An e-zine about spaceships, aliens, science, memory, motherhood, magic, and cats.
When I was in high school, I had a friend who was HORRIFIED when I listened to cheerful Beach Boys music while playing Diablo. I loved the contrast.
Well, I fell down a rabbit hole this week fusing those concepts as thoroughly as possible… Continue reading “Musical Concept Albums”
Music lets you be in another place at the same time as living your life. Maybe that place is just hanging out with Taylor Swift. Or in the case of this album, it lets you take a guided tour through the solar system, led by a retro singing spaceman.
A song about the sun needs to be bright and shiny, bursting with light, and even so, I was almost afraid I overshot the mark with “Center of It All.” Continue reading “Insipid Liner Notes – Cobalt Starstrong Tours the Old Solar System”
It’s so delightful that Avenue 5 gave Hugh Laurie a chance to fluidly and comedically switch between his English and American accents.
My husband’s putting my kid to bed, but when the kid came to give me a goodnight hug, he kept reading his phone the whole time over my shoulder… because he’s so hooked on the book he’s reading… which is one of my books. Best hug ever. Continue reading “Tidbits from Life, Shows, Games, Etc.”
Anne O’Malley and the Event Horizons is the first album I made that wasn’t either a soundtrack for one of my short story collections or composed of poetry I’d already written, so it was a big leap. And it turned out so well; I can’t believe it’s real.
“Stealing Promethean Fire” is a song about how AI has made it possible for some of us to create things we couldn’t have created before. It’s about being able to make music now that makes me feel the way Brian Wilson’s music always made me feel. Continue reading “Insipid Liner Notes, Take 2 – Anne O’Malley and the Event Horizons”
There’s a reptilian alien pop-star who shows up around the edges of my Entangled Universe, and so, now that I can make music… I made her first album, Star-Shaker Sings!
“Fly High the Time” is a line my older kid came up with when he was four. He’s always been crazy good with words. Anyway, it seemed like a fun place to start Star-Shaker’s first album, and it was really fun making sure it had all kinds of sci-fi details. Continue reading “Insipid Liner Notes – Star-Shaker Sings”
It’s out now! The complete space opera surf rock album—Cobalt Starstrong the Singing Spaceman!
I dreamed about this album for nearly twenty years, trying to figure out how to make it, before Claude/Suno finally made it possible.
It was so worth the wait. Continue reading “Insipid Liner Notes – Cobalt Starstrong the Singing Spaceman”
It’s out now! The complete space opera surf rock album — Cobalt Starstrong the Singing Spaceman!
I dreamed about this album for nearly twenty years, trying to figure out how to make it, before Claude/Suno finally made it possible.
It was so worth the wait. Continue reading “Insipid Liner Notes – Cobalt Starstrong the Singing Spaceman”
It’s been twenty-five years since Daniel and I walked to the video store, rented three Marx Bros. movies and watched them nested — A Night at the Opera sandwiched around Duck Soup around Horse Feathers as the gooey middle while holding hands for the first time. Yes, we’re weird and adorable.
Sometimes I feel like an LLM writing my own prompts.
And sometimes I feel like an LLM without a prompt at all.
It’s seems to be an effective hack to tell Claude about my ideas for a song… and then tell it to think about what it knows about me and write the kind of lyrics that if I heard them would sound like they’d been written just for me, telling me what I most need to hear. Continue reading “Writing Songs with Claude and Suno”
I’m having so much fun building an entire fictional universe with the music I’ve been making. I’ve been dreaming about this character — Cobalt Starstrong the singing spaceman — for nearly 20 years. Getting to finally actually make & hear his albums is a real highlight of my life.
The majority of my music so far is still song interpretations of the short stories I spent the last 20 years writing. It took about 4 months to turn all my collections into albums, and it was a great way of touring through different styles until I found one that really clicked. Continue reading “Eras Crammed Into Months”