AlanAtKisson.com

Words and music from a sustainability geek

Music, Songs, and Songwriting

Watch this space … Soon I’ll be showcasing a featured song each week or so, and offering it as a free download. At the bottom of this page there are instructions for finding and purchasing my songs online. And now, a little background …

First, 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 a lot of 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 long-term career for me. I stopped playing 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, the music started to come back, 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.

We’ll be making my music CDs available on this site in the near future.  For now, here are a couple of ways to get my music.

If you use iTunes, just search on my name, and my albums will come up.  So will a song from the old Fast Folk Musical Magazine, that was published by the Speakeasy Musicians Cooperative in Greenwich Village, New York City … I used to belong to that Cooperative and helped produced shows at the club we ran, Speakeasy, behind a falafel restaurant on Macdougall Street.

Alternatively, go to Amazon.com, where you can purchase and download my songs in digital (MP3) format.

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