In January of 2022 – the dawn of my seventh decade on this sphere – I was noodling around on my iPad watching a NetFlix special on the late, great Betty White, when I started playing some beats in Garageband. Before I knew it, I had composed a silly ditty called “Betty and the Bear” about the time she hung out with a bear at the LA zoo (she was a huge lover of animals). That started me down a path of writing and composing music that has grown to fourteen albums of original music as a singer songwriter and three sets of soundtrack music.
During the summer of 2026, I spent many hours indoors avoiding hte Texas heat, which allowed me to work on two massive project. The first is a five volume set (!) called “Those Voices in My Head” that contains reimagined versions of songs I recorded but never “got right” – so I used some of the latest AI tools to generate new music and vastly improved vocals. It’s really not a greatest hits album, but it has some of the songs I consider my best. Plus it has 10 new songs, many of which were unearthed from the time I attended college in Austin in the early 80s.
The second project is “Lilly and Willy On the Fast Train to Mars“, which is an 18 song musical based on the songs I recorded earlier that were inspired by Carl Sandburg’s “The American Songbag”. When I originally wrote and recorded those songs, I always imagined a narrative arc connecting them together…and now there is a full blown musical connecting them.
…In hindsight, this didn’t come as a total surprise, because I’m a lifelong lover of both music and technology, having played guitar as a high school and college student, and DJed on the side throughout my career as an IT professional.
Click on the thumbnails below to tour the 18 albums I somehow cranked during a very fertile four years.. Or, if you wanna’ just skim the top, check out my Top 10ish favorites…
