"Bigsong" Introduction

Here's where things start to get strange. After the Ingersoll Dinner Theater production of A Heart Calls Quietly, I had a hard time getting back into songwriting, so I decided to experiment wildly. Bigsong was one of the first of those experiments. I took all of my lyrics up to that point, and edited them together into one giant lyric mashup. Then I added music that ranged from fairly traditional, to very strange, to collages of artifacts from my life at the time. How some of these would ever be performed is beyond me.

Bigsong represents a turning point in my writing. This was when I decided that anything goes. (A title that was echoed in another collection from around this time, Anything Grows.) I started thinking of written music as an art from in its own right. My sheet music began to incorporate collage, drawings, pieces of my journals, and anything else that struck my fancy.