In 1995, I earned my first and only producer (co-producer, actually) credits for my then fiancee’s childrens music recording project “Walk Around the Block”. Billed by her maiden name, which she used for performances, Rebecca Golden wrote eight delightful songs that are so addictive, people actually wore out their cassette versions playing them for their [...]

Side B contains some fantastic instrumentation. Trillium Green provides the backing for Joel the Mole – and Salamander steps in for Dirty Hairdo.

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Rebecca on guitar and voice; Scott MacDonald on voice; Me on opera voice

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Rebecca [...]

I was with Salamander from 93 to 96. I knew Justin Cayou and Brian Sullivan from high school – as well as the semester I spent at Washington State University. While I was still in the army, stationed at Fort Lewis, I started coming up to Seattle and seeing old friends. One weekend, someone invited [...]

… smile at the wind. The first song, I Go Real Slow, was written when I was 17 and working at Camp Orkila on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands of Washington State (recorded live at The Black Citroën). Orkila is where I met Hal, Emily, Katya, Joey and other characters that still populate [...]

Oh, such an angry young man. No Poetry in the Rat Race was written sometime in 86 or 87 – recorded by Erik Huber. I laugh when I hear the line, “The President speaks of peace with nuclear breath.” I laugh because when Bush was pretending to be President, he spoke with nuke-u-lar breath, instead. [...]

I know what you’re thinking… where are the hymns? He’s got everything here (including the Kitchen Sink), but no darned hymns. Well, let me Throw Out the Lifeline. The words to this song were written in 1888 by Ed­win S. Uf­ford. “Uf­ford’s in­spir­a­tion came from a life sav­ing drill he ob­served at Point Al­ler­ton, near [...]

Two more from the March 1995 workshop session with Erik Huber (this was a very fruitful little endeavor – served as a dumping ground for a lot of the ideas I was working on at the time). I have no recollection at all of writing the first song It Don’t Work That Way. Very strange [...]

This is added here more or less as an antidote to the last post. Erik Huber is actually pinching my nose while I sing (that is true dedication from a producer). I wrote it as a condom commercial. “Don’t forget to bring your rubber, Ducky…” Quite possibly one of my best songs. From the cassette [...]

In an earlier post, I defended a song that wasn’t about suicide… well, this one is. It’s called Alive and it is about my friend Allison who died by a drug overdose. Maybe it was suicide… god I would like to think it wasn’t. I heard about it by phone call when I was in [...]

Boy howdy, what luck. I just found an early workshop of the song Time. This came from a session with Erik Huber on March 31, 1995 – he ran tape and we recorded song fragments and conversations about various tunes. The verses came out different in the end, but the chorus stayed pretty much intact. [...]

Well, these ought to get those love songs out of your head. The first is the original version of Let Me Tell You About the War which later became a decidedly shorter and altogether different rendering called About the War. The first was recorded before I joined the army, the second after. That’s more a [...]

Yeah, so they are a wee bit saccharine, but don’t hate them because they’re sweet. These two are both wedding songs. The first I wrote for my dear friend Brian Webb on the occasion of his marriage to Julie. Sadly they divorced some time ago. Don’t know what ever happened to Julie, but Brian is [...]

Finally found it. Erik Rockom and I were discussing this song here where I posted a rough track of it. Bruce Huber’s friend Tom (Daley?) plays drums, someone I can’t remember is on organ (Erik Huber or the engineer guy?), and of course, Erik Rockom on guitar. And possibly bass? Oh, the sixties were bad [...]

Back in 1990, Erik Huber and I set about to record a theme album about an old man who confronts his inner demons. We called it Since Childhood (I introduced it in this post). The inimitable Emily Kate Hall is the female vocalist… Without apologies for its synth patina, from the cassette vault:

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Side B of Since Childhood (introduced here). In case you missed Side A, you can find it here. This time, I want to give Steve Scalfati a shout out for his collaboration and creativity. He was listed as the “one-take wonder” in the liner notes. So true. Without continued lack of apologies for its synth [...]

Just discovered this one on an unlabeled CD. Apparently, I had made a decent cassette to digital copy of Oilspills and Daffodils – and tracked over it with some organ and bass. I also appear to have fixed the sharp vocal note on “just”. Here’s the plain cassette master version. My continued appreciation to Jayson [...]

These two songs are place together here just so I could name a post “Pure Maple Sugar and the La Brea tar pits”. Mission accomplished. May I just take this moment to thank you for spending time out of your busy life to listen to the sounds herein. My assumption is that you are reading [...]

These songs share little in common except that they both read like a roadmap to my dream mind. The latter, an untitled improvisation, is sloppy – off-rhythm, occasionally atonal. And that’s just fine. I have vague memories of being very sick when I recorded that one and at one point actually falling asleep in the [...]

What luck! I thought this one had died in the proverbial fire. The PC that used to be my studio died sometime ago and with it several of my songs in progress. At some point I burned a copy of this to listen to and make some mental notations. The levels are way off and [...]

This song contains some samples from the William S. Burroughs tape cutting experiments (like Curse Go Back here). I have a secret bond with initialed odd fellows: William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, R. Buckminster Fuller, Douglas R. Hofstadter, etc. The song is a kaleidoscope quiltwork of dreamsounds and cognitive cloudbursts. And that, sir, was [...]

Back in 1996, Joe Rojo invited me to play flute on his Holiday Reunion album released on Global Pacific Records. I was flown down to California where we stayed on a relaxing horse ranch and made music in a fine recording studio. Joe is still making music in Seattle at Martin’s Off Madison. The title [...]

I’m not talking about room to breathe – the title is in reference to a virtual room that I created in my mind while practicing self-hypnosis in my teens. I would “go” to the room and pull my brain out of my head and engage in meta-hypnosis by meditating on my brain as an object. [...]

Why? Because nobody else had written a song about them… “In recreational mathematics, a polyomino is a polyform with the square as its base form. It is a connected shape formed as the union of one or more identical squares in distinct locations on the plane, taken from the regular square tiling, such that every [...]

I guess I’ve stopped trying to present songs thematically. The title of this post would be evidence of that. What does tie these two together is that they are both solo piano pieces. Off the Coast was recorded during the Since Childhood sessions. It was conceived as a background track for a seal clubbing documentary [...]

You are being eaten by the sky. There were lyrics to that one – about how when we are children we crawl, then we learn to walk, then we fly when we’re older, and eventually we’re just eaten by the sky (please refer to this post if you would like a happy song). The other [...]

The first one below is titled The Secret World of Cardinal Fox. It was written long before the recent scandals hit the Catholic Church. It is a reference to the name of my character in the role-playing game called Top Secret. I can’t remember much other than my weapon of choice – which was a [...]

In my defense, these and the last post’s songs where recorded solely on an Alesis QS6 and a four track to cassette. Not much of a defense, but I’ll take what I can get. Here’s the thing… I’m not really proud of these songs – they aren’t shining examples of my best work. But, and [...]

This and the next post constitute a package of songs I wrote in the early 2000s, but should have written in the late 80s by the sound of them. And oh, what hideous names I chose to call them. Bolerical (which I guess isn’t too bad) has a few musical shout outs to my man [...]

These two tracks are joined by theme, but certainly not by style. Both concern themselves with the insanity of human behavior. Crazy World seeks release from the madness, while Chaos almost seems to participate in it. Well, at least they aren’t about suicide. And yes, the voice on Chaos is my own. I was shooting [...]

Nobody likes one. How horrible, they say. I don’t want to listen to some depressing song about suicide. Well, I’m here to tell you folks that this song is *not* about suicide. It is about someone who is about to commit suicide, but chooses not to at the very last moment. See? No suicide. “Slow [...]

Back in late 80s, someone I knew (sure can’t remember who now) was connected with a project to turn Greg Bear’s Eon novel into a video game. I was asked to score some short orchestral bits that were to be used in the demo of the game. I have no idea what ever became of [...]

I fell so hard for her. She had dark hair with purple highlights, rode both a motorcycle and VW bus. She called me young buck. She made me feel so many things at once… which pretty much comes out in this curious piece from long ago. I doubt she remembers me at all. And so [...]

These two songs mellow me out. The first one, ‘I am not inside of me’ was written as soundtrack music for mind flying. It works for me… by the end of the song, my eyes are closed and I am soaring. It starts out mildly grating because that’s the sound of the world that the [...]

Listening to Lost Tongues from two posts ago, I was reminded of other World Beat inspired songs I recorded. Mixing instrument sounds from around the world can be very exciting. I get the same feeling when mixing textures and colors of glass for a stained glass window. Sometimes the combinations are illuminating. Below is Invocation [...]

I am *this* close to finding the missing Traveling Song from the Hyde Street session. Damn. I did, however, find School Daze. I know I’m going to mess this up, but Erik Rockom is on bass and guitar, Jayson BiNary Ramos on rap, Steve Scalfati on sax, the engineer guy (whose name eludes me) on [...]

I contracted meningitis on 9/10 of 2001. I saw the twin towers come down through squinting eyes (I couldn’t open them because the meningitis made them horribly photosensitive). Like everyone, I became a different person that day. I processed my anger and anguish through music. These two songs represent that anger (Georgie’s Playground) and anguish [...]

For a brief period, I was really into the idea of creating music that took hold of the brain and held it in a state of suspension. It’s not trance music, but the three tracks below are meant to be subtly hypnotic. If I put each song on a scale, they are about 50% samples, [...]

I served in U.S. Army Infantry from 1991 to 1993. When my Mom found out I had enlisted she was torn – she felt that the experience would douse the fires of creativity that fueled me. I can see how that might happen to some folks, but I found many outlets that kept me sane. [...]

In 1995, my friend Havilah Rand asked me to lay some flute on a track or two for her demo. The track below is Release Me from that session (© Sweetie Pants Music). I recently got back in touch with Havilah via Facebook (all praise the Facebook gods). I’m pleased to find out that she’s [...]

In 1990, Erik Huber and I recorded a dark theme album called Since Childhood. It was about the stuff most kids think about at 19: Satan, arson, inner demons, Revelation, redemption… you know, the usual. The project included Emily Kate Hall on vocals, Steve Scalfati on sax, Bruce Huber on cello, Greg Strickland on guitar, [...]

Opening the vault can lead one to poo-poo past creations for a variety of reasons. Part of me wants to do that with the next three because they are a wee bit schmaltzy or saccharine. The other part recognizes that the songs aren’t all that bad… or at least hopes so. The Song of Leaving [...]

At night my family’s dreams are nurtured by sounds from the CD players in our bedrooms. Tynan favors stories from the oral traditions of the Haudenosaunee and Abenaki, Sawyer likes mellow music or talk radio, and Becca and I have a few different mixes of mellow instrumentals that we rotate every so often. Over the [...]

When my son Tynan was born, I wrote a couple of instrumental tunes that we could dance around to and be silly. He’s now nine – all grown up and serious. I’m still dancing around and being silly. So it goes, so it goes…

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These two songs, the second more than the first, are clear indications that my humor is a little off. The first one, Going Away, started out as a tongue-in-cheek environmental song written in response to someone saying, “Hey, you haven’t written an environmental song” or something like that. In production, it turned out almost serious.
The [...]

While listening to Mickey Hart’s ‘Planet Drum’ album, I became enamored with the idea of collaborating with him on some tunes. Since our social calendars (and the fact that he doesn’t know me from Adam) never quite allowed us to work together, I did the next best thing. I sampled some beats from the CD [...]

It’s Difficult Listening Music Hour with your host, Mark. Several of my songs over the years have ranked among listeners least favorites because of the songs’ lack of general musicality or because of their arcane nature. Let’s preview a few of them shall we?
The first one, Curse Go Back, uses vocal samples from the William [...]

Ah, back to 1992 with Erik Huber. These were collected in one sitting, me at the piano playing songs and sharing ideas for production. The Traveling Song showed up again during the Hyde Street Studio sessions, but I haven’t been able to locate a copy of that one. Perhaps Jayson or Huber or Rockom has [...]

These songs are the last two I’ll be sharing from The Black Citroën show in 1996. The second one is for my wife Rebecca (written when we were having a long distance relationship – I was in Seattle, she was in New York State… hence the line about 3,000 miles being pretty damn far away).

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Also from 1992 or thereabouts, I had shared my song Premeditated Life with Erik Huber (the first version below). While he was in Placerville, California, and I was stationed at Fort Ord, he orchestrated and laid down the tracks for a new version (second below). All credit goes to Erik for the arrangement – and [...]

Back in 1992, Erik Huber and I were busy making all kinds of music. In an odd turn, we cooked up these two spoken word pieces using poems I had written. Such Wit is written in a poetic form called a pantoum – the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and [...]

With an $800 loan from my Dad, I booked some studio time at the Hyde Street recording studios in San Francisco and invited a bunch of friends to come play. My memory is failing, but I think it was 1993 or thereabouts. Pretty sure it was when I was in the army – Erik Huber [...]

1995 was a pretty active musical year. Salamander released Catalyst – and Rebecca Golden (my wife) came out with her children’s album ‘Walk Around the Block’. When I can find them, I’ll post those tunes. A while later, Becca and I started working on another kid’s project, but never finished it. Here are the initial [...]

Back in August of 1999, Erik Rockom, Donovan Curry and (I have recently been reminded) Bryan McGriff were chilling out in Erik’s living room working the 4-track. With Erik on bass, Donovan on percussion, Bryan on shaker, and me on piano and flute (though obviously not all at once)…

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Another from The Black Citroën show… It was one of the most intimate shows I’ve had the fortune to play. The venue was like a living room (with a car in it). I think every friend I’d made in Seattle came. Christopher Williams opened the show with customary aplomb.

Digging through the archives, I found a version of In My Dream called Searching For Safety. I performed it at The Black Citroën in October of 1996 (my only official solo performance). Here’s the old version:

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I’m working on a separate page for Salamander. I’ll be putting pictures and more tunes as I get them online. I was with the band from 93 to 96. We were very active on the Seattle scene, playing several shows a week and performing from Vancouver, BC to Stanford, CA. Here’s Salamander at the Starlight [...]