THE MARIONETTE: This & That from Hither & Yon

THE MARIONETTE: This & That from Hither & Yon Prologue

Like most things in my life, I started writing music for shows by accident. Or maybe it was a dare. I don’t know. Whatever you want to call it, it began with Star Trek and a series of live, staged parodies based on the original television show. When asked if I would be interested in writing a theme song for the show, I enthusiastically agreed. Almost immediately, it was made very clear to me just how important the social implications of Star Trek were to the producers and fans at large. Things like the first televised interracial kiss, or a woman, of color no less, in a position of respect and authority. The same woman who was personally encouraged by Dr. Martin Luther King to not quit the show because she was such a beacon of hope and inspiration for so many. How Star Trek predicted technologies that we now use every day, and quite literally changed us as a society. What had I gotten myself into? Here I was, trying to put into a song something that conveyed how Star Trek had influenced, changed, and even improved us as a society. Wasn’t there something in the Star Fleet code of conduct against doing that sort of thing? Of course… The Prime Directive! So there it was, staring me in the face... the premise that Star Fleet personnel were not to interfere with any cultures they encountered. Oh, the irony. With that realization, the song quickly fell into place. I named the tune The Prime Directive and went on to perform it at every monthly production for over two years... for a hot second there, I was almost Springfield famous. Altogether, I wrote eight songs for those parodies, and it kind of made me the “go-to guy” for that sort of thing. That said, what we have here is an odd assortment of songs written for several theatrical productions, a web series, and a feature film. There is also a birthday song, a wistful “I wish I was young again” song, and a new rendering of a very old instrumental, plus a couple of strays. There isn’t really anything cohesive about this collection of recordings except sharing the commonality of surviving a near-catastrophic episode of negligence on my part. Almost all of these tracks were accidentally deleted from my studio computer along with all of the songs on The Sound That Love Makes. After the (mostly) successful, and nail-biting effort to recover them, I decided I needed to get them out and into the world before any other misfortune could befall them. I sat down and divided all the recovered tracks into two collections and labeled them love songs and show tunes. In 2019, after several weeks of additional recording, touch-ups, creating artwork, mastering, etc. the love songs became The Sound That Love Makes. Nearly a year passed... I had started driving a school bus, and then covid happened. Live music performances died. Work died. My optimism shriveled up and was left for dead. Over four more years passed and I accomplished an impressive pile of nothing. Then one day, seemingly out of the blue, something inside me shifted, and the urge to move forward slowly returned. So, from the pen of a puppet, I present this odd collection of tunes, The Marionette: This & That from Hither & Yon.