I got the idea for this song after being called upon to read the names of graduating students at Cornell’s architecture department commencement ceremony out on the Arts Quad May 29, 2011. The YouTube video is here. Remixed Sept. 1, 2019. By coincidence, an article about J.D. Salinger’s distaste for graduation ceremonies appeared in the NY Times on the same day that I uploaded the video. Salinger is quoted as saying: “I’ve been going to graduations, and there isn’t much that I find more pretentious or irksome than the sight of ‘faculty’ and graduates in their academic get-ups.” The Times reporter added that Salinger apparently needed all his self-control “not to gag.”

The video borrows short pieces of Bill Clinton’s honorary degree speech at the NYU commencement that was held at Yankee Stadium in 2011. However, the lyrics that I wrote about “spouting every known cliché” apply to all commencement speeches ever spoken, and are not directed specifically at Clinton’s abundant catalog of clichés, although — as they say — the shoe fits.

[updated 7/5/11] I just received this photo of the Cornell Architecture event which inspired the song:

Photo supplied by Jung Wook Lee, Cornell Architecture ceremony, May 2011

You Baby is a new song, recorded May 2011. Watch the YouTube video. Actually, I wrote the music for this song many years ago, probably in the early or mid 1980s. It was only recently that I decided to add words, a task that was rather complicated because the original music was never intended as a “song.” The lyrics themselves are rather strange, as they at first appear to be of the conventional “I love you” type, but upon closer scrutiny reveal, if not exactly an opposite sensibility, then at least a kind of resignation about the more-or-less arbitrariness of the whole concept.

This is the first video that features my entire band: Jonathan on electric guitar, Jonathan on drums, Jonathan on electric piano, and some other guy on bass (I’m actually playing bass as well, but don’t own an instrument that can be photographed). So the bass player was borrowed from some other video where he was introducing guitarist Laurindo Almeida playing with the Modern Jazz Quartet. Through the magic of Photoshop and Final Cut Express, I convinced him that he was not just a host, but a musician in his own right.

For those of you curious about the video itself, this is basically how it was produced: all the individual clips of Jonathan playing the various instruments are shot with a low-resolution Flip Camcorder, placed either on a tripod or hand-held (e.g., where I’m holding the camera with my left hand while playing the keyboard with my right hand). These individual clips are then inserted behind an image of a suitable band, in this case taken from some Steely Dan concert.

Original image of Steely Dan concert (left); modified image with band members removed leaving transparent background, shown here in red (right).

I shoot most of the clips in front of a piece of black fabric, so that they blend into the (default) black background behind the transparent spaces. It takes a bit of color correction to match them up, but it’s a lot easier than using the Chroma Key feature. The only other tricks are putting the bass player’s arm and his instrument on separate tracks so that they can be moved a bit using Final Cut’s motion keyframe features. I temporarily imported a GarageBand version of just the “slapped” bass line into the Final Cut “timeline,” so I could easily match the arm movements with the actual music being played (the original GarageBand score has a conventional bass track in addition to the “slapped” bass track).

I wrote and recorded a new song, sort of country (not being a connoisseur of such music, I have to say “sort of country,” leaving it to others more into the genre to verify whether it is or isn’t). As usual, there’s a YouTube video and other production notes. I’m singing all the vocals, and playing all instruments (some of which, especially drums and bass, are played on a midi keyboard using GarageBand digital sounds). The video is shot with my low-resolution Flip camcorder and edited with Final Cut Express. Remixed Sept. 2, 2019.

I collaborated with Dan Smullyan to write a new Rollo song. As of now, it has turned into something which could be called I Stare Into the Mirror’s Eyes. I’m still hoping it can be recorded by Rollo; for now, here is my live demo version.

I recorded this song a couple of years ago, but never made a video. Jennie wrote the lyrics, and I wrote the music. Never quite happy with my GarageBand “trumpet” solo, I finally got brother Kurt to add some lead guitar (he also helped out on the new GarageBand mix). Here is the Youtube video along with lyrics and production notes. Remixed Sept. 1, 2019.

I’ve just made a new video for a song I wrote in 2003 and recorded in 2008. Included is some Flip video footage from the 2009 World Series in which C.C. Sabathia waves off the curve ball and instead throws an unfortunate two-strike fast ball to Chase Utley — cheerleader “Rudy” Giuliani is watching from the stands and Tim McCarver is telling the world how difficult it is to get a two-strike fastball past Mr. Utley. I was lucky enough to film this perfect scene for my verse #3 lyric (“Catcher wants a breaking ball; pitcher’s waving off the call…”). The YouTube video for One Life (Is All You Get) is here. Remixed Dec. 1, 2018.

This is my first recording of an old song that was left unfinished for many years. I had only an idea for the beginning of the first verse and for the chorus, probably about 25 years ago, but never got around to finishing it until now. View the lyrics, production notes, and see the embedded video here, remixed Aug. 26, 2019. Want a dynamic, transcribable chord chart for the song? It’s here.

This new live video of my song, Anyone, is a milestone of sorts: it represents the final recording of all the songs that I wrote in the late 1970s and early 1980s after graduating from college, moving to NYC, and playing with the band, Rollo. Five additional songs that I wrote during this time period were actually recorded in the 1980s for Rollo’s Don’t Look CD, and I don’t intend to record those songs again now. The song was remixed Aug. 18, 2019.

There are one or two other songs that I wrote in my more distant past (high school, to be precise), but I haven’t decided whether to record them. So this means that any new recordings will be either new compositions, old favorite — unrecorded — Rollo songs written by Dan Smullyan in the 1970s and 1980s, or maybe some new Rollo collaborations.

I wrote this song in 2003 after seeing the movie, Adaptation (directed by Spike Jonze, screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, with Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and others) and seeing some potential in doing a live musical performance of a song that is being written during the performance itself (an idea inspired by the movie). So the video of my song, Adaptation, is a re-creation of my actual performance of the song for the first time at the ABC Cafe open mic in Ithaca, NY on August 19, 2003. The ABC Cafe recently closed; I made the video by screen-capturing an image from a YouTube video of Evan D Williams performing at the ABC Cafe in 2007, carefully extracting Evan and his band from the image (no one was hurt in the process), and then adding in my performance — shot at home with my low-resolution Flip Camcorder based on a recording I made using GarageBand (both the recording and video made in March 2010). I also filmed myself as the “audience” for the song, again inspired by Nicolas Cage playing both Charlie and brother Donald Kaufman in the movie.

Remixed Aug. 18, 2019.

After All was one of the first songs I wrote, in 1978, consisting of 2 verses with an instrumental break. In 2003, I added a bridge and a third verse. The song was recorded on GarageBand software; a YouTube video was shot using the built-in camera on my iMac (remixed Aug. 18, 2019).