GrooveLily

I begin this blog entry from a seated position on the floor of the commissary here at Disney Toon Studios. They keep the animators happy here by providing cereal and snacks in nifty dispensers with large turning cranks that drop a portion of tasty comestibles into your waiting bowl. Very nice.

There’s also a nifty coffee machine that grinds the beans and brews you a cappucino at the touch of a button–Val and I are each enjoying a nice Americano as we sit and catch up on some computer work.

It’s been a whirlwind–since the opening of Long Story Short in Pittsburgh, we dashed home for a week, cranked out four more Sleeping Beauty Wakes mixes with Ben Wisch, and then flew to Los Angeles to work on the revision of Toy Story: the Musical for Disney. Three days at the Disneyland Grand Californian Hotel, where Mose ran rampant in loops around the vast lobby, pretending to be a fast-moving train engine with very important connecting rods. He rode the monorail, we rewrote Toy Story. He drove the cars at Autopia, we worked at the Disneyland Corporate Headquarters in a conference room, and on the stage of a rather magnificent, 2,000-seat acoustically-dead, incredibly high-tech bigger-than-Broadway theatre.

Following those three days in Anaheim, we moved back to the Oakwood corporate apartments in Marina Del Rey, where we had stayed with my Mom and our son Mose for about three and a half months in early 2007 during the run of Sleeping Beauty Wakes. For the NEXT three days, we worked on songs for the Disney Toon Studios Tinkerbell movies.

Those of you with female children below the age of 16 may or may not have become aware of the new Tinkerbell phenomemon. Essentially, Tinkerbell has been subtly re-envisioned, in this series of Peter-Pan prequels or reboots, as a super-cool tomboy with a talent for mechanical engineering. We got the chance to visit Pixie Hollow at Disneyland – and families were willing to wait up to 45 minutes (or more) for a chance for their daughter(s) to have some one-on-one time with the fairies. Val and I got to watch a 7-year-old girl light up with delight and awe and wonder at the opportunity to play animal charades with Silvermist and Fawn, and to talk to Tinkerbell herself. It sounds cheesy, but the look on that girl’s face reminded us of why we’re working our butts off crafting these songs for these movies–we are feeding the dreams and aspirations of literally millions of girls. Wow.

We met with Matt Walker and the Disney people to discuss tweaks to the song we’ve written. Originally, we’d pitched a song as a possible end-credits anthem for Tinker Bell–but instead, the directors of Tinker Bell movies #’s 2 and 3 (Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure and Tinker Bell: A Midsummer Storm, respectively) angled for our song. It’s nice to be fought over. In the end, our song has been brought into movie #2, in the opening and closing sequence, and the lyrics, formerly about the coming of Spring, have been tweaked to sound more Autumnal, in keeping with the “bringing Fall to the world” theme of movie #2.

Joel and his daughter, Claire

We also met with Joel McNeely, the composer of the scores of these films, to re-arrange our song for inclusion within the film. The original assignment was: “Make it sound world-music-y, but possibly hitworthy.” Accordingly, we made an afro-cuban, celtic, Peter-Gabriely song which was all over the map stylistically…and now, to match the rest of the score, it needs to sound Irish. Ish. Irishish. In any case, Joel McNeely is particularly awesome at making things sound Irishish, and we spent two glorious afternoons trying things out with his various pennywhistles and recorders. He hopes to record a killer 12-person chorus and bodhran players and a monster hurdy-gurdy player doing the score and our song. This is going to be quite a recording.

After this time with two very different divisions of Disney, Val and I dashed back to Pittsburgh to catch the last performance of Long Story Short before it closed. We had done some rewrites with the intention of putting them in the following week, but seeing the show reminded us of how much we wanted to change and fix…and how little time we would have to do it. Val flew back to LA that night to take care of our kid, and I stayed in Pittsburgh for the rest of the week to do more rewrites, reorchestrations of the rewrites, and to attend rehearsals and come up with solutions as we went. We had a mere 18 hours of rehearsal time over three days, and that was it…and we didn’t get to everything Val and I had wanted to do.

However, the show is already better than it was in Pittsburgh, and I’m really excited to see how the preview audiences react here in California.

While in Pittsburgh, I had a few moments to listen to a new album by Gabe Kahane. (Joel McNeely gifted me and Val with a copy, and I ferreted it away before she could get her hands on it.) It’s amazing. It’s wonderful, original, and at first blush might seem to be in the vein of Sufjan Stevens, but for some reason I just can’t listen to Mr. Stevens and I think I could listen to Mr. Kahane all day. Must hear this man some more.

I know I’m rambling, but it’s been a while since I’ve been able to blog–and SO MUCH has been going on I am starting to feel like my head will burst. There’s been so much good news, and so much exciting stuff going on that I feel it mitigates the bad news: we’re not going to be able to release the Sleeping Beauty Wakes album in December after all. We decided to include more music than originally planned, and PS Classics was so excited about the disc, they felt the material deserved the kind of lavish packaging that takes a few months to design and manufacture, so we’ve moved the release to early 2009. Gene’s singing the part of the King, and his vocals make me cry.

I end this entry from the conference room at the corporate housing place that Theatreworks is putting us up in–it’s beige, it’s comfortable, and my son likes to run up and down the halls with me pretending to be a steam train. It’s getting late and I need to feed the kid and then get to the band rehearsal in the theatre. It’s a very exciting time. Thanks for reading!