expatriate songs
A collection of tone-poems and songs I have worked on my entire adult life.
Most of the songs don’t fit easily into any one specific genre, but exist as a blend of different traditional colors and textures all held together by a loose narrative centering on themes of alienation, personal identity, national identity, physical displacement, spiritual exile, and the musical expressions of ecstasy and lament across specific cultures and borders.
It’s all terribly pretentious stuff. So much so that it has taken me more than 20 years to become comfortable with what it actually is. I hope to do the project with Rob and Jamie from Telegram and some other players and contributors someday. It’s a dream. If it ever becomes actual, it’ll live at the URL expatriatesongs.com
“isn’t it funny”
A song I wrote a looong time ago about getting over a heartbreak. I think it’s a lovely, poignant little poem and melody — punctuated with a soft, knowing wink. It’s unabashedly sentimental, nodding a good bit to Burt Bacharach or Randy Newman’s first record. I don’t know if the song belongs here in expatriate songs, but then again, the expatriate songs themselves don’t really fit-in or belong anywhere in particular… so I’ll leave it here.
I recorded this at home during the pandemic. I totally forgot about it. I played the piano and did the arrangement myself. I like to think my old friend Eddie Horst would have loved this version with its french horn.