Greetings, animal lovers!
Thanks for stopping by this top secret, unlisted page on my website. Below are some previews of what I have been working on in the studio, but it you’d like a little more background, here’s the promo video for my tour of The Animal Show to get you caught up to speed:
As I was touring with the show and performing it for people who didn’t already know me, I became more and more aware of how powerful the art forms of music and storytelling were in my animal advocacy. My stories, music, and video were able to affect people in ways that my usual forms of activism couldn’t. In an effort to broaden my reach with this project, I am working with another artist, luke kurtis of bd-studios.com to create a book and an album based on the show. He is handling the design of the book, and the cover art for the album while I am working on recording the music for the album. Along with a traditionally published book, there will be an Apple iBook that will contain interwoven audio and video. it will be a completely immersive experience and I can’t wait!
The release date for all of this material is June 21, but I thought you’d like to hear some samples from the album. These are rough mixes and completely “in progress.” I spent last week in the studio recording vocals, piano, and my all-vegan string quartet!
“Home Again”
This first sample is from the show, and it’s a song I wrote to accompany a story about my best friend in middle school — a dog named Corky. Corky gave me unconditional love when I was a confused adolescent starting to realize I was gay. There will be strings on this track too, they just haven’t been mixed in yet. I am especially proud of this song.
“New Life”
“New Life” was written back when I released my first album, Tentative Armor. For the first time ever, I was able to hire a full string quartet for the album release show, so I seized the opportunity to write a new piece for just strings and piano. This won’t actually be on the album, but it will be the b-side for a track called “Their Eyes” when it’s released as a single.
If you’d like to keep up with the project, subscribe to my mailing list, or if you’d like the real inside scoop, you can subscribe to my Patreon page for $1 or more a month and get behind the scenes info and other cool perks.
I love communicating on social media as well, all of those links are in the very top right corner of this page.
Thanks for everything you do for animals, and if you like, here’s a free download of my first album Tentative Armor, and some other groovy stuff.
Thanks for stopping by, and please keep this page just between us, okay?
Love,
Michael