Magellan & Pele CD

I’m pleased to announce the release of my new CD, Magellan & Pele. Please download tracks and listen below, hit the info pages for lyrics and stories behind the songs, and if you care to, buy the CD at CD Baby. (All proceeds are folded back into supporting my musical endeavors.)

Note: a couple of these songs contain expletives, used sparingly for emphasis or the fleshing out of character. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

Track list

About the CD

I began writing songs for this CD about four years ago. I was living in Hawaii and didn’t have much recording equipment with me. On hot afternoons I would sneak into the University of Hawaii practice rooms and play piano in the wonderful air conditioning. The earliest song was a sound collage thingy that became “Buenos Aires.”

Songwriting continued over the next few years but sitting down and recording them was endlessly delayed. Sometimes by factors worthwhile (master’s degree), and sometimes maybe not so worthwhile (World of Warcraft). The last song written was “Break at the Seams,” which came together in early 2007 while recording the CD. Two of the songs, “Had it Up to Here” and “Half-Hearted Stab,” were originally written for a SongFight!, a songwriting competition web site. They provide a title and you have one week to write a song for that title and send it in, and people vote on their favorites. “Half-Hearted Stab,” incedentally, was my only winner.

Magellan and Pele are names that have a great deal of significance for me, especially in how they represent the period in my life during which I wrote these songs. I found an an intersection of two streets with these names, decided it was destiny, and snapped a photo for the CD cover. The cover’s background is a view of the Hole in the Wall glacier near Juneau.

Technical details

M&P was recorded at home on my Power Mac using MOTU’s Digital Performer. The piano sounds are from my Yamaha digital piano. Most everything else is sampled, for which I use MOTU’s MachFive software sampler. This was the first CD I’ve recorded using a true digital audio workstation with MIDI after years of using audio only. This increased my fluency throughout the process, especially during the writing/arranging steps. If I didn’t like a particular sound, I could simply call up another with the sequence still running. Previously, I’d have to load a whole new set of patches into my ancient hardware sampler and overdub them onto a new audio track, at which point it was fixed and difficult to edit.

I use a number of freeware soft synths and plugins, most notably Crystal by Green Oak Software (heard on “Break at the Seams” most obviously) and CamelCrusher by Camel Audio, a distortion/amp simulation plugin.