For now, I am going to post a link to my music playlist on YouTube and slowly add individual links to videos below with some brief descriptions. There will be some duplications when videos fall into multiple categories.
Originals with lyrics
2013 : An Apocalypse (rock) A dark song with a lot of apocalyptic imagery and part of a traditional Hawai’ian chant to Pele.
Above Water (rock) This is final song of the Deluge Cycle of songs, with imagery drawn from flood myths. See also The Silent Fear of Rain.
Been So Long (world rock) This is a spiritual song I wrote while exploring Unitarianism. It references the lives of the Prophet Muhammad and Gautama Buddha.
Buy Your Time (latin pop rock) When I was in the military, some of my shipmates and I had an ongoing joke about creating a multiracial boy band. This song was my contribution to that joke, basically a less-than-affluent guy’s pitch to a girl used to dating a rich guy.
Cause for Alarm : Cry Wolf in the USA (rock) A highly political song, written in 2006, protesting partisan tactics on both the left and right.
Come to Bed (blues reggae) A noir song about violence and sexuality.
Erase Me (hip-hop rock) Love lost, responsibility accepted, and mortality faced.
Gethsemane (rap rock) I always felt the Passion didn’t have enough pop music, so with this song I sought to remedy that. The tune is about authentic and inauthentic spirituality.
If I Be (latin rock) A dark song about love and rejection.
In the Shadow of the Tree (acoustic folk rock) I draw hard on my comparative religion training in this introspective tune.
Masquerade (islands pop rock) A very crude recording from before I had ProTools, a song about living an authentic life.
Mist (world rock) A lot of history and spirituality in this song. My inspiration was the prehistory of Africa, the desertification of the Sahara region after the last ice age, and the evolution of religion.
Mist : Dark Version (hard rock) A much harder mix of the original Mist. The lyrical progression is a bit jumbled in this; the original has the proper sequence.
Naked (world rock) A spiritual tune about aligning yourself to the ultimate ends of life.
No Ordinary Wave (dance pop) An uncharacteristically upbeat song about true love.
Sleepwalker (modern rock) A thoughtful song written in the 00s, with the resulting political references.
Summer : Reggae Mix (reggae rock) A remix of Summer with the distorted guitars played down.
Summer : Rock Version (rock reggae) A quasi-love song about the passage of summer.
Stereo (rock reggae) A deeply academic and spiritual song about the Divine Feminine, with lyrics from at least five languages. Not for the timid.
The Silent Fear of Rain (acoustic) This is the first song in the Deluge Cycle, with imagery drawn from flood myths. See also Above Water.
The Threat (pop rock) A very 80s-influenced song about broken love.
To Make You Free (pop rock) A 70s-influenced song that admittedly draws heavy inspiration from the guitar riff from George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord.
Uila Pele (world rock) The words of a traditional Hawai’ian chant to Pele set to ominous music.
Covers
Everybody’s Changing (Keane) I was just entranced by sadness of this song, so much that I had to do a cover.
Game of Thrones – A very crude recording of me performing the Game of Thrones main theme on acoustic and electric guitar.
Separate Ways (Journey) I heard Journey’s Separate Ways in my head, performed by Evanescence, so i started wondering how this 80s song would sound with a more modern spin on it. Using basic MIDI instruments (nothing fancy) I threw this together in about four hours. I might still add lyrics one day, but to be honest I’m concerned that it’s well out of my range.
Silly Chord Progression – REO Speedwagon’s Keep on Loving You, Poison’s Every Rose Has Its Thorn, Matchbox 20’s 3 A.M., Warrant’s Heaven, The Indigo Girls’ Closer to Fine, and Third Eye Blind’s Semi-Charmed Kind of Life.
Wonderful Tonight / Stuck on You (Eric Clapton / Lionel Richie) An acoustic mash-up cover of these two beautiful tunes, based on the similarity of their guitar hooks.
Wreck of the Sloop John B – A dark, rock remake of the traditional tune, with a tip of the hat to the Beach Boys’ version, in which I attempt to truly capture “the worst trip I’ve ever been on.”
Yellow Brick Road (Elton John) I took this one as a challenge, since it is fairly complicated musically.
Performances (actually me on screen!)
Bed of Nails (acoustic pop rock) This is something I wrote in the early 90s and only recorded sometime in the 00s. I apologize profusely for the use of the Bleeding Cowboy font.
Everybody’s Changing (Keane) I was just entranced by sadness of this song, so much that I had to do a cover.
Game of Thrones – A very crude recording of me performing the Game of Thrones main theme on acoustic and electric guitar.
Limit of True (acoustic pop rock) I wrote this after the birth of my daughter. It’s also partly inspired by Patsy Cline’s Crazy.
Silly Chord Progression – REO Speedwagon’s Keep on Loving You, Poison’s Every Rose Has Its Thorn, Matchbox 20’s 3 A.M., Warrant’s Heaven, The Indigo Girls’ Closer to Fine, and Third Eye Blind’s Semi-Charmed Kind of Life.
Yellow Brick Road (Elton John cover) I took this one as a challenge, since it is fairly complicated musically.
Mash-ups
Barbario – Basil Poledouris’ Conan the Barbarian main theme and Duran Duran’s Rio.
More Jolene Than Rapture – Dolly Parton’s Jolene, White Zombie’s More Human Than Human, and Blondie’s Rapture.
Papa Was a Crazy Brain – More of a treatment for a mash-up than a full song. Temptations’ Papa Was a Rolling Stone, Ozzie Osbourne’s Crazy Train, and Green Day’s Brain Stew.
Ride Low With Me – Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, War’s Low Rider, Christopher Cross’s Ride Like the Wind, Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, and Nirvana’s Rape Me. This is nominally “Part 1” as I always intended to do a follow-up incorporating Haggard & Nelson’s Poncho and Lefty.
Three Worlds of Winter – Vivaldi’s Winter, 4th Avenue Jones’ Stereo, Maxi Priest’s Wild World, Neil Young’s Keeping on Rocking in the Free World, and Journey’s Separate Ways (Worlds Apart).
Whataya Want From Me? – As a musical experiment in “found poetry,” I mashed together two versions of the same song with different vocalists, the original by P!nk and the more well-known cover (which used the same backing tracks) by Adam Lambert. My goal was to dig up a lover’s dialogue from the monologues of the original lyrics.
Wonderful Tonight / Stuck on You (Eric Clapton / Lionel Richie) An acoustic mash-up cover of these two beautiful tunes, based on the similarity of their guitar hooks.