The story so far:

After getting into Twitter in 2009, things began to accelerate. One of the first folks I met was solo bassist & author Steve Lawson, who taught me the true nature of Twitter and Web 2.0, among a host of other things. He's an excellent musician, and I took the first opportunity I could to work with him, when a house concert tour he did with his lovely wife Lobelia, also a stellar muso, brought them through my area. I organized an event called "Waves Across the Pond" (I wrote about it in my blog here).

Though poorly attended, one guest was Allen Wentz, a bassist, producer, and...neighbor! Connected through a love of synthesizers, musicians and classic tunes, we struck up a sincere freindship punctuated by occasional satruday morning coffees at Two Alices Coffee Lounge in Cornwall NY. Then Allen revealed he had started working on something - something rather interesting - with some of the other musos we'd been connecting with on twitter, namely bassist Trip Wamsley & guitarist Rob Michael. In fact, Allen had been much more in touch with them than I was - and had started collecting performances from them in the form of audio files. I finally made the trip to Allen's small Cornwall NY studio, where I laid down quite a lot of keyboards tracks. The project's title is "Legoland Empire". (I'll let you see if you can work out where that comes from.)

I can't imagine the editing process he went through, but the end result is, in my humble opinion, truly excellent! There are 4 songs, each with it's own style & sonic language, showing great variety in style and texture. There are amazing performances by all involved (There are too many highlights to mention here; I may go tune by tune on a future post), and an audio mix & production worthy of major recogniton. The story doesn't end here, though. During this process Allen and I did 2 performances at the aforementiond 2 Alices Coffee Lounge, And we're talking doing about more....

So? Take a listen for yourself. Listen for free, or download all 4 songs from Bandcamp for a measly ONE DOLLAR. C'mon, really. :)

FYI, you can follow all of us on twitter:

Rob Michael:   @atmostrio

Trip Wamsley: @tripwamsleybass

Me:                  @nailmusic

Allen Wentz:    @allenwentz