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).

I finally got around to making a YouTube video for Squints on a Triple, a song I wrote and recorded in 2008 based on a true story concerning a game of Scrabble played with daughter Jennie (remixed Dec. 1, 2018).

At the same time, I just discovered that my recording of Squints was the winner of the 2008 BoardGameGeek.com contest for real songs that reference actual boardgames in their titles or lyrics.

I wrote This Isn’t Hollywood in 1981, recorded it in 2008, and just made a new video. In the video, which includes animated faces of Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, and James Stewart, the final “celebrity” image is of a young Billy Joel, who wrote Say Goodbye to Hollywood five years earlier,  in 1976. For the record, all the moving lips are my own (remixed Dec. 2, 2018).

Here’s a new video for an old song (Just Another), actually the first song I recorded using garageBand software more than two years ago. The song itself was written in 1980 (remixed Dec. 2, 2018).

I wrote Long Distance Love Affair in 1978 and it is, as far as I remember, the first real song I wrote. This version is recorded using acoustic guitar. My Flip camcorder was set up on its tripod, so here’s the live video with guitar, vocals, and a single mic (and some imaginary musicians joining me for the final verse; remixed Aug. 25, 2019).