Music and the art of song have intrigued me since I possessed a memory-the ways the grooves, melodies, harmonies, meanings, and phonetics of the lyrics, tone colours, and textures interacted with one another creating atmospheres that transcended the sum of their parts in ways that expressed and clarified authentic life. Whenver I heard a song that moved me, it always felt as though I was being loved.
Vitreous Windows
These two albums (Vitreous Windows and Munificent Love) are collections of some of my songs from 1981 through 1989. The 'vitreous’ descriptive belies that any medium of expression is but a shadow of the actual experience, yet these ‘soliloquy windows’ of songs still allow a glimpse that is true and clear.
Munificent Love
In a very real way, I was learning how to deal with a complex set of responses to a sometimes beautiful/sometimes horrific world - like all of us; it’s a process that never really ends if we’re being attentive. The instrumentations and orchestrations reveal my enthusiasm for acoustic tone colours and their inherent intimacy and timelessness.
Voiceless Applause
Recorded in 1990, this collection continues in the gentle poetic reflective style of the first two albums, but with a bit more layering and enhanced fidelity. The cover art is reminiscent of the view out my bedroom window when I was a young boy - almost a metaphor for all of the spaciousness, whimsy, and ‘voiceless applause’ that are the songs.
Mingling & Opposition
My style of writing began to move to a ‘catch-you-more-quickly’ thing in the late 1980s, as I began to pay more attention to the music that enlivened me when I was growing up - the freshness, exuberance and joy of the whole early British Invasion wave. That was a real gift.The rhythm of suffering and peace endemic to human life can have a ripening effect as one opens to discoveries and illuminated understandings, though it’s not always pleasant in the same way that simple isn’t always easy.
St. Quilts the Comforter Blesses Paul’s New Tunes, Opus 5 number 1
Though I continued to write songs through the decade of the ‘90s, I didn’t have the opportunity to record again until 1999. A fine artist friend of mine - ‘Lucky’ Shie, created a saint to theme her art quilts, which I found vividly inspiring; the notion of inventing a saint was confluent with the playfulness and freedom that had been guiding my songwriting. The renditions are more impassioned, the tone colours more varied, the range of emotion enhanced, and the poetry more naked
collected letters
Though my songwriting remained uninterrupted, another long stretch occurred before I was able to record again; I was back in Iowa visiting one of my old musical friends, Jim Infelt, and he said, “Let’s record something!” I was ill-prepared and fatigued, but we went into his studio and I played two of my newest songs. About a month later he sent along orchestrated versions of both, and I liked them - enhanced treatments thematically consistent with the songs’ essences, so we kept up that routine from across the country (I was in California, he in Iowa) until we had an album. We called our collaboration ‘soft typewriter’ and the album ‘collected letters’.
