About the Musical
I wanted to write a bio specific to this project about how my experience in the world and the music industry led me to write this musical.
I was raised in Houston, Texas, and taught myself guitar and piano at 11. I figured out how chords work together by studying Beatles’ songs and popular sheet music and then began writing my own songs.
I moved to Austin in the early 80s and started performing with my first band. I won Best Pop Artist two years in a row in the Austin Chronicle and also around that same time I talked my way into a job in the brand new Fire Station Studios. I got to assist on recording sessions for Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Christopher Cross, etc. It was there that I fell in love with recording and producing music.
I moved to New York City in 1987 to attend NYU and lived in a basement in Hoboken while working at a TGI Fridays. I performed as an artist for the first few years in NYC, but I learned that I preferred the studio to the stage, especially when computers started replacing tape machines.
I also learned music theory for the first time while getting my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and had the opportunity to study music theory at Juilliard as well. Music Theory opened up a whole new world for me. I call it my “Helen Keller Water Pump moment”. In 1990, I won a jingle contest as an NYU student and invested in my first Mac and some recording gear, put an ad in the Village Voice, and started taking clients in my tiny apartment.
I became quite the geek working with MIDI and digital audio and started getting more and more clients. I eventually moved to Greenwich Village and built my first commercial studio in Chelsea in the early 90s. It was during those years that I had the incredibly good fortune to work with Stephen Schwartz; my first exposure recording for musical theatre. He was writing Pocahontas with Allen Menken (for Disney) and I engineered a few of the lead vocals with AnnMarie Milazzo for the Pocahontas demos. I also recorded lead vocals for a solo album that he was producing and was thrilled when he asked me to write and sing vocal arrangements for two songs on that album!
I moved my studio to Austin in ’97 when my parents fell ill and I used the downtime while my studio was being built to dabble in screenwriting. For some reason, I never thought to combine music and script to write a musical and then I hit the ground running when the studio opened.
Blue World was the first digital audio studio in Austin and I had some amazing years as a studio owner and engineer. Some of the clients and projects at my studio included; two songs for a musical written by Sting, a remix for the U2 song Elevation done by Chris Vrenna, two albums with Shawn Colvin, two albums with Jimmie Vaughan, and many albums with Austin bands and artists like Spoon, Vallejo, Anna Egge, Kelly Willis, Kacy Crowley, Lou Ann Barton, Junior Brown, Rick Trevino etc… In between clients, I was writing and recording my own work.
I pivoted to a music software startup called eSession.com from 2007 – 2015. In 2016, I converted Blue World Music to Blue World AV and in 2017, I proceeded to spend 5 years creating media for politics.
In 2023, I met my collaborator Marci Geller, and found my way home as a full-time writer/producer. In March of 2024, I decided to combine my skills as a writer/producer/engineer to tell my story and write a musical. I asked Marci to join me and here I am…
This project has been such a beautiful, cathartic experience. As a pop writer and producer, rarely did I ever work on or compose songs that didn’t have a a strict, limited structure. For the first time, musically and lyrically, I let myself color outside the lines.
If the story within a song felt like it needed a verse and repeated chorus structure, I did that, but many times I felt drawn to more linear songs without predictable pop structures. While recording and producing the songs, I stayed in the modern pop world, but I also got to branch out and use some more unique orchestral instrumentation.
Writing this has been a true labor of love and I’m very proud of it. Thank you for reading this far…and I hope you enjoy the show!
If you want more details about my music career, go to BlueWorldAV.com and/or my LinkedIn .
Yes, this is based on a true story, my story… I made quite a few changes to the real story for creative reasons, but, the foundation of the story is true. I was born into a family that was just coming into new wealth, growing up in Houston, Texas in the 1970’s.
And yes, I did get a “Trustee” at 11 years old. I cringe when I hear the derogatory term “trust fund baby”. Just because someone is financially fortunate doesn’t mean that they waste their lives on a beach in St. Barts. Money doesn’t make the world a beautiful place as is evident in this story. I hope this musical helps people see that a Trust is just a safety deposit box in a bank that someone gifts to you. You get the safety deposit box and everything in it, but someone else has the keys. I had 3 misogynistic men holding my keys…
And yes, I did sue my 3 trustees, one of whom was my brother. I’m happy to say that we’ve moved WAY past all of this and the character Robert is far more maniacal than my real-life brother Richard ever was. It was actually my lawsuit that enabled my brother and I to finally see each other as equals. Next to my wife, he’s my favorite person in the world.
The title, “The Trustee” is because, in the end, Cory fights for the key to her trust and she is appointed Sole Trustee. The story is about Cory, and so Cory is The Trustee.
It was so cathartic to write this! So many of the songs allowed me to apply a playful but also sometimes dark humor to things that probably weren’t funny in the moment… I exposed some pretty vulnerable moments in my life but also tried to paint a new and more colorful view of misogyny and homophobia and even my mother with Alzheimer’s. This project is my “musical redemption”.
In the end, Cory finds true love with Raven and in real life, I found my incredible wife Shari. It is because of her that I felt loved and safe enough to be able to be this vulnerable and tell this story. So, thank you Mrs. Fant-Simon.
In May of 2023, I was doing a weeklong songwriting challenge where they show you an image or photograph each day and you write and post your musical interpretation of it. After you post your song, you go through and listen and comment on other writer’s songs.
Well, Marci Geller was one of those writers and I listened to the first song she wrote and I was completely blown away! My first comment to her was “Holy chord changes Batman!”. She’s just a brilliant writer and musician and is always taking these unexpected musical twists and turns.
So, we started collaborating and it was like that (very) old commercial where someone accidentally mashes a chocolate bar into someone else’s peanut butter jar to create the Reeses Peanut Butter Cup. From June of 2023 to March of 2024, Marci and I evolved into this musical machine. We had matching software and instruments in our studios and swapped songs back and forth from Texas to NY. We do most of our work remotely, both individually but also in realtime and the few times that Marci has come to Texas and I went to NY, it was absolutely magical to work in person. I wish we lived closer so we could do it more often….
First we tackled songs for KPOP with Marci’s UK publisher and then we decided to go less poppy and write some more ethereal music for sync and film and TV.
In March 2024, I was piddling in my studio, sipping on a fabulous glass of red and BAM – like a frickin’ lighting bolt, it hit me… I’m supposed to write a musical and tell my story!! It felt like a big “duh” for some reason.
My manic brain took off, and the first thing I did was text Marci and asked if she could connect because I wanted to share this hallelujah moment with her. So, we connected via Sessionwire (which is a recording studio version of Zoom) and we had a glass of wine together and then I told her my idea.
She totally got it and went straight to her keyboard. On that first call, we wrote 80% of the song “When Your Parent’s Die”. From that moment on, this musical poured out of both of us. 8 months later, we have 27 songs and an entire musical written. It still needs a lot of work, but it’s getting there and we’re very proud of it.
As I started thinking about how to present this musical to people, I struggled with how to depict each character. Because this is a work in progress, I tend to re-sing ideas on the fly, rewrite lyrics, move parts around, etc. I knew that hiring and recording vocals with other singers would be a logistical nightmare.
Then another lighting bolt hit me —I love editing video and I know Final Cut Pro pretty well. What if I could create videos to show not just the lyrics but also the character who is singing?
A few months prior, I had dabbled in the Adobe Character Animator application for a song that Marci and I wrote for a Kpop band. For fun, I created an animated virtual boy band with what I’ve coined “digital puppets”. I realized that using digital puppets for each character with animated lyrics would convey the story perfectly. So, I got to work…
I found an amazing company that creates custom digital puppets. I sent them family photos and images of specific outfits and hairstyles for the five digital puppets that I needed for each character in the opening number. Then I created a video combining the puppets and lyrics. (I thought about animating the digital puppets to sing but decided it was too distracting. And, I’m not thinking of this musical as an animated movie…)
After I finished the first Digital Puppet Video for the Opening Number, I decided to bite the bullet and do a video for each song. I am still working on Act 2…
Creating these videos is a labor of love that I enjoy almost as much as writing the musical, I believe that these videos work to convey the individual personalities of the characters, the story and songs from The Trustee.
I do think of them as temporary placeholders until we finalize the music and lyrics and keys and arrangements and then we will move on to recording singers.
