Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet
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Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet
Poetry has been defined as "words that want to break into song." Musicians who make music seek to "say something". Parlando will put spoken words (often, but not always, poetry) and music (different kinds, limited only by the abilities of the performing participants) together. The resulting performa...
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The Burning Babe
I've recently made this 16th century poem into a song, but then I hesitated to present it this week – because Robert Southwell's "The Burning Babe" se...
The Sunset Stops on Cottages
Here a new-made song from the poetry of Emily Dickinson. The music is jaunty, and I think that fits the language of the poem as I read it, but best as...
Adapting Michael Strange: "To Claude Debussy's La Grotte"
I've long wanted to do a piece using the words of early 20th centery American poet Michael Strange, if only because her life story is so interesting....
Before the Snow
The Parlando Project is predominently about its encounter with other people's words, but I do occassionally use my own, Today's piece is a setting of...
The Pumpkin
19th Century American "Fireside Poet" John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a Thanksgiving ode to pumpkin pie. I took the conclusion of his poem and made this...
Forum
This is a loud electric Rock band performance of a piece memorializing the "Flame Wars" of the early days of the Internet when it was largely made up...
Langston Hughes' Jazz Poetry "Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret"
Poet Langston Hughes was an early and fervent exponent of combining the music of Jazz and the lyrical expression of Blues with literary poetry. Here...
Like the Touch of Rain
Edward Thomas' poem about the lost wildness of love made into a little song.
The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry...
Old Soldier
Here's a piece for Armistice Day - Veteran's Day: a song made from a poem written by Irish poet Padraic Colum.
The Parlando Project combines var...
Ode to a 1953 Automobile Ad
A poem written by a teenager who grew up to be me. In my youth I was writing here about the images of Mid-Century America and the costs in hardly grow...
Searoads
This is a contemporary poem written this autumn by American poet Henry Gould. The musicality and lush imagery of this short poem so captured me when I...
The Spider and the Ghost of the Fly
Here's delightfully wicked little poem written by Vachel Lindsay now made into a short song for Halloween.
The Parlando Project combines various...
from "A Ghost's Leave Taking"
To make this I joined a short plaintive piece of new music with some lines excerpted from Sylvia Plath's poem. The full poem is longer and deals in gr...
Robbing an Orchard
Here's a poem turned into a little song for the more light-hearted side of Halloween. English Romantic-era poet Leigh Hunt tells us about fairies' mis...
Frost Warnings
This is a poem about Autumn by Minnesota poet Phillip Dacey, who wrote many poems about marriage and family that gracefully combine clear surfaces and...
Beautiful Justice
I translated Paul Eluard's French poem about natural law into English for this new song.
The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly l...
In Another Language
In our last piece I wrote about finding some old writing by my late wife who died decades ago. I was charmed by this poem, which was likely written wh...
Exhumantion
Here's a short poem I wrote about an old man going through storage boxes and finding things his late wife had packed away in the 1980s.
The Par...
Portrait of the Artist
Humorist and poet Dorothy Parker presented this sly account that I suspect many other creatives will recognize. Well, I got around to setting it to mu...
Tis whiter than an Indian Pipe
The Indian Pipe or Ghost Flower serves as the initial image in this strange late Emily Dickinson poem, In this musical performance using acoustic guit...
I Should Turn to Be - Jimi Hendrix Memorial 2025
Each year, on the anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's death, I play guitar to remember him. In the last decade this has led to a public piece each September...
Bavarian Gentians
This is one of D. H. Lawrence's most esteemed poems, yet I found it exists in two versions, and the one I perform today is the lesser-known of the pai...
The Cherry Blossom Wand
English poet Anna Wickham wrote "To be sung" under the title of this, so I wrote music for it and did so. My appreciation for the poem about the trans...
Sedition
No fair-minded person would say the thoughts in this piece's lyrics justify its title, but then that's part of the point it makes.* Edmund Vance Coo...
The spider holds a Silver Ball
I sometimes like to take Emily Dickinson's 19th century poetry and recast it inside music that takes on the 1960s psychedelic approach. If severed fro...
I guest on the R. Mutt Podcast
Another Summer departure from our usual fare. In this satire I appear as guest on a podcast about Folk and Americana music to discuss some new protest...
Wild Peaches
I made this song using an extraordinarily musical sonnet by Elinor Wylie. I think her sonnet, and now this song, speaks about the desire to escape fat...
The Unquiet Grave (Child Ballad 78)
As I approach the 24th anniversary of my late wife's death, I decided to perform this Child Ballad about the closeness and separation of lovers.
China Mouth (live 1981)
As part of this month's atypical series recounting long past live performances from my youth, this is an original song from a lo-fi tape of the LYL Ba...
Bugs in the System (Keys to the Drop Safe)
From a lo-fi tape of the LYL Band's 1981 concert at the University of Minnesota, the LYL Band's live performance of Dave Moore's song adaptation of Ke...
The Ballad of J. W. Hinckley
A topical song the LYL Band sang in 1980 about privilege and the attempted assassination of President Reagan. This is part of an atypical series I'm r...
Four Performances-Part One: A 19-year-old reads Leonard Cohen
My first live performance, a public spoken word reading from Leonard Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers I did back in The Sixties. I had just turned 19 ye...
I had a guinea golden
This Emily Dickinson poem about our fixation on losses seems to me informed by early 19th c. popular ballads, so I sang it as one.
The Parlando...
The Sound of Sense
A sonnet from a series I've been writing about Alzheimer's disease, recorded as the LYL Band has traditionally done this kind of spoken word performan...
Meru
I've turned this late William Butler Yeats poem about worldly and spiritual battles into a song, because, at least to this one reader, this poem from...
Holy Thursday (from Songs of Experience)
Here's William Blake's other poem about children, poverty, and Ascension Day performed as a song.
The Parlando Project combines various words (...
Holy Thursday (from Songs of Innocence)
We may think of English poet Willam Blake as the writer of majestic mystical visions, but here he is simply observing the civic use of children of pov...
Dirge Without Music
This is Edna St. Vincent Millay's bald statement of mortality and grief performed with music. Her title says it's without music, because she wished to...
Langston Hughes' "Teacher"
Here's a knotty poem about virtue, life, and star-dust by Langston Hughes that I've turned into a song.
The Parlando Project takes words (mostl...
Langston Hughes' Cabaret
The great Afro-American poet Langston Hughes was a pioneer in Jazz Poetry, so it is appropriate that managed to finish this piece for International Ja...