Week #27: ALRIGHT WITH ME

Read an article this week in one of those airplane magazines that said that all song-writers had to have a song called "alright with me," and I took that as a challenge. This song is inspired by a story that Tracy Singer told me two nights ago. The opening line and melody were written with her based on a crazy road trip she had, which seems to have inspired as many as four different songs. Sounds like a great trip to me.... here is my version of "Alright."

Check it out:
Alright With Me

INSPIRATION:
Tracy's story involved taking her daughter and a friend to pick up a pet pig, and seeing dozens of dead deer along the road. They passed the quaintest little town called Johnson City, and wrote a twenty minute song about it....... as well as a song about 10 dead dear, a golden phallic symbol and others..... this is yet another song inspired by that trip.

Week #26: NEVER GIVE UP ON A DREAM

Week #26!!! I'm half way there guys!!!!! I've written 26 songs and I've got 26 more to go!!! The last few weeks have been really hard and it's been really hard keeping up with the songs each week. I've wanted to throw in the towel so many times already, but I'm going to stay focused and keep chugging along!!!! I wrote this week's song to inspire myself to keep chugging along..... and never give up on the dream!!!

Check it out:

INSPIRATION:
The song is literally inspired by me having to tell myself to not give up on this project, when it would be so easy to just give up.

Week #25: THE OTHER SIDE OF TWENTY-FIVE

On the twenty-fifth week of David Davila's 52 SONGS, I invited a special guest, NYC based song-writer Stephanie Nash to write a song about the number twenty-five and what it means to us. We wrote this song about turning 25.... and what it feels like to float farther and farther away from that number..... hope you like it.

Check it out:

INSPIRATION:
Since it was week 25, we wanted a song called 25, and so we wrote about being young, and then NOT being young..... we literally went through all the years in our twenties and tried dissecting them... there was lots of wine involved and some pizza from 7/11............

Week #24: WINE AND THE WAY WE EMBRACE

This week's song is inspired by the title of one of my plays which I've been working on since last year. It's called WINE AND THE WAY WE EMBRACE. I wrote the first part of the chorus several months ago, but never did anything with it. This week the song was in my head ALL WEEK. It wouldn't leave me alone. It was like it was begging to be finished..... so I did. I thought this week I would write something about New Year's eve or starting over but maybe that will have to wait till next year. ;)

Check it out:

INSPIRATION:
The song is of course inspired by the title of the play WINE AND THE WAY WE EMBRACE about a waiter who falls in love with his closeted boss.... but the actual song is only semi inspired by that. It's more about an incident that actually happened to me years ago... which has inspired three different songs now, all about different aspects of the same night. It's good to live your life and reflect on the past as far from it as you may be now.

Week #23: BARRIO CHRISTMAS

Happy Holidays to everyone!!!!! If you haven't been watching, I've been writing one original song a week for an entire year. It's kinda crazy but I'm still doing it. This year I am not going home for Christmas so it came time to write a song about the Holidays all I could dream of is what Christmas would be like if were back in South Texas...... so I enlisted the help my dear friend, Vanessa Garcia, and we sat in Bryant Park freezing our butts off as we dreamed of 80 degree Christmas weather back home. And YES.... those are all names of people in my family, or Vanessa's family....

Check it out:

INSPIRATION:
We wanted to song to sound very Tex-Mex, or Mariachi, or Tejano sounding. Wish we could have used a full band, but I didn't have one at my disposal. We listed all the things we loved about Christmas in South Texas that people don't understand up in NYC.......

Week #22: CONSTANT PAIN

This week, I wrote a cabaret song for my friend Michelle Caniglia. I asked her what she wanted a song about….. and this is what she wanted. lol. Another song about breasts from a gay man. This is a video of rehearsal footage of Michelle and Thomas for a performance we did at Primary Stages on 12/13/11. It still isn’t perfect, but we plan on bringing the song to some local cabarets so we’ll have a better video in the future.
Thomas did the piano arrangement for this, I just gave him a chord chart and he made up the piano part. Thanks Thomas!

Check it out:

INSPIRATION:
I interviewed Michelle about the things that she hated about having large breasts and she rattled on about several things. I took some of those ideas and developed them into this song.

Week #21: THE MAN SONG

This week’s song is a collaboration with famed musical-theatre song-writer, Drew Gasparini. Drew, whose new show, Crazy Just Like Me, won the best of fest award at the New York Musical Theatre festival, wrote the music to this song, based on my lyrics. It was a great experience working with Drew who really challenged me to keep changing the lyrics to be funnier and funnier. The version of the song below, is NOT the final version. Based on feedback from this performance in Adam Gwon’s workshop I changed the lyrics again so that they would be funnier. Check out the version we presented at the workshop:

Check it out:

INSPIRATION:
Drew and I worked on this song mostly via e-mail until we got together at his apt. He wanted to write an “I AM,” cabaret song based on an embarrassing event that happened in class. I thought of this one moment that I witnessed in High School where a teacher embarrassed a kid for staring at her boobs. I took that idea and ran with it.