Music

Much of Alan’s recorded music is available on iTunes and Amazon.com.

For his overview music page on the web, go to:

http://www.tunecore.com/music/alanatkisson

To purchase vintage physical CDs, with real CD covers and lyric booklets, write to Cassandra  [at]   AtKisson.com.

Here’s a free download from the album companion to the book Believing Cassandra (the album is also called Believing Cassandra). Note that the album is not yet released digitally.

Click to listen/download >> Alan AtKisson – Trying To Be Happy In A Crazy World

Here’s some background:

Before I was a sustainability wonk, I was a musician. I started performing professionally when I was 18, singing with show bands in New Orleans (USA), then playing guitar and singing in an Oxford (UK) pub, and finally moving on to songwriting. I had bands and performed solo in New York clubs (as well as a lot of New York weddings and hospitals) during the middle 1980s. I was always doing other things too — social work, moving furniture, freelance copy editing, whatever paid the rent. But music was my first love, and my main “career” for a time, until my other interests convinced me that it wasn’t a sustainable or fully satisfying long-term career, at least for me. I stopped playing music for a few years, at the end of the 80′s, and focused on non-profit administration, journalism, and other work — which is when I really became a sustainability geek.

Then, around 1990, music started to come back into my life, starting with a little tune called “The Dead Planet Blues.” (The story is told in my first book, Believing Cassandra.) And in the middle 1990s, it came back in a big way. Songwriting became essential for some reason — “comedy” songs to get sustainability messages across, “serious” songs to express and reflect on life. Looking back on it, the comedy songs are sometimes the most serious, and the serious songs are sometimes the most funny.