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.

Week #20: LULLABY (BLESSED DREAM)

This week I found out I am going to be an uncle so I decided to write a lullaby to my future niece/nephew. I enlisted the help of my all time favorite singer Yalda Zamiri who I’ve been singing with since I was fifteen. We wrote the song together at her place in San Antonio, but I didn’t have my camcorder with me so we recorded it on her iphone. The sound is a bit soft. You might want to use headphones. We wrote the song as if we were parents singing to our little bundle of joy.

Check it out:

INSPIRATION:
I really wanted to give a message about how much hope for the future a baby brings into a parent’s life. Children are your only shot at immortality. Well according to Stephen Sondheim it’s CHILDREN & ART. I’m trying to cover the art part, while my brother can carry the children part. :) I wanted to tell the little baby the same things I would tell my students when I was a teacher, that they can be anything they want to be as long as they try hard enough.