Zendaya shooting "Dig Down Deeper" video

This just in:

The first (2008) TINKER BELL movie is airing at 5:30 PM tomorrow – Saturday, November 5 – on the Disney Channel, and the music video of our song “Dig Down Deeper,” performed by Zendaya, debuts during the first break which should be right around 6:00 PM.

Dig!

I’m officially a very happy camper.

In 2002, I was at a recording studio in Englewood, New Jersey, overseeing the digital transfer of some multitrack tapes for “just the three of us,” and Phoebe Snow was in the next studio, recording. I actually got to shake her hand, profess my love for her voice, and got to hear some music she was working on. I was on cloud nine.

In my miniscule spare time these past weeks, I’ve been staying up late, poking through iTunes, flitting about on youtube, listening to songs. I’m surprised at how much I have been influenced by certain recordings, and how the recordings have seeped into me until I can’t even remember the source of the music that comes out of me–but then I happen upon one of these records and the floodgates open and I realize–I have made these songs a part of me and now I’m reworking them into something new. You could call it borrowing or theft, but I prefer to think of it as unconscious homage, which I think is the best kind. (As long as it doesn’t get me into copyright infringement. See George Harrison and “My Sweet Lord” for a cautionary tale.)

Yesterday afternoon, before a meeting with writers and producer and director, Mara’s husband had put on XTC’s Oranges and Lemons, and the song “Across This Antheap” was playing–and the gorgeous, mournful end of the song has EXACTLY the same family tree as the chorus of “Can You Cure Me, ” our opening number for Sleeping Beauty Wakes. (not the one on the GrooveLily record—the new one that you can hear in the show.) But it didn’t occur to me, because I haven’t heard this song since 1989 or 1990 when it came out and I wore out my double-disc vinyl album.

And this morning I discovered that Phoebe Snow had died, and I was slammed in the head with a memory of the entire recording of Paul Simon’s “Gone at Last,” my favorite track from “Still Crazy After All These Years.” When I was four years old my mom and I had just moved to San Francisco and we were a single parent/single kid family for the first time. This album came out in October of 1975, a couple of months after we moved, and my mom picked up a copy soon after it came out. I would put this record on the record player and drop the needle on “Gone at Last” and dance around and around, and then CAREFULLY lift the needle and start the song over.

The night was black, the roads were icy
Snow was fallin’, drifts were high
And I was weary, from my driving
And I stopped to rest for a while
I sat down at a truck stop
I was thinking about my past
I’ve had a long streak of bad luck
But I’m praying it’s gone at last

In retrospect, I think my mom didn’t mind my dogged determination to hear this song over and over because in some sense it applied to her, to us, to anyone who has been in difficult circumstances and is hoping that things are going to get better. And dancing in circles with me around the living room of our little apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco, I think she too was wondering if we were about to see our streak of bad luck end. Dancing around the room helped, anyway.

Paul Simon’s song is wonderful, subtle, and tasty gospel pop. Richard Tee’s piano playing is subLIME, and I think was an early indicator to me that I needed to become a piano player. But Phoebe Snow’s vocal on the 2nd verse and onward, when she takes on the CHARACTER of the WAITRESS in the TRUCK STOP is AWESOME. This may have been my first indication that a pop song could be used to tell a story. Either way, I love the song, I miss Richard Tee’s piano playing, and I will always miss Phoebe Snow’s voice.

The tapes are currently in Andy Parsons’s basement. They’re pretty valuable and reusable in and of themselves, so we’re pretty certain that they’ll sell. But if anyone wants a piece of GrooveLily history, complete with unreleased songs from the Are We There Yet? sessions from 2003, then you know what to do. Hit the link below!

http://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/msg/2336214118.html

Here’s a home demo of “Home Fires Burning” we recorded in 2001.

Staff Sergeant Brett Bennethum preparing to deploy to Iraq, with his daughter Paige refusing to let go of his hand. Photo courtesy Abby Bennethum

No one knows how much of her growing up he will miss.

I, on the other hand, got to spend Veteran’s Day playing with my son. Today I am writing songs I care about, for projects that move me, as a partner and collaborator with my husband whom I love. I get to do these things because I live in a country where such things are allowed, and because people like Staff Sergeant Bennethum help make it continue to be possible.

Yesterday, many Vietnam veterans received long-belated welcomes home, welcomes they deserved to get forty years ago.

Our (usually comedic) friend Eric Schwartz, who I always thought was the person LEAST likely to write a killer, sincere Veteran’s Day song, has done so, and I think he’s really knocked it out of the park; you can hear him sing it in the video below.
Regardless of politics, regardless of position, let us be grateful to all our veterans — to those who have truly sacrificed, giving up time with their children, and all too often, their very lives, to serve our country.

I know I am.

Val with violin, age 9

I started playing violin in the school orchestra when I was eight years old. (Not because I had been yearning to do so specifically, but because I was told I couldn’t play the trumpet without front teeth; I was in dental limbo between my baby and adult sets, and wouldn’t be able to make the right “embouchure” for proper trumpeting.) I was offered the choice between waiting a year—an eternity!!—to begin trumpet, or starting violin immediately. I chose violin, of course, never knowing it would turn out to be such a huge part of my life.

Mr. Sharp, our twinkly elementary school conductor, encouraged us and waved his arms about with such glee that we thought we were really playing beautifully. (Years later, my parents unearthed a cassette tape of one of our first concerts, and it was so delightfully cacophonous, barely recognizable as tonal music, that only the tape label clued us in as to what it was…and I realized only then how what I remember about those early months of playing the violin was not at all related to what it actually sounded like; instead, what stayed with me was the contagious joy Mr. Sharp instilled in his raucous students. I realize now that without that joy, the horrendous screeching tones we were producing would have quickly stopped us all from pursuing music.)

After that first year, Mr. Sharp advised my parents that private lessons would be a good idea; so they did some research and found a nearby teacher for me, a retired symphony player with affordable rates. Suddenly, the joy was gone. The lessons with this man were actually scary: up a dark narrow staircase into his dim attic studio for weekly hair-raising encounters with his grim visage, glasses obscuring one eye completely behind an opaque pink lens and somehow magnifying the other to facilitate optimal scrutiny of my flaws. His conclusion: my playing would never be any good, due to my double-jointed fingers. (They tended to “lock out” rather than curve gracefully into relaxed violin-and-bow-holding positions.) Discouraged (and probably partly relieved—maybe I wouldn’t have to go back there!), I told my parents that I had better give up the violin right away. Fortunately, they didn’t listen to me, and instead went looking for a different teacher.

How lucky that the one they found was Ed Johonnott. With all the twinkly happiness of Mr. Sharp, plus his own unique combination of discipline and serenity, Mr. J quickly dismissed all my anxiety about double-jointedness, and got right down to the business of turning me into a capable violin player, while always ensuring that the process would be fun. “Don’t give up, just keep at it; you’ll be fine.”

Under his tutelage, I was able to get serious about the violin, but never ever had the experience described by so many of my classically-trained peers, where after years of strenuous practice and struggle the instrument eventually becomes an enemy, glaring at them from across the room, demanding perfection and inducing guilt. I know several incredibly talented, accomplished former musicians who will no longer touch their violin or their cello or their piano, because all the enjoyment was sucked out of their playing due to excessive emphasis on technique, and not enough on actual music-making. I don’t know of any students of Mr. J who have quit violin for that reason! In my case, he always made sure there were plenty of opportunities for fun, and for playing music I actually LIKED. He played duets with me at every lesson (the high point for me always); he went through considerable extra effort to set up chamber music groups for me to participate in; and I remember he even took some flak from colleagues for allowing me to play the Beethoven Violin Concerto at an early age. (It’s considered a piece of great depth, not the very most technically challenging but suitable for “more mature” musicians—but I felt very connected to the music and loved playing it, and to him that was the important thing.)

I never remember him not smiling—except for one time, the moment when he had to break it to me that I wouldn’t be a classical concert soloist. I was suffering from some delusions of grandeur, since having placed in the top ten in a national concerto competition won by Joshua Bell; and Mr. J very gently told me that a solo career simply wasn’t in the cards.

The characteristically kind, well-timed way he did that was actually a great help to me. A door had been closed, and I had suddenly graduated from being what I had always been up until that point—a young talented person with “all my options open” and a rather inflated idea of my own prospects—to being a person in the real world, with talent and ambition but also some limitations, on the cusp of making hard choices about my future.

The foundation given to me by Mr. J as a violinist and overall musician who truly enjoys playing has been absolutely central to my life. I’ve gone on not to be a classically-focused musician, but a songwriter, singer and electric violinist who tries to find the joy in the process—the discipline and the serenity—as much as I can. My fingers still “lock out” occasionally, but it’s not the end of the world…and best of all, my 5-year-old son Mose loves to hear the story of how I started taking violin lessons, and about my “happy teacher, Mr. Johonnott” who loved music and said “don’t give up!”

Ed Johonnott passed away suddenly last week, at the age of 66. The many people who knew and loved him are stunned and bereft, and I am no exception. It’s difficult to believe that he’s gone. I take some comfort in the fact that last December, he came with his lovely wife Dianne to our STRIKING 12 show at Arena Stage in Washington, DC; it was one of the only times he saw me perform on electric violin (and sing)—and I could tell he was proud of the path I’d taken. I think he knew just how fundamental a role he had played in my musical life, and that I will always be deeply grateful. I have him to thank for keeping me from my alternate destiny as a singing trumpeter; but even more importantly, I learned from him that whatever the instrument, joy is the key.

Leap. Creative Commons attribution license, Sabrina's Stash on flickr.

Forgive me for being inconsistent with these “weekly” demos. It’s been kinda tough lately–and I’ll get into that shortly. But for now, here’s this week’s song, way more “adult contemporary” than we usually roll, but it still feels appropriate to the subject matter. Here’s “Leap.”

http://groovelily.bandcamp.com/track/leap-rough-demo

If you like it, download a copy and throw us some $, which goes directly to buy groceries and pay bills. Thanks!

Here’s why it’s appropriate this week:

Val and I moved out here to LA, among other reasons, to try to further take advantage of our growing relationship with Disney. They were flying us out once or twice a month, and it just seemed like the right idea. And as far as writing songs for the Tinker Bell movies, it has been, and continues to be, great.

Two weeks ago, though, a bunch of things happened in quick succession that really threw us.

First: we’d been invited to write two songs for a potential stage musical version of Disney’s “Freaky Friday” last fall. We thought this was a terrific idea. We knew we’d be competing against some of the best theater songwriters in the country, and we held out hope, and kept holding out hope, and kept holding…for about six months. And finally, we found out through the grapevine, that somebody else got the gig. (We wish him the very best.) But we were sad.

Second: We’d been invited to write spec songs (i.e.: spend a lot of time writing and producing demos, and don’t get any money at all, in the hopes that one or more of your songs gets chosen) for a spinoff of High School Musical. Once again, we knew we’d be competing against many other talented writers, and our chances were slim–but we poured everything we had into three songs, and found out that none were chosen. We were very sad.

Third: Toy Story The Musical, long in redevelopment for a huge, amazing, revised and revitalized production at the big, grand, awesome Hyperion Theater at California Adventure Park, was cancelled. The reasons for its cancellation are numerous, and I don’t understand all of them, but we didn’t realize how much we’d been counting on this one terribly cool thing until it was taken away from us. We were very, very sad.

Finally: Guy Adkins died. See this blog entry. I kinda lost it.

So it’s been a little tough here in the Milburn/Vigoda side of things for a couple of weeks. As in the song, we leapt, and fell. And leapt, and fell. And leapt, and fell again.

But there’s nothing like failure and being reminded of your own mortality to jump-start the creative process. Which is why it feels SO GOOD to have Gene out at our house for five days to finish writing the songs for Wheelhouse. Nobody is paying us any money to do this. No theaters are lined up to book it. Right now, we’re only doing this for ourselves. And it’s incredibly satisfying. It’s taking another big leap, and the three of us are doing it together.

The structure of Wheelhouse as of Saturday morning.

Mose and Gene perform a saxoflute duet during a rare break in our Wheelhouse toil.

Which leads me to the context for this week’s demo: Leap. It was never intended for Wheelhouse–but now that we’re building Wheelhouse into something bigger, stronger, and better than we originally envisioned, we’re finding ways to include things we hadn’t dreamed of when we started.

I don’t want to overshare here, but let’s say that the band dynamic in GrooveLily is a little bit like this:

Brendan: Oh, look, a cliff! Let’s jump off it.
Val: Okay! Me first!
Gene: Uh, guys? Hello?

This risk-inclined Val & Brendan/risk-averse Gene dynamic is what drives the story of Wheelhouse, and risk-averseness is what kept Gene in safe, static situations in work and love for a long time, until somehow a dam broke inside him. In a matter of weeks he found Suzanne, fell in love, and started a life with her.

Leap was written as a wedding present for Suzanne and Gene. Our intention was to write a song to play at Gene’s wedding that would make him cry.

It worked.

And then we recorded it as a VERY adult-contemporary styled demo for Warner/Chappell.

And now it looks like it’s gonna be Gene’s 11 o’clock number in Wheelhouse, in a far more direct, far less smooth-jazz version sung by Gene.

As I type these words, we are done with five solid days of writing and discussing and hashing it out, and the score of Wheelhouse is 99% written. We are no longer very sad. We are happy and hopeful and excited about the future again.

The other day I went to a class where there was some vaguely eastern-sounding music playing in the background, and I paid it little attention (I actually prefer it when there is no music because I get distracted)…until I suddenly heard a very familiar voice coming from the speakers: it was my grandfather!

Samuel Vigoda

Samuel Vigoda was a world-renowned cantor, who concertized until the age of 96 and was a true rock star among orthodox Jews. He was a prolific composer and brilliant musician, active—and quite a diva (divo?) as well, he’d be the first to admit—right up until he passed away at the age of 98.

After his death, his voice and music were chosen to be part of the gorgeous traveling multimedia exhibition Ashes and Snow, with a hauntingly beautiful track called “The Absence of Time.” (The underlying string parts were written by Heiner Goebbels and performed by the Eastwestern String Ensemble.) You can hear it at the beginning of this film clip from the exhibit, or sans visuals, here.

I am always astonished and captivated by the beauty of my grandfather’s singing; and this timeless track is a particularly stunning example. I’m not at all surprised that the yoga teacher told me that her students frequently request “that Ashes and Snow song”…or that, while listening to its glorious ethereal melody, I was inspired with new energy of all kinds; doing those yoga moves felt like dancing on a cloud. I also felt a kind of filial pride…Grandpop Sam’s music has now been heard by many millions, not only of his own generation but those born more than a full century after he was.

I can only hope that my work has anything approaching that kind of lasting significance. Meanwhile, I keep practicing yoga.