1. I never imagined I’d complete this many pieces. My original thought was I’d do some impressive number – like maybe, oh, I don’t know, A Hundred!
2. Before the first piece was published, I had around 10 or 20 Parlando Project candidate pieces already recorded that I thought I’d keep on hand for any dry spells as I worked on new ones. Most of them eventually got posted, a few didn’t – usually because of poor recording, performance quality, or flagrant copyright concerns.
3. After the initial few months, I could see myself really getting into a groove with making these audio pieces, and I figured I could give myself a stretch goal, like maybe Two Hundred!
4. As things progressed there were periods over the early years when I was doing a steady at-least-two pieces a week. That meant that I was essentially researching, composing, recording, and writing the blog posts about the pieces full time.
5. I had ample quiet time for thinking and recording. My child was in school, my wife worked full-time or nearly so. I miss those years. If I blew off a day and played hooky from thinking about composing or recording, I knew there’d be a certain day, real soon, when I could pick it up again.
6. Working at that level of production had me feeling like someone who learns they can run marathons or ride a bicycle century – I didn’t know I could do that, and then suddenly from doing it: knowing that I can do that!
7. Does rapid production reduce quality? Yes, it can, but not necessarily as much as you might think. My honest guess is that unless I had musicians on call, professional audio production equipment, and experienced audio engineers, that the best of what I produced in a few days turn-around was as good as what I could have done with a few weeks work (or more) on one piece.
8. On the other hand, some pieces failed, but I wasn’t able to realize how badly they’d failed until after I’d released them. So far, I’ve kept everything available anyway.
9. And can one have a third hand? There are pieces that I thought were just marginally good enough to release that I now think are some of my best.
10. Are there a lot of never released pieces? Not as many as one might think. Some just never work when I try to think of how to present them in performance, others fail manifestly at the recording stage when my limitations can’t be mitigated.
11. Earlier in the run of the Project the LYL Band with Dave Moore as the alternative composer, voice and keyboardist, was recording at least every month, sometimes every week. LYL has always worked rough and quick – lots of first takes, hang on for the ride – producing some outright musical trainwrecks. I used some of the better takes, but not most. My thinking back then: the LYL material was most often songs, and the lyrics weren’t “literary poetry” enough.
12. One of the LYL Band’s biggest influences was The Fugs, a band of East Village NYC poets who decided to form a band despite not having sweet voices or any musical pedigree whatsoever. Besides their own poetry repurposed as song lyrics, they frequently performed other poets’ work. Warning, the Fugs lyrics are often flagrantly sex-positive and Not-Work-Safe.
13. Dave Moore and I have both written poetry since we were teenagers, and songs with our own lyrics since the Seventies. Dave’s lyrics were used extensively by a pioneering Twin Cities new wave/punk/indie band Fine Art. We don’t use other people’s words out of desperation, but out of a desire to illuminate other poets.
14. Do I start with the words or the music? As one might well think, it almost always starts with the words, but I like changing that up. I always have a few musical pieces that stand by waiting for me to see or seek out a set of words to use with them.
15. My solo recording focus, lasting for around a decade before the Parlando Project, was instrumental music with no words at all. I like music without vocals as a listener quite a bit, and since I realized my voice was not attractive to many listeners, not having vocals in the music I made public removed that worry for me.
16. The Parlando Project eventually led me to use my singing voice more. I still worry about my lack of skill offending listeners, but I feel my singing has moved from mostly terrible to mostly just not very good. Really, there’s a palpable improvement there.
17. I’m always puzzled by the question “What sort of music do you like?” Am I supposed to have an answer? Is everyone supposed to like one type of music?
18. The Parlando Project has made me much more appreciative of poets whose words seem to ask to be sung: shorter Frost poems, Emily Dickinson, Sara Teasdale, William Butler Yeats, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Joseph Campbell.
19. Every time I mention Irish poet Joseph Campbell I feel I have to add “Not the Power of Myth guy.” That’s tiring.
20. Some might assume that “Free Verse” makes things harder to set to music. I haven’t found that so. Instead, my experience has been that Carl Sandburg, Fenton Johnson, T. S. Eliot, or Langston Hughes are easier to combine with music than many metrical/rhyming poets. Some poets are musical, and others just aren’t. It has less to do with how regularly it scans.
21. I can’t think of myself as a musician, because I think a musician has to have at least a minimal set of largely repeatable skills. I don’t. I’ve played guitar for decades and yet there are very basic skills on that instrument that I don’t think I could day to day assure someone I could demonstrate.
22. Every time I pick up an instrument to play it, or record a part, I’m thinking “How can I fake what a real musician would do in order to make a sound that works here.” I don’t recommend that approach, but it’s what I do.
23. Sometimes I fail to imitate something a real musician would play. Those can be some of my favorite tracks – or also, things you can be glad I didn’t make public.
24. When I first was considering the Parlando Project I thought it’d be good to have various musicians contribute to the recordings. As it turned out, this rarely happened, other than Dave Moore’s crucial contributions. Whenever I ask myself if I can change things to allow that, I wonder how many musicians would want to record parts for this Project without pay, with little rehearsal – and now, how difficult it would be to reliably arrange times and studio space to allow those contributions.
25. From my youth, one of my models was poet and artist William Blake. Blake was also a trained pressman and engraver, and so was able to produce his illuminated books from thoughts and visions to poems and drawings to pages through his own stubborn and dedicated efforts. I remind myself of Blake whenever I consider the different roles I need to play as composer, arranger, musician, producer, engineer, essayist, promoter. There’s also this: there are accounts Blake sang his poems – and the Fugs, Patti Smith, and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg have all recorded Blake poems, as has the LYL Band and the Parlando Project.
26. I continue to try to make plain that I call myself a naïve composer. Alas, “composer” sounds grander than musician, and many composers are widely knowledgeable in music theory, score notation, and the historic repertoire, while I’m not. I still think it’s the best description of what I do. If I’m “faking” playing string parts or an oboe with my MIDI guitar, or triggering chords or arpeggios with my little plastic keyboard, I’m just doing the best I can to realize the musical aims in my head. That I edit on a MIDI piano roll instead of a musical staff is personal expediency.
27. I worry that as a lower-talent, knowledge, and skills musician and composer I might do more than embarrass myself in front of those that are beyond that level, and that my persistence in doing what I do will be seen as ignorant pretense or perhaps a case of “stolen valor.” The only thing I can say to them is that it’s not ignorance on my part, I’m fully aware of what they have worked to be able to do, compared to what I do. That I have that knowledge could make what I do even worse to them, but still, I’m driven to do it.
28. Even when it was contemporary, a great many people thought beatniks reading poetry while some vague sense of Jazz wafted around in the background was corny and affected. Who am I to say, but I kind of like it.
29. Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s a professional voice talent from Chicago, Ken Nordine, made LPs reading his own free-associative spoken word pieces with cocktail Jazz backing – he called it “Word Jazz.” A few people thought that cool. I was one of them. Did it help that he was a practiced voice talent? Did it hurt that the Jazz was often a little too polite?
30. More than a decade later an expatriate Chicagoan Laurie Anderson Zen-deadpanned in front of music of her own device. A few people thought that was cool. I was one of them. I would sometimes get a strange sense of déjà vu when I’d hear one of her performances, and then in an interview she eventually let on that Ken Nordine (alongside William Burroughs and eventual husband Lou Reed) was one of her influences – and Laurie Anderson is one of mine.
31. Patti Smith’s first LP, Horses, is rightfully listed as a landmark. Oddly, there are few attempts at using and expanding that record’s style. I’ve always wished I could do that, and sometimes I try. Worth trying.
32. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always been distrustful somehow of Slam Poetry. Maybe, however much it is “just for grins,” I distrust the audience competition aspect of it? I’ll just leave it by saying I also distrust my distrust.
33. I’m also not entirely sure why I avoid overtly rapping to the beat. I was elated when the first hip-hop records were released. Somewhere on a cassette tape there’s evidence of me rapping in the early ‘80s. Yes, there are the issues of cultural appropriation, and then too of the associations (however narrow-focused and ignorant of the form’s range and reasons) with violence, bling, and misogyny – it’s also likely that I’m just bad at it. The hip-hop rapid flow thing is quite the skill, though I don’t value it nearly as much as others, and that’s my sour grapes on that. I should probably listen to more down-tempo variations though.
34. Gil Scott-Heron is widely noted as a progenitor of hip hop. I always admired his records and used some of his and Brian Jackson’s ideas from those records to guide me.
35. Do you ever think that you need to hold back ideas until they can get their best realization? Or that if you use an idea, your store of ideas is depleted by one, and so your larder will soon be empty? Doing this Project seems to say (that at least for me) you instead get more ideas when you use one, and that held-back ideas more often get lost unused than saved for the best time.
36. A problem I haven’t figured out what to do about: if you release too much stuff too fast there’s a high risk of wearing-out whatever audience you have or develop.
37. A problem I think I’m dealing with: I’m an old man, and I can’t say when my body will disable me in some crucial way, or the date Emily Dickinson’s carriage driver will take me away in my tulle PJs. So, if I’m going to get out what I want to express, there’s no waiting for a better time, or choosing a more deliberative release schedule. My apologies to my audience if I weary them.
38. The more I work at this Project, the less I listen to music. After spending some hours composing, recording, mixing; listening to music is not how I usually wind down. This troubles me, as listening to music was, for much of my life, one of my chief pleasures. Perhaps I will have a “retirement” interval from this Project when I’ll listen again to music often after not having the energy or need to be constantly making it myself. Then, it’s also possible the end of my life will be more abrupt, or that listening to others making music, when I cannot, will vex my future self.
39. I’m less constrained (other than by the limits of waking hours in a day) from reading poetry outside of the texts I work with on this Project, though I wouldn’t call myself exceptionally well-read in poetry.
40. Because my Project prefers to keep on the good side of clear public domain status for the words it uses, my poetry reading has been focused on the decade or two just over the line into U.S. public domain status. I find I enjoy this. A friend of the blog wrote her own blog for some years called “My Life 100 Years Ago.” While working, I often feel like I’m vacationing in the last decade to be called “The Twenties.”
41. I sometimes wish for a longer-life because I’d like to delve more deeply into the 1930s-1950 era. Alas, that’s not a realistic expectation.
42. I’ve started to bend a little on PD status, telling myself that I’m totally non-revenue and educative. “Fair use” is a fuzzy legal conception, but I assume I have a case for exception there.
43. For much of the early years of this Project I wrote my posts here using my child as the imagined audience. This means that in the earliest years I would be writing for their soon-to-be future-self, but in the middle years of the project, I wrote for a curious middle-schooler, and then for a high-school student.
44. As far as I know, they’ve never read any of this Project. I know they’ve written music and poetry themselves. They’ve never shared it with me, and I haven’t asked to hear it. I think they’d feel awkward doing that.
45. I’ve always expected a small audience for the Parlando Project. Literary poetry is a tiny part of contemporary American culture; and independently made and distributed music with a singer whose qualities are decidedly of a subjective value is a minority interest as well. Combining these two things may decrease rather than increase the potential audience.
46. I’m always wishing for a larger smaller audience. Every day hundreds reach out to hit one of the posts here and dozens listen to the audio pieces. By Internet standards this is miniscule for popular music or successful blog topics, but likely far from the bottom if one puts it in the context of poetry or non-commercial music offerings online. But because of the considerable (if joyfully entered into) effort involved on my part, I keep hoping for more.
47. I don’t do enough self-promotion, and I don’t especially care to do the self-generated promotion I eventually do. I worry that I’m bothering people, even driving them away when I do it. I expect that others in poetry or indie music that are self-promoting may feel similarly, yet I sometimes turn away from rampant self-promotion when done by others – who , like me, have no choice but to attempt it dutifully. The only respite I have from this feeling is when I remember: for the most part I’m promoting other folks’ words and trying to explore the experience of a variety of poetry.
48. Lately, I often include simple chord sheets for the Parlando Project musical settings. I took this idea from mid-century “folk scare” publications like Sing Out and Broadside which encouraged reading guitarists and banjo pickers to perform the songs themselves that those magazines printed in each issue. Given the limits of my skills, it’s my hope that others could perform one or more of those songs and do better with them than I could.
49. I’ve considered collecting some of my better Parlando Project recordings as one or more albums that would appear on streaming services or through digital distribution (such as Bandcamp). I wouldn’t expect them to find a wide audience, but they might find a few more ears in such places. One problem with doing that: there doesn’t seem to be a way to do this without “risking” revenue, which however small would add the overhead of running a small business, something that I personally cannot bear to undertake.
50. I’m currently expecting to continue to produce new Parlando Project pieces more-or-less in the same way I have for ten years here. Having reached 900, the obvious next objective is an even 1,000. That might take upwards of two years, and so that assumes good health and opportunity that are not a given. For those that read what I write today or other days, or listen to the Parlando Project musical pieces: I hope you’ve enjoyed some of them, and have maybe found a new poet, poem, or form of musical expression to consider. I am so grateful for your time and attention.

Here’s something else I may do more of: video content. While that adds work and another needed skill-set, it might help in creating that “larger small” audience.

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