Music for Newborns – Owls Call video

Here’s the vid I made for my song Owls Call from Music for Newborns featuring photos of Joy and Coral by Crystal Barbee Photography.

Advertisement

Music for Newborns

Music for Newborns started when I saw the image of Joy, two days old, and knew it was the cover of my next album.  I heard the sound in my head and lets face it, I love to make niche albums, so I started working on it right away.
Much of this was composed the first couple of days after bringing Joy and Coral home from the hospital; most of it with them sitting right beside me in their baby chairs. They seemed to like it. Hopefully they weren’t just being polite.

I’m a huge baroque and classical fan and I was a music theory/composition minor in college, so it was only a matter of time before I did something like this. The beauty is that Music for Newborns is the soundtrack for our twins’ first six months. The album is relaxing but has lots of counterpoint which I was hoping would inspire imagination and sweet dreams for babies and parents.  Counterpoint is a style of using overlapping melodies popularized by JS Bach and something that I’ve employed on my rock albums for quite some time.   My goal here was to make it simple with complex undertones, but it’s really all about the french horns, bassoon and oboes, my favorite (and possibly over used) instruments.

Watching the kids monitor while mixing late at night.

The song ‘Owls’ Call’ is especially poignant.  Right before Adair decided she was definitely in labor, the owls that come to our Reynoldstown back yard on occasion started being very noisy.  We both heard them, even with me cranking up mixes in the studio trying to finish my Life’s A Love Song project.  Since they had been seemingly signaling every other milestone pregnancy event, we naturally felt that their energetic bombast was the sign that we needed to pet the dogs and go meet our kids. The song reflects the calm we felt as we left for the unknown.

The other songs play on an array of emotions anchored by piano or guitar.  The album finishes with “Waking Up” which I tried to do in a tempo that would alternately either get you stirring a bit to wake up or continue to dream that semi-conscious skewed revelry you were drifting in and out of.   Thanks for listening!