First, we were excited to get together and play, ’cause it’s been a while. Second, we’ve also been wanting to get together to work more on WHEELHOUSE (which premieres next spring at TheatreWorks of Silicon Valley), ideally in the company of the wonderful director we now have on board for the show; her name is Lisa Peterson. Lucky for us, the executive director of Lone Tree was happy to help us accomplish both at once; her name is also Lisa Peterson.

Lisa and Lisa had never met, though as theatre professionals they had heard each other’s names for many years. We were delighted to be the reason Lisa flew in to meet Lisa at the Denver airport.

Lisa (J.) Peterson, our WHEELHOUSE director - photo by Fred Hayes

Lisa (Rigsby) Peterson, Executive Director of Lone Tree, at groundbreaking last year - photo by Kristal Kraft

Lisa and Lisa watched STRIKING 12, which was a blast to do at the beautiful brand new Lone Tree Arts Center…and between Friday and Sunday, we were able to squeeze in 3 days of intensive work on WHEELHOUSE, mostly in a glass-enclosed conference room in the middle of the venue’s administrative offices. We had a borrowed keyboard; we had a big table; we were steps away from Super Target; it was perfection.

A big thankyou to both Lisas for making it all possible.

Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam

Choreographing "Paper and Pen" during a rehearsal at the Kirk Douglas Theatre.

I’m getting to work on something wonderful and strange: a piece of theater about the father of behaviorism, entitled “The Behavior of Broadus.” Back in March I lucked into seeing an invite-only, hastily-rehearsed and gleefully thrown-together performance of this play with songs by the Burglars of Hamm. Center Theatre Group was commissioning this piece–and my friend Matt Almos was reluctantly banging out chords on the piano for this piece that had slowly but inexorably turned into a musical. The actors were making up their own harmonies, and the melodies were simple and memorable. I laughed and cried and it was better than Cats.

I approached Matt afterward and told him that it was wonderful–and they simply needed a little help from somebody who does this sort of thing and can help finish the songs the way they intended them. You know, like me.

And I said I’d love to do it.

Fast forward a few months, and Matt takes me out to lunch. Were you serious? he asks. Yes, I was, I reply.

And now here we are: there’s a commission, I am now a co-author of the piece, and 8 actors, a director, a musical director and a choreographer are making stuff REALLY HAPPEN here during a luxuriously-long two-week workshop at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, the same place we did Sleeping Beauty Wakes back in 2007.

The way the Burglars write together–and their painfully funny script–directly affected how Val and Gene and I wrote the script for Wheelhouse in the middle of August. I had already begun my work on the score of this piece before I left for the Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, and the way these Burglars challenge each other and go with whatever is best/funniest/most right for the piece, no matter who wrote it–this is what we in GrooveLily were striving for as we revisited our painfully funny past to write the Wheelhouse script.

It’s odd to be back here in the same rehearsal room, four years later, and be working on something so…utterly different. The Burglars have written a musical (yes, it’s actually a musical now) that is so damned funny and wrong and wonderful, and I’m just grateful to be a part of something that is so WAY beyond my ken. And yet I’m here at the table contributing, being a part of it, and writing and arranging music to support the weirdest, sickest, funniest, and unexpectedly moving piece I’ve ever been associated with.

There are two performances that are open to the public. Tickets are ten bucks. Here’s the link. If you are anywhere near Los Angeles on September 17 or 18, come and see this. It’s great.

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2011/aug/23/groovelily-wakes-sleeping-beauty/

It’s a pretty nice story of how we got where we are, and what we hope for the future.

Val, Brendan and Gene convene tomorrow for an intensive week-long WHEELHOUSE writing retreat, at Rhinebeck Writers’ Retreat in Rhinebeck, NY. We are honored to be part of this retreat’s inaugural summer: founded by former NAMT Executive Director Kathy Evans, this program is designed to nurture the creative process, by providing time and space (and food!) to writers like ourselves. No kids, no distractions, just a focused block of time in a beautiful secluded locale to complete our long-awaited autobiographical show, in preparation for its world premiere production next spring at TheatreWorks of Silicon Valley. We are really looking forward to this.

The projects percolating at Rhinebeck this summer (in addition to ours) include: A Clockwork Orange, by Fred Carl and Ed DuRanté; Nobody Loves You, by Gaby Alter and playwright Itamar Moses (The Four of Us); The Disillusionist, by Rebekah Melocik and Jacob Yandura; an untitled project by Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson writers Michael Friedman and Tony nominee Alex Timbers; Pool Boy, by Janet Allard and Nicholas Tsakalakos; and the Richard Rodgers Award-winning musical Gloryana, by Andrew Gerle.

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/152312-Rhinebeck-Writers-Retreat-to-Nurture-New-Musicals-by-Alex-Timbers-Michael-Friedman-GrooveLily

We’re in pretty august company, and it’s nice to read that Gaby Alter and Itamar Moses’ terrific piece “Nobody Loves You” is getting more work time at the Rhinebeck retreat AND is getting a production at the Old Globe. Val and I will be there with bells on–this show kicks butt.

There’s an official announcement from Theatreworks, and a mention on Playbill.com, but you can get the straight poop here. It’s happening.

It is our hope that we will actually have the CD (you remember, those round things that you make mp3′s out of) in hand in time to sell them in the lobby of the theatre. But no matter what, it’s all really happening.

Thank you to to everyone at Theatreworks for believing in us and this piece for so long.

Okay, two gauntlets.

Thanks to everyone who came to see us in West Chester, PA, last weekend. It was a blast to come back to a town where we’ve previously only played in the rec room of a (surprisingly lovely yet not very large) Swedenborgian Learning Retreat, and instead to find ourselves in a big, lovely auditorium filled with people who are digging what we do. Thank you.

We have slowly but surely been adding Wheelhouse songs to the set, so much so that the entire 2nd set was filled with them:

• We’re In A Rock Band
• Take On The World
• Way To See America
• Gene’s country songs on the radio as we drive through the middle of our fair nation:
  • Out Of Gas
  • Carburetor
  • Car’s On Fire
• Idea Man
• This Is Not The End (formerly the title of a long-since-cut Striking 12 song)
• The End Of The Beginning

There’s more than that to Wheelhouse, of course, but that’s what we played Saturday night, and the response from you guys was overwhelmingly positive.

The Drumnaseum in Gene's Basement.

Now comes the next step: actually commencing making the album of Wheelhouse. I have created a Logic file for End Of The Beginning and posted it so that Gene can download it and record drums in his basement in New Jersey, and then return it to me so that Val and I can record our parts over his drums. The gauntlet is, as they say, thrown.

We are a long way from finishing the record; we are really only beginning. But you have to start somewhere, and we are starting with the last song in the show. It is our hope that down the line we will complete tracking this record and find the wherewithal to have the inestimable Ben Wisch mix it, as he did so ably with “Midsummer,” “Sleeping Beauty Wakes,” and “Are We There Yet?“.

There’s been a bit of a hubbub about “fan-funding” lately over on a website called Music Think Tank. Brian Hazard, the author of the blog post, is generally against the idea of bands asking their fans to help raise money for albums or other projects. I can see where he’s coming from, but with our history of fan funding,[or euphemistically titled "investors,"] (I hereby redact that after reading Ewan’s comment below) I can’t quite agree with him. (Full disclosure: We have not paid everybody back for everything. We are still paying. But we do continue to pay regularly, and we continue to be grateful for the way that fan-funded projects have helped us and furthered our careers.)

In particular, Brian Hazard says the following:

You could fail. Publicly and humiliatingly. Everyone will get their money back while you walk away empty-handed. Your fans may conclude that either your goal was too ambitious, or just maybe, your music isn’t as good as they thought is was. Your failure functions as a reverse testimonial. And then what? Are you really going to dump the whole project? If not, why hold it hostage in the first place?

I was moved to respond to him in the comments of his page with the following:

Man, if I listened to this particular piece of advice, I would NEVER get ANYTHING done. Fear of failure is always there, but it’s NOT a good reason to refrain from pursuing anything, be it fan-funding, skydiving, or learning to walk.

Fan-funding is partially and indirectly responsible for the fact that I now have a career making music. I don’t have another job. I am one of the lucky ones, I know; but if I had listened to my ever-present fear of failure, I would never have gotten to this point and I would have lived to the end of my days with unending REGRET that I hadn’t tried harder.

We don’t know what our financial situation will be like when it comes time to mix, master, and release Wheelhouse. We don’t know if we’re going to be doing a run of it in a theater, or just gigs here and there. And we don’t know if we’ll even release it on a label at all – we might just put it out on our bandcamp site – people have certainly been responsive to the new music we’ve uploaded there, and have voted with their listening time and frequently, their downloading dollars in our bank account. (Thank you to all who buy our tunes, it’s very heartening.)

The possibility exists that we may choose to ask for your financial help when we are ready to finish Wheelhouse. What do you think? Great idea? Stupid? Please give us your thoughts in the comments below. Until then, we’ll keep writing, rehearsing, and recording on both coasts in preparation for our next joyous excursion on stage together. We look forward to seeing you.

photo by Kris Umezawa. I love the fact that my head is a blur--I was racing to get through the 15-minute sound check...

First things first: a BIG thank-you to all you righteous people who came to see us on our East Coast jaunt last weekend. It was such a pleasure to see you and share the new Wheelhouse stuff with you.

Back in the day, when we drove from gig to gig all the time and brought two (!!!) P.A. systems with us, ran our own sound, and had our own monitor mixer set up next to Gene on stage…

Let me rephrase that. Back when we were kinda control freaks about our live sound but playing small enough gigs that we couldn’t afford to bring a sound guy on the road all the time, we spent a LOT of time hooking things up before a show. We would actually put the following language into our contracts: “WE NEED TO ARRIVE THREE HOURS BEFORE SHOWTIME TO SET UP ALL OF OUR STUFF.”

And Gene made up a song which he sang during the ever-lovin’, extremely long set-up time, reliably cracking me up and getting me out of my pre-show nervousness with his trademark wit:

I
Like
Microphones and wires.
And, Instruments and Songs.

Okay, maybe you had to be there. But there was something delightfully funny about it. Nowadays we fly to the gigs, arrive to set up a rented drum set, and leave most of the microphones and wires to Kris Umezawa, our redoubtable sound ninja, and the local crew. But there are times when we do have to roll our sleeves up and get into the electric spaghetti, and a few weeks ago we did so with alarming speed and not a small amount of stress. We did a GrooveLily showcase at the Midwest Arts Conference, which was our usual 15-minute speed-through of Striking 12, Sleeping Beauty Wakes, and a new song from Wheelhouse. And then, we did something new: 15 minutes of Valerie doing three songs solo, with violin, vocals, harmony box, and looping with a computer program called Ableton Live.

Getting these three songs together took about a month. The hard part for me wasn’t so much the arranging of violin parts and singing; it was deciding how many crayons to use out of the limitless crayon box that is Ableton. Someday when we’ve got things down a bit more smoothly, I’ll share what I’ve learned here on the site. In the meantime, here’s a little photo which should explain things a little bit:

Val doing her sound check. Click the image to see precisely what's what amidst the spagetti.

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.

Standing in the shadow of the man who is first in line.

This week’s song is about a guy who discovers too late that he’s lost his chance with a girl he used to date. It’s my hope that this song will become part of our live set with Gene singing lead…but in the meantime, this demo has me singing lead and Val playing the role of the hot backup vocal chicks. If you like the song, buy a download and send us your $ without diverting vast percentages to Steve Jobs, eh? Thanks.

This one’s also about envy, and in much the same way that “Happy, Happy, Happy” was born from an incredible, uncomfortable bout of pure unadulterated envy when we were trying our hardest to get signed by a major label and I walked past a larger-than-life-size-poster of Vanessa Carlton back in 2002…this song was born from the same emotion, but in a slightly different set of circumstances.

Here’s a little backstory, if you’ve got a moment.

Herman, set the wayback machine to 1995. The internet is a wee thing. People make telephone calls on telephones that are plugged into the wall. GrooveLily is still The Valerie Vigoda Band. I have returned from 13 weeks in Amsterdam with Val and Max to resume living in New York City, and I have to find a job. I get word that there’s this guy who writes music that sounds kinda like mine, and he needs a piano player for this show he’s doing.

I call him and arrange for an audition. I arrive at his little upper west side apartment which has an imposingly large (at least by NYC apartment proportions) 7′ grand piano. We chat about his experience and mine, and while I have chosen to go to college and grad school, he has eschewed the academy and pursued writing musicals with a fervor and a directness that I have not. And it’s paying off–he’s got one show opening off-Broadway soon that he needs a musical director for–that’s why I’m auditioning today–and he’s got another big Broadway-bound show coming up with bookwriter Alfred Uhry and director Harold Prince.

My jaw drops. But I pick it back up.

He asks me to play something that I’ve written–he seems genuinely interested. I’m more than a little intimidated now, but I gamely stumble through “Take Away My Dreams,” the final song from my thesis musical with Jason Cochran at NYU, which had been fresh in my mind and my fingers in May at the staged reading downtown, but now in September tumbles across the keys and scrapes out of my throat like a distant memory of a brick falling into a vat of cow pies. Apparently it sounds good enough to him to continue the audition, though, so maybe it wasn’t SO bad.

Then, to gauge my abilities at the keyboard a bit more precisely, he plays the complex opening riff from a song from his show, called “She Cries.” Go listen to it, and then come back. It’s great, isn’t it? Wow, what a terrific song, I’m thinking. What a cool riff.

And I try, and I can’t play it right. And from that moment, I can tell the audition’s over. I didn’t get the gig. I leave his place, feeling pretty dumb and lame–I’ve spent the whole summer playing introspective songs from Inhabit My Heart every day, and not getting my chops into shape for cool-ass samba rhythms like this.

And I go home, dejected.

Jason.

Over the next few years, I watch from afar as this guy (whose name is Jason Robert Brown, by the way) goes on to success with that first show, Songs For a New World, then gets a tony award for his next show, Parade, and then writes the complex, sad, but deep and inspiring show The Last Five Years, which is STILL kicking my ass from across the room, despite being stuck inside its CD case.

In the meantime, I finally did learn to play that riff and stole appropriated it for a Milburn/Vigoda song called Sitting on the Fence, and opened up a whole world of syncopation and fun in my playing which is still expanding.

So for a long time there I turned my back on the world of Musical Theater and enjoyed Jason’s work from afar, as Val and (first Max, then) Gene and I pursued immense rock stardom in college cafeterias, coffeehouses and Unitarian Church Basements across the United States and Canada. And when our ticket to immense rock stardom actually turned out to be in the world of Musical Theater, my path and Jason’s path converged again.

In January 2005, Val and Gene and I were at the Theatreworks Writers’ Retreat in Palo Alto, working on our first batch of songs for Wheelhouse, our follow-up to Striking 12. Georgia Stitt was also there, working on a song cycle, and we reconnected. It turned out that she was now MARRIED to Jason Robert Brown. Unbeknownst to us at the time, Val was already pregnant with Mose, and Georgia was already pregnant with Molly, who was born a week after Mose in September of 2005.

Fast-forward to 2009. Val and I move out to Southern California, and among the first people we get in touch with are Georgia and Jason. We hang out a few times: their place, our place. Mose and Molly become fast friends–Molly actually performed a marriage ceremony for herself and Mose in a tent in her backyard, and now whenever we mention her, Mose says in all seriousness, “I’m her HUSBAND.”

The kids get along. The four adults find that they have a lot in common. I’m actually getting to know this guy after all these years, and I genuinely like him. Heck, I genuinely like them both. I think they like us too.

They both have a career writing musicals.

Val and I have a career writing musicals. Basically. Sort of. Well, there’s a rock band and some songs for movies. But it’s basically the same thing.

What could be bad? Nothing to be ashamed of.

So why is it, when I read a facebook post from Georgia about her and Jason being mentioned in a gossipy theater article about how they attended the opening of A Little Night Music on Broadway–why is it that I am suddenly filled with ENVY?

I thought I was OVER this kind of petty poop.

I thought I was a mature person. Am I not capable of being happy for and proud of my friends?

Yes, I am capable. I am happy, happy, happy for them. But I am also going green with envy. STILL.

AAAAGH.

I have to get my kid to school this morning. I have to make a lunch for him. I have to get my s**t together. Val gets breakfast for him while I take a shower, and lo and behold I find I am singing what seems like an entire song to myself. I have a verse, I have a chorus. The chorus goes like this:

I am standing in the shadow of Jason Robert Brown.
I am standing in the shadow of Jason Robert Brown.

It’s a song about what if, about if only, about if I had just tried harder younger and not gotten diverted, if I’d been as ballsy as he was, and as skilled as he was when he was so frickin’ young, if only, if only, then I might have the level of success and fame that he has. It’s a very, very, very small-minded petty little song. I am genuinely embarrassed by it.

Clearly, this will not be a song that will be of any use whatsoever to Warner-Chappell. What can I do to repurpose all of this unbridled, unexpected envy?

What if the fame and fortune is neither fame nor fortune? What if it’s a girl? What if the protagonist is not me, but instead a guy who used to have the girl, but has lost her because he “got off track,” and she went with somebody else in the meantime?

After some back and forth with Val, we arrive at a cross between a country song and an R&B song, in the neighborhood of John Mellencamp, with the following hook: “Standing in the shadow of the man who is first in line.”

So Jason, if you’re reading these words, please take this in the spirit it’s offered: I think you’re awesome. I hope you don’t mind that you inspired a fit of envy, and I hope you take some pleasure in the song that came out of it. I’m glad to be friends with you after all this time.