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November 2006
It’s been a busy summer and fall at The Farmhouse, Rob’s Hudson Valley studio.
On the record front, Rob has just finished up string arrangements for two wonderful new songs by songwriter great Marshall Crenshaw. The first session took place in July. Debbie Assael and Sara Worden aka The Dying Tremolos played down the charts, with producer Stewart Lerman and Crenshaw in attendance.
Also at The Farmhouse, Rob tracked some B3, clav and accordian for The Roches, and wife Lisa played pennywhistle, for a lovely reworking of the Band classic, “Acadian Driftwood”. This will close out a new Band tribute record, “Endless Highway: The Music of the Band,” due out in January on 429 Records. Other artists include Death Cab for Cutie, Jakob Dylan, Bruce Hornsby, The Allman Brothers and many, many more.
Still available in stores is a beautiful new record from Jules Shear. For what is really an intimate set of chamber music, Rob contributed arrangements and plays accordian and assorted other instruments. The record, 'Dreams Don't Count', is being released on MAD Dragon Records and distributed by Ryko.
Rob helped out with string arrangements, keyboards and background vocals on a great new release by singer/songwriter Matt Duke, “Winter Child.”
Rob recently produced and played on a really cool tune for a really cool artist, Matt Turk. Called “The Fog of War”, it features a smoking performance on banjo from Matt’s friend Pete Seeger. Check out Matt’s website to see pics of Pete rocking out in The Farmhouse and to hear Matt’s great tune.
In September Rob had the honor of recording a track featuring another American legend, Willie Nelson, performing ‘Blowing in the Wind’. Working from a technically problematic recording Rob enlisted the help of David Mansfield on fiddle and Peter Calo on guitars and mandolin, with Rob on B3 and piano. Mastering ace Dominick Maita helped to clean up the source recording. All in all a great team effort for a good cause: the work was commissioned by Appalachian Voices for the launching of an important environmental website, ilovemountains.org, and can be heard there.
Rob's new record, his third with longtime collaborators Jon Herington, Paul Ossola and Robin Gould, is now available. Called A Periodic Rush of Waves, the record was produced by Stewart Lerman and features guest appearances by Marshall Crenshaw and Jules Shear, among others. You can listen to it in its entirety, or purchase a copy, here.
On the scoring front, Rob is very pleased to be working on a special episode for Masterpiece Theater, the great PBS series and the longest running primetime drama show on American television.
NOVAscienceNow, the PBS series which Rob scores, has just been renewed for its third season! If you haven’t ever watched the show, it is really on the cutting edge of documentary television and is created by a truly inspired and talented team. You can see Rob performing in a wonderful NSN short about the Twin Prime Conjecture online at here.
Rob has had other shows airing on PBS in recent weeks, including a beautifully wrought historical narrative, “Wings of Madness”, about aviation pioneer Alberto Santos Dumont, which featured an orchestral score evocative of Paris in the 1900s; and Nova’s ‘”Monster of the Milky Way” which aired on Halloween!
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