Toy Piano I

Toy Piano I was my first album release for the project. The initial basis for the songs, once I got the idea to do a chillhop/lofi project, came from when I sat down during my lunch break at work and wrote down about twenty different sets of chord changes with likely tempos and time signatures/feels. I started recording the songs, starting with the first nine sets of chord changes I had written, and then building the melodies and other leitmotifs around, over a six week period between February and March of 2023. The decision to end the album with a cover song -- "(Theme From) A Summer Place" -- came close to the end of the sessions.

About The Songs:

  • Make It Easy In Paradise (for Burt Bacharach): The day I started recording the album, the news had broken that Burt Bacharach had passed away. My mother had his second A&M Records album Make It Easy On Yourself in her collection (I have all of her albums now), and several weeks beforehand, coincidentally, I had gotten a reel-to-reel copy of the album and had also listened to it a few times on Apple Music. When the news of his death came, I marvelled at the wide path he had spread as a songwriter and musician. The man discovered, produced, and wrote songs for Dionne Warwick. The Beatles covered him on their first album ("Baby It's You"), rather than the other way around. The list of people he worked with was endless: Elvis Costello, Neil Diamond, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Dr. Dre(!); The list of people who covered his songs is even more endless. It wasn't much of a hard decision to decide to dedicate the song to him, and to refrerence that same album of his that I liked, in the title of the song.
    For whatever reason, I found myself improvisiong a piano solo on this track -- a "bad habit" I started to find hard to break as I composed and recorded future tracks.
  • Dreams Of Kimona: One "good" habit that I established early on throughout this project was not coming up with song titles until I got the idea for one as I added the melodies and other parts to the composition. The initial Mellotron line, which almost reminds me of the theme to Days Of Our Lives or some other old soap opera for some reason now, inspired me to play a koto sound on the keyboard for the solo section, and that is what led me to come up with the title of the song: It sounded dreamy and Asian, and the next thing I thought of was Kimona Wanaleia, who was a vary popular and very attractive valet in ECW for a good chunk of 1996, and who I had met at the first ECW show I ever attendedin Jim Thorpe, PA that very same year. The funny thing is, Kimona (real name: Kristina Laum) is Korean, not Japanese.
  • Heart Sign For Shannon (for Shannon "Daffney" Spruill): On September 1, 2021, I had gotten a phone call from my wife when I was on the way back to my then-day job from running a business errand. She had seen on TMZ that Daffney Unger, the former WCW and TNA wrestler, had died of suicide. What makes this sad event personal is that another ECW personality, "The Queen Of Extreme" Francine (whose website I used to run, and who I have been friends with ever since, had introduced me to Daffney - or rather to Shannon - the year before online. I would soon find out from talking to her that we shared the same birthday (July 17, albiet eight years younger than me) and had a lot of the same pop culture and musical touchstones of our shared generation. When my wife gave me the news, I immediately freaked out: "Oh god, no! Not Shannon!" I remember saying. That was the start of a bad period for me. Less than two months later, both of my parents (both long diveroced) died eithin a week of each other, then two friends of mine that I had been in bands with passed away suddently before the year ended. Shannon's was the one I took the hardest. I miss her. The idea to dedicate this song to her came easy when I recorded it.
  • Dove's Eternal Flight got its' title because David Jolicoeur, aka "Trugoy The Dove" of De La Soul, had suddenly passed away that day. The band had already scheduled the long-overdue streaming/download re-release of their back catalog long beforehand for what became a month after his passing. Not surprisingly, I found myself dedicating the song I was recording to him. And don't worry: this would end up being the last song on the album that would get a memorial title.
  • Sleep Is Optional: The title came from a lyric in the Descendents' song "Kids". Other than that, I don't even know why I called it that. But you'll find find a few sleep/insomnia related titles throughout the first era of the Toy Piano discography.
  • Ode To Ted Cassidy got its title in the middle because the piano and harpsichord riffs reminded me of the Addams Family, so I found myself throwing in a nod to the spinoff series Wednesday and adding a cello part. I actually never watched the latter series, but online talk about the scene where she played "Paint It Black" on the cello inspired that creative choice.
  • Blue Nadia got its title because the composition reminded me of another soap opera theme, from The Young And THe Restless by Barry De Vorzon & Perry Botkin Jr. -- which had not only gotten a new title, "Nadia's Theme", from when ABC Sports used the song to soundtrack a montage about gymnaast Nadia Comǎneci and people started calling radio stations out of the blue to hear "Nadia's song", wasn't even written for the soap opera in the first place -- it had been written for and used a movie under th etitle "Cotton's Theme", something I didn't know about until when Istarted writing this and had Googled to refresh my memory of who wrote it.
  • Athens, GA 1987 is titled as such because I actualluy repurposed a chord sequence from a song I had written several years earlier on a 12-string guitar under the working title "Athens Limited", itself titled because I had sat down with the idea to write a song in the style of early R.E.M. for my then-band Insomnia Station. Played on kayboards, this arrangement definitely has no actually R.E.M. influence.
  • For TKT got its title because it reminded me of my first girlfriend for some reason.
  • I covered (Theme From) A Summer Place because I always liked the hit instrumental version by Percy Faith. I downloaded a copy of the sheet music (I can follow a score decently enough) but realized after I had finished tracking it and doing a first mix that I had recordeed it in a different key than the Percy Faith version.The solution? Take the entire session, which was played as MIDI instruments with a Novation Launchkey 48, hot Cntl-A in Logic Pro (my DAW of choice), and transpose it from B-Flat to F.