bd  foxamoore  peppercoyote

I’ve spent most of my time since Confuzzled doing fairly “responsible” stuff - client work, mostly. Audio production to exacting specifications. Arrangements and transcriptions to exacting specifications. Lately, rehearsing an upcoming performance of material written in the seventies to its approximate specifications, and finding ways to make it exact. Part of my success is my ability to hide myself within all of this work, to not put my own stamp of personality onto it, to let other personalities shine through. People gladly pay me to hide. I should count myself lucky that I can do this. Having said that…

At Confuzzled, at long last, I met Bob Drake. Though I was afraid we’d have nothing in common, we bonded over a shared love of the Beatles, and twice held impromptu jams in the hotel lobby. He is the most shockingly original pop musician I’ve ever met. You can hear all his influences as they fly by, but that’s the thing - they’re always flying by, never staying long enough to set up shop. He’s built a completely unique style out of quickly setting up expectations and just as quickly defying them. I got to watch him perform a few of his originals live, just him and his guitar; they was at once perfectly logical and logic-defying. BD songs are the sonic equivalent of a Crazy Mouse roller coaster that jumps through a quantum portal and drops you off in another state and calendar year. They all bear his incredible, identifiable stamp.

I’ve done quite a bit of work with Fox Amoore over the past couple of years, and more recently with Pepper Coyote. One pretty much has to use the word “epic” to describe Fox’s music. Even when he’s not conjuring up massive orchestral, cinematic sounds, his artistic world view is huge; his most intimate solo piano work hints at an infinite universe. Pepper's songs inhabit maybe a more tangible and recognizable world than BD's funhouse mirrors, but they share a dedication to demolishing the status quo of pop songwriting. By the time you realize just how odd Pepper's word pictures are, it’s too late; they’ve become your new normal, and he’s got you with some hook that’s far more clever and meaningful than anything you’ll hear on mainstream radio.

BD sounds like BD. Fox sounds like Fox. Pepper sounds like Pepper. All of them have considerable stretch abilities, none of them are necessarily tied to any skill set, and yet they have all found their voices.

I haven’t.

It’s hard not to panic a little as I consider why this is. Not counting my commercial work (and I won’t count it, for the purposes of this piece), I’ve written five complete stage musicals and several one-off songs for various projects. I’m not sure that any of them are really “mine”. I seem to have a talent for pastiche, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. There’s room in this world for exactly one brilliant pastiche artist, and Al Yankovic already has that job. I spend so much time paying homage that I don’t really get around to branding anything as my own. Can you think of a song I’ve written that’s really, really “me”? I sure can’t.

I’ve spent most of my time since Confuzzled trying to figure out how to create my most authentic work, the sort of thing I can readily use as an answer when asked “What kind of music do you really do?”. In the meantime I’ve been too busy with “responsible” client work, and I can’t and won’t abandon that. But there has to be an answer…