News Archives

Tom Kimmel's July 2007 Newsletter

Contents

1. Greetings!
2. News
3. Drawing Board
4. Recommended
5. Perspective

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1. Greetings!

Greetings!

2. News

a. Music News

Lots of travel this summer and lots of seed-sowing that should bear newsworthy fruit down the line. A few things worth mentioning:

i. New song!

Recorded by Canadian artist Jimmy Rankin. "When I Rise" (which I wrote with Jimmy) is one of my favorite recent songs. And Jimmy is a great singer who does the song justice.

Artist: Jimmy Rankiin
CD: Edge of Day
Song: When I Rise
Produced by: Colin Linden
Websites:
www.jimmyrankin.com
myspace.com/jimmyrankinmusic

ii. Free Podcast Series update

The next two of a series of podcasts (which I promised some time back) are now available (for free) at iTunes. If you have iTunes (a free application) on your computer, you can go to the iTunes store, search for Tom Kimmel and voila! You can then "subscribe" to all my podcasts (in which you'll get these two podcasts as well as future ones from this series), or you can just click on any individual podcast to download it.

Featured this month are the songs "Bigger Than the Both of Us" and "The Blue Train"

This first series of song podcasts is taken from a great house concert I played earlier this year with friend and frequent collaborator Michael Lille.

www.michaellille.com
www.frontporchhouseconcerts.com
www.onsitemedia.com

iii. New album update

Just took a big step closer to finishing the new songs-from-film-and-tv album by mixing final tracks in NYC with longtime co-producer Cliff Goldmacher. As I mentioned last month, I'm looking at a first quarter 2008 release date.

www.cliffgoldmacher.com

iv. Blog

Yes, I've started one! Have a couple of entries posted and I actually enjoyed writing them, so I guess I'll keep it up. They'll be between-newsletter entries, not too long, reasonably focused. Check it out (if you dare):

www.myspace/tomkimmelmusic (and click Blog in top menu)

v. TK rock video on YouTube

A friend recently pointed out that one of my old *rock videos is up at YouTube. Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btx2soZweKg

"That's Freedom" was the first single on my 5 to 1 album which was released on Mercury in May 1987. It peaked at #17 on the Billboard Rock Tracks Chart later that summer. The young woman in the picture is Paige Hannah (Daryl Hannah's little sister), and the guy in the beret is Kenny Greenberg—great guitar player and record producer. [One of Kenny's productions-an Allison Moorer trackwas featured in The Horse Whisperer and received an Oscar nomination.]

BTW I broke out in hives watching this on YouTube, but hey, I hope you enjoy it! [My daughter's response: Oh my gosh, that's really you!]

vi. Dirty Linen article

Very nice Dirty Linen article about me in the June/July issue. An excerpt is online at:

http://www.dirtylinen.com/linen/130/

b. Book: audio book

I'm back on track recording the audio book version of The Sweetest & the Meanest, and I'll have a progress report next month. I'm still planning on a fall release.

c. Teaching

I'm just back from teaching at the inaugural Cedar Run Song Workshops retreat in Virginia, and it was a great experience.

Check it out for next year: www.cedarrunworkshops.com

Coming up fast: 2 more very fine long-running writing retreats, The Swannanoa Gathering's Contemporary Folk Week in Asheville, NC, and SummerSongs in Ashokan, NY.

[BTW, it's not too late to register for either!]

www.swangathering.org
www.summersongs.com

3. Drawing board

The new website is slowly but surely coming along!

4. Recommended

Breakfast at Tiffany's Truman Capotes excellent 1958 novella. Although I'm a Capote fan I'd never read Tiffanys until Kate Campbell, a literate songwriter if ever there was one, recently commanded me to read it, and in an effort to gain credibility with Kate I did so. Thank goodness!

Tiffany's stirred a lot of feeling in me. Don't we all attempt to rewrite our own stories in an effort to somehow ameliorate painful aspects the past? Of course if we do it artfully we can be fairly entertaining, but don't we ultimately find that there's no getting over anything? That if we're to live at all we must learn to live with.

BTW my favorite Capote book remains Music for Chameleons, which would be a wonderful summer read. Pick it up and check out The Beautiful Child,Capotes bittersweet take on his friend Marilyn Monroe.

[Note that Capote spent his childhood summers with his old maid aunts, the Faulk sisters, across the street from my great-grandmother in Monroeville, Alabama. His exquisite A Christmas Memory is a memoir of his friendship with one of those aunts, Miss Sook Faulk.]

5. Perspective

"If you want to test a man's character, give him power."
--Abraham Lincoln

Love & Peace,
Tom