Specters of Twilight
Posted on June 19th, 2009 by Jon O
After a four-year hiatus, I’m getting ready to release my sixth CD, Specters of Twilight. It’s a major departure from my previous music, reflecting the influence of Nine Inch Nails, MeShell Ndegeocello (The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams) and Tori Amos (Venus and Back): industrial, strange, anti-pop. The music consists of fragments of melody, distorted sounds, obsessive ostinati and recurring themes that linger briefly before vanishing. Less visible links connect the songs, too, with passages from some tracks manipulated electronically and reincarnated in other tracks. [Read more →]
The RIAA is waging a war against music piracy, trying to stop what has become as common as breathing. It’s probably too late. I came across this article from The New York Times: 
Whenever I hear Steely Dan’s “Babylon Sisters,” it’s suddenly fall of 1980 when I first moved to San Francisco. I see every detail of my studio apartment in a 1920s brownstone on the border of the Marina district: the honeycomb-patterned tile on the bathroom floor; the wall niche for the telephone; the space in the kitchen that once held the icebox. I relive the emotions of those early days in a new city, the excitement tinged with longings. “San Francisco show and tell.” Most songs don’t have this kind of emotional valence for me. But some do. Why is that? 
The storyline of the 2008 independent film “The Visitor” uses music to signify transformation. Widowed economics professor Walter Vale (played by Richard Jenkins) has been simply going through the motions for far too long. In his Connecticut home, he takes piano lessons, perhaps trying to reconnect with life through the instrument his late wife played, but his fifth piano teacher finally tells him that it is difficult to learn an instrument in mid-life, especially when one “has no natural ability.” 
