", I wrote a lot of lyrics. Some of the lyrics I really liked that didn't made their way into "Touch the Sky" became the seed from which "Way to Go" grew. I also noticed a lot of people asking what kind of music "Touch the Sky" is. Hopefully "Way to Go" helps answer that question....
Thank you for listening, and please feel free to share "Way To Go" with your friends.
Update: here's track 2, "Helping Hand". Please share with your friends who you think will get it.
