Pirates from Grammar Island Emerges!

It's been too long since the last post, but I was immersed in writing and producing the songs for the new pirate/grammar show. Let me quickly get to the end of the story: the play is out; I think it's one of our best, and if the pre-sale numbers mean anything, we'll have a major Bad Wolf hit on our hands. You can read the first third of the script and listen to sample songs at http://www.badwolfpress.com/pirates_grammar.htm

Okay, back to the story. I last blogged several weeks ago, just before heading off to Austin, Texas for their state gifted/talented conference. As I mentioned, I brought with me a CD of me playing six of the songs for the new play. John Heath, my writing partner, was going to listen to the recording and let me know his opinions.

The recording was absolutely terrible, both in terms of sound quality and performance. But John listened two or three times and gave his approval to 4 1/2 out of the six songs. So I knew I had a significant amount of the writing out of the way. I returned home and began crafting the remaining tunes.

The first deadline was Thanksgiving. Singer/actress Dana Shaw was in southern California visiting her parents for the holiday, and Thanksgiving morning was the last possible time to record her. So I managed to get three of the songs together, notated the tunes, and made rough recordings for her. She came over with one day's practice on the songs, prepared to sing.

Meanwhile I had pretty much stayed up all night recording the instruments for the songs she was about to sing. Here's a link to an mp3 of "I'm the Queen of Pronouns" sung by Dana. (I'll leave the link up until mid-January.) http://www.badwolfpress.com/pronouns.mp3

After a day or two of rest I went back to work. There are a total of nine songs, and I was hoping to get longtime Bad Wolf singer Brenda Tzipori to do five of them. That's a lot for one recording session, even though two of the songs were duets, so she only needed to half of those tunes.

I delivered the rough recordings and sheet music a few days before the session, and she quickly let me know that she didn't like a couple of the notes in one song. Strangely, I had seriously considered her proposed solutions when writing the tune, so I was happy to say, "Go ahead and sing it the way you want to."

When she showed up to perform I had instrumental tracks recorded, but a lot of them were temporary. She could sing to them, but they didn't always sound great; in one song the drum part kind of went crazy a couple of times. Brenda managed to sing everything despite the weird music behind her.

A couple of days later guitarist Mike Fishell was in to play. He had no idea what the music was going to sound like. I just showed him the sheet music, turned on the recording and started telling him what I had in mind. He managed to play on five tunes in just a couple of hours. Here's a link to a duet between a collector of synonyms and a collector of antonyms. Brenda sings the collector of synonym part and Mike's guitar is easily heard.
http://www.badwolfpress.com/antonym.mp3

It's wonderful to be finished with the show and I hope to hear from you soon telling us what you think.