The Making of Tom Jones
My good friend Paul Mirkovich and I are in the midst of recording songs for our new musical Tom Jones, based on the novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding. Not based on Tom Jones the Welsh singer.
Writing songs always scares me. It’s a bit out of my comfort zone. I never know if they’re good or plain old crap. I felt that way when I wrote China the Whole Enchilada. But I suppose I feel that way about all my writing.
Fortunately my musical writing partner, Paul Mirkovich, is the Wile E. Coyote of music – a super genius. He took the songs for Enchilada and made them much better. So much better that we ended up being awarded Outstanding Musical at the 2008 NYC International Fringe Festival. And getting a publishing deal with Samuel French.
And now we’re teaming up for Tom Jones.
The Musical
My idea for the songs, which thankfully Paul thought was a good idea, was to have all the songs be reminiscent of the 1960s British Pop Invasion. Think The Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, the Animals, the Dave Clark Five. But also with a somewhat modern sensibility.
Right now we’re doing basic skeletons of the songs. To give us a chance to work through the songs and to give theaters, directors, and producers an idea of what we’re doing.
I’ve had a bunch of people ask me about the process of going from the thought of a song to the reality of a song. So Paul and I put this video together to give you an idea of what we do when no one is looking.
We were originally going to record with Paul’s band (The house band for the TV show The Voice) but we ended up just doing it ourselves. It also saved us some money by not going into the studio.
I hope you like the song. We had loads of fun recording it.
To hear more of our songs, go to my sound cloud page.
