Tag: rock

PRISM Out Today!

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My new album, PRISM, is out today, Friday, 7 February 2025. Use promo code “photon” to get 20% off this release, my biggest and longest to date!

PRISM follows the journey of a single photon through the spectrum of light, flashing from darkness through the dazzling light and color of the rainbow.

The entire album clocks in at fifty minutes, and features my longest composition to date, the title track, “PRISM.” It also comes packed with bonus material, including the following:

  • Full PDF scores of each piece!
  • Unique artwork!
  • Original, handwritten manuscript scores!
  • Original music videos for nine of the eleven tracks!

PRISM is a conceptual musical journey that encourages deep, meditative listening. It also makes for good background music if that’s more your speed.

PRISM is available on the following platforms:

Remember, use promo code “photon” for 20% off!

Happy Listening!

Open Mic Adventures CIV: “Heavy Metal Mummy”

The Portly Politico4 Comments

Yours portly is on his way back from a family trip to Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida, where I very likely rode The Mummy, an exceptional indoor rollercoaster based on the 1999 film of the same name.

As such, it seemed appropriate to feature the first track from Spooky Season III, “Heavy Metal Mummy“; it’s a really fun jam to kick off the album, and I particularly love the spaghetti Western vibe it has, especially in the B section of the piece.

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Open Mic Adventures XCI: “Tu Me Manques”

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Yours portly has been composing a ton of instrumental music over the past year (ten releases since 1 September 2023:  Spooky Season, Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids, Leftovers, Firefly Dance, Epistemology, Leftovers II, Four Mages, Advanced Funkification, Heptadic Structure, and White Boy Summer), but my songwriting has lain fallow for some years now.  As far as I can tell from my records, the last song I wrote to completion was back in 2019.  D’oh!

So I finally sat down this past weekend and hammered a new song, “Tu Me Manques”; it translates to “I miss you” in French, but the literal translation is “you are missing from me”—far more poetic.  I took that concept and wrote this 1970s-style piano ballad, with liberal use of common French phrases.

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White Boy Summer Out Today!

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Yours portly keeps churning out the hits, and I’m pleased to announce my seventh album this year, White Boy Summer.

White Boy Summer is a collection of ten summertime jams spanning multiple genres of instrumental music.  The title track is a driving retro rocker reminiscent of Super Nintendo side-scrollers, and is perfect for jamming to on the open road.  I also rewrote it as a chorale for the album’s finale, “White Boy Summa (Theologica),” a piece for brass trio.

This album heavily favors trombone, and the three major trombone pieces emphasize the chill nature of summertime:  “Mellow,” “Lazy River,” and “Summer Vibes.”

“The Sea Crab” is the most experimental piece; it’s a musical interpretation of an unpublished poem of the same name by Liza Libes.

And, despite the title, White Boy Summer is for all people of all races—and both genders.

You can pick it up on Bandcamp for $7.  I’ll be posting links to the album on other streaming platforms in the comments.

Rock on!

—TPP

P.S.—Here are a couple of the tracks that have already been uploaded to YouTube:

Open Mic Adventures LXXXIX: “White Boy Summer”

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Yours portly released a new album recently, Heptadic Structure.  It’s an exploration of pieces in 7/4, 7/8, and 7/16 time.  Each piece is twenty-one written measures, for a total of 149 measures across the seven pieces.  Math is fun!

You can listen to and/or purchase the album at the following links:

However, I’m deviating my plan to feature the tracks from that album for (at least) one week, because I am super excited about another album I have coming on Friday, 2 August 2024.  It’s called White Boy Summer, and while there are quite a few of my more experimental and modern classical pieces on the release, the title track is a straight-up banger—so much so that I wanted to feature it in today’s edition of Open Mic Adventures.

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Lazy Sunday CCVIII: Original Music, Part I

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Ah, the glorious summer.  I can already feel it slipping through my Vienna sausage fingers like the grains of sand in an hour glass, or the metaphorical sandbags I’m desperately stacking up against the inexorable tide of the new school year.  I love teaching, but having mornings free to write and the like is glorious.

One perk of summer is that I can actually get out to open mic nights again.  I’ve missed playing live, and I want to find sustainable ways to play during the school year.  It’s difficult, though:  I typically don’t get in from an open mic until 10 PM.  That’s doable during the summer months, but during the school year, I’m usually zonked out by 9 or 9:30 PM, not hanging out with hipsters in some coffee shop.

Regardless, here are some recent posts featuring original pieces, two of which are open mic performances:

Happy Sunday—and Happy Listening!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Yngwie Malmsteen Concert

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Last week I rode up to Silverado’s in Black Mountain, North Carolina, with my younger brother and his wife to hear Swedish neoclassical metal guitar god Yngwie Malmsteen.

Boy, it was an amazing concert.  He even played some Mozart!  Yngwie also played one of my personal favorites, “Albinoni’s Adagio“:

It’s been awhile since I’ve been to a full-fledged rock ‘n’ roll concert, and Yngwie delivered for a solid ninety minutes of neoclassical decadence.

This post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Open Mic Adventures IV: KISS’s “I Still Love You”

The Portly Politico7 Comments

Last Tuesday I forewent my usual trip to F.E. Pop’s to take an end-of-summer trip to Benjamin’s Bakery in Surfside Beach, South Carolina to play their new open mic night.  My girl lives down that way, and she’d never seen me play live before (although I send her videos of my pianistic noodling on a regular basis), so we decided to take advantage of this opportunity for her to hear me play a few tunes.  It was a fun evening, and a great opportunity to meet some new musicians in a different town.

Unfortunately, my girl was so enraptured watching me perform (and a little girl grabbed her attention for about half of my mini-set), she didn’t take any video of my powerful coffee shop crooning.  That performance is now lost to the mists of time (although I will always remember it; I hope she does, too!).

As such, I’m going back to the night of Tuesday, 26 July 2022, featuring a duet with my buddy John Pickett.

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Open Mic Adventures III: Joanie Sommers’s “Johnny Get Angry”

The Portly Politico22 Comments

Well, it was inevitable: after getting the early 1960s Joanie Sommers tune “Johnny Get Angry” stuck in my head, I had to cover it myself.  The version that really got me into this song is from the 1990 film Nightbreed, specifically the Clive Barker-approved director’s cut.  Other versions of the film apparently were missing the song—performed by actress Anne Bobby in the role of heroine/love interest Lori Winston—which is a travesty, as it’s really key to highlighting the struggle inherent in Lori and Boone’s relationship in the flick.

Here’s that version:

The Anne Bobby/Nightbreed version is the one I used as the basis for my own performance.  Instead of the iconic kazoo solo from the Sommers original, I replaced it with a classic late 1950s/early 1960s voiceover part after the key change.

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