Here's the quick list of creative endeavours I'm currently struggling with.
Music
Tim Spainhower and the Night Social
I've been making sporadic appearances as "special guest studio keyboardist" on my buddy Tim Spainhower's latest project, "Vicious."
The music encompases a wide range of styles, moods and influences including traditional blues/rock, reggae, progressive, etc. This is
a particularly interesting departure for both of us since it gives me the opportunity to play around with different synthetic sounds and
styles other than my comfort zone of traditional piano/organ -- for example, the steel drum and marima on the Jimmy Buffet-influenced
"Luxury." Hopefully I will be able to offer the completed album for streaming here, but for now you can
hear the early mixes on his MySpace page.
Blue Tear (Formerly: Into the Mystic)
From November 2006 to June 2007 I served keyboard duties for a band called Into the Mystic, which later became a band called
Blue Tear. (Now, take a deep breath because here's where it gets confusing...) That band's debut release "Mystery or Mischief,"
was recorded and mixed but never mastered. When founder Mark Miller left for greener pastures in Oklahoma, the project was
subsequently abandoned, and other principal member, Tim Spainhower, kept the Blue Tear name for his new cover band while he
channeled his original songs into his own solo projects. Consequently, you can now hear Mark's songs from this
album redone under a release from "Ladmosis and Company,"
while Tim's songs from this album will be re-recorded and released later as part of a new Tim Spainhower solo project called
"Mystery or Mischief" (which I may or may not appear on, depending on schedules and timing.) Meanwhile, I am able to offer up
these original, unheard, never-to-be-released versions from a great band that had a lot of great times, but sadly, no longer exists. (... aaaaand ... exhale!)
The Fabulous Huckleberries
Sadly, the Hucks are now defunct, though multiple spin-off side-projects are currently
ramping up, so hopefully more great music from these guys will be heading your way soon.
There is, however, a video featuring yours truly during my all-too-brief stint as "anciallary keyboardist"
and "honorary Huck." This is just the live portion of the video, the ambitious finished product actually
would have included dialogue, acting, and an actual plot. But you can still check out what
did get done ...
For a brief period way back in '95, I was a contributing composer on the soundtrack to
John Blum's amateur sci-fi feature "Time Rift." To purchase the film and/or
accompanying soundtrack CD, I direct you to Half-a-Dozen Lemmings' official site.
As my limited contributions to the sountrack were confined to portions of the first quarter of the movie (though I somehow received an equal billing in
the credits), I was invited to contribute a full-length original suite to the soundtrack as a "bonus track." That suite, "Eternal Warrior," was later used
as the background score to a short prequel film called "Fight or Fly." You can see that film here...
I have a strange OCD thing about being a completist. If I hear a band, I must buy all of their CD's, then all of the CD's the members of the band have appeared on, etc. If I read a book, I must read the entire series -- even if they suck. Hubbard's "Mission: Earth" was bad enough, to say the least, but I will no doubt slit my wrists if Robert Jordan doesn't stop writing "Wheel of Cheese" books (or at least put his overly-foreshadowed cardboard cutout characters in some sort of believable peril soon). Oh, and it almost bankrupted me to discover comics. Some of the old ones are expensive, and I don't think I'll ever own all of them.
