This page used to be just music I recorded and posted, but now that I’ve started playing around with some other things I figured I’d broaden the scope a bit. So, if I create something I feel is worthy of sharing with the world, I’m going to stick it here.

Enjoy. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed making this stuff.

Tunes

I’ve been playing guitar, bass, and various other stringed (and occasionally not stringed) instruments for night on 30 years; occasionally, I even make some money at it (but not much). I enjoy playing music with my friends and stuff, and occasionally, I record things. Here they are:

♦ – The Blanket Fort Demos – In March 2021, I went ahead and released cleaned-up versions of the demos I recorded for February Album Writing Month. I thought most of them were pretty good.

♦ – World’s Okayest… – My debut solo record, released November 2019; 15 original tracks written and performed by me. People seeme to like it.

♦ – All’s Fair in Filk and War by D.J. McGuire – Another record from my buddy DJ; this one is his reaction to the situation in Ukraine, and serves as a fundraiser for The Leleka Foundation, a US non-profit supporting medical and social support projects there. He “filked” a couple of my tunes on this one, and had me play guitar on ’em.

♦ – “Sleep Forever” by Mikey Mason – My immensely talented friend had me sit on bass on this tune off his 2021 record, Retrossance. It’s a great record, and in addition to performing here, he also gave me an “inspiration credit” on the lead track, “Friday Night, 1988,” because the song I wrote with that title last year inspired him to write his.

♦ – You’re Not Cleared For This by D.J. McGuire – D.J.’s full length record, with lots of sci-fi and workplace stuff. I play guitar on a couple of tunes, and did some off-the-books consulting.

♦ – Impeachment Carols by D.J. McGuire – My friend D.J. is a political pundit as well as a hell of a songwriter. In December 2019, right before the official articles got voted on, I helped him knock this E.P. together as producer and guitar player. It’s all his stuff, I just pushed some buttons. Still, it’s fun, and likely overcome by events by the time you read this.

♦ – Songs of The Faithless by Jonah Knight – Jonah is a ridiculously talented musician and a good friend. He started writing a few tunes, which ended up becoming a full-cast recording of a yet-to-be-staged musical featuring all kinds of talented folks, and me, playing a small part as a cultist and playing bass on half-a-dozen tracks. It’s cool.

♦ – “Dreamland” by Metricula and cphaurckker – My talented friend Madison “Metricula” Roberts asked me to sit in with her on this track from “Streamer Song Swap vol. 2”, a fundraiser for the Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation, featuring various twitch streamers covering the songs of other twitch streamers. It’s always a treat to make music with Madison, and this one has the bonus of supporting a good cause.

♦ – Since 2014 or so, I’ve been pretty regularly playing bass and occasional other things with a wizard rock/nerdmusik band based out of Cary, NC, The Blibbering Humdingers. You can find us playing all up and down the Mid-Atlantic region at your favorite festival, convention, or wherever will have us. We have a pretty good time, all told, and I’ll keep thanking my friends Scott and Kirsten for keeping me around for as long as they’ll have me. Below you’ll find some links to a couple of recordings I’ve done with them over the past couple of years:

• Raised By Nerds, the album we recorded back in 2015; I play various things; bass, guitar, mandolin, and ukulele. I’m a particular fan of track five, “Engines Make Me Hot”, where I’m playing damned near everything, but the title track is perhaps our biggest “hit”
• Live at Dragon*Con, a recording of one of our live shows from Dragon*Con, one of the biggest sci-fi/nerd gatherings in the country, back in 2015. It’s been an honor and a joy to play there there last couple of years.
• “The Weapon”, a track off of 2015’s Harry Potter Alliance fundraiser record A Tribute to Harry and the Potters, for charity run by Joe and Paul of the eponymous band, the founders of wizard rock (who we got to play a couple of shows with a while back); we contributed a cover of this HatP classic, which features some of my best guitar playing ever captured, if I do say so myself.
• Fantastic Geeks and Where To Find Them , Our 2018 record, which flirts a lot with “old timey” dance music: foxtrot, swing, tango, and the blues, plus some ragtime for good measure. I really enjoyed playing on this one; these new styles really forced myself to stretch as a bassist, and I’m very proud of the results. I even have a songwriting credit on this one, which makes me doubly proud, that such great songsmiths as my friends Scott and Kirsten thought something I came up with was worth inclusion.
• Gruntled: A Collection of Non-Sequitir Ditties, the band’s 2021 release. Lots of interesting and very different stuff, in part thanks to S&K’s amazingly talented kids having joined the band over the course of the last few years, bringing a ton of interesting instrumental contributions and a whole new five-piece vibe live. Recorded during the pandemic year, mostly live in the family living room, I’m only on five tracks on this one (as I’m rather remote), though the production makes my playing sound damn good on those, if I do say so myself.

♦ – From roughly 2016 through the end of 2018, I was a regular part of Dimensional Riffs, a nerd rock band that does a couple of con gigs a year and the occasional other show. They’re still together, and I occasionally sit in these days, but it’s not a regular thing for me, as I have too much other stuff going on. They’re friends, and they play a couple of my songs in their set.

• Live in the Boudoir, DR’s first release, recorded “live” (mostly) in our singer’s bedroom in 2017, all of us around one mic like a bunch of 1920s jazz musicians. It’s quick, it’s dirty, but it’s also not particularly bad, and gives a pretty good sense of the original stuff the band does.

♦ – Variations on ‘All Creatures…’: I use to play with a “guitar ensemble” on the other side of town – here’s an open-air live recording of a tune from April, 2013. I’m playing electric leads. I don’t think it sounded all that bad (thanks Pete L for the recording).

♦ – Chuck Can’t Play Bass!: Back in 2007, I went on a recording kick, not knowing what the hell I was doing, with almost no gear whatsoever. Some of the stuff below is the result, call it an E.P.. I dare you.

• Cookies and Porn: title inspired by something I saw on the front seat of a a car in the parking lot at work.
• Pullin’ Teeth: my little two-minute salute to crisp 80s instrumental guitar rock.
• CF Groove, v2.0: A tighter re-mix of one of my first attempts at home recording. Cool bit? Backwards drums.
• Reef Ridge Aeration: Another shuffly instrumental which proves I have exactly 45 seconds of second-rate lead guitar chops (hey, I’m really a rhythm guy, but I try…).
• Thursday: A consciously lighter, less aggressive pop instrumental; with a little bit of piano in the background for variety – of course, I couldn’t nail the simple five-note line, so what you hear in the track are the keyboard stylings of my lovely wife.

Writing/Editing

Occasionally, I write things besides songs and memos. I also used do some developmental and copyediting for Antimatter Press, a small digital imprint run by some friends. If I think it’s worth reading, I’ll post it here.

♦ – Into The Mirror: A Literary Collection: The first publication from a friend’s new independent publishing venture. I re-worked some of my song ideas from the past few years into some poetry that’s included in the collection.

♦ – Rescue in the Feywild: A short adventure module for 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons; suitable for 4th and 5th level characters. A quick interplanar jaunt to rescue a baby unicorn from some suitably monstrous creatures. It’s pretty linear, but my players at the time were young and inexperienced RPG’ers. No statblocks, so you’ll need access to the sourcebooks. In any case, we had fun playing it.

♦ – Live, Without A Net: A quick little Urban Fantasy short story I wrote in December 2009; My nod to the classic “Devil Went Down to Georgia” trope; owing more than a little bit to Emma Bull’s excellent War for the Oaks. Just a vignette, with the suggestion of a larger world. Maybe I’ll run with it one of these days.

♦ – Get Out of my Head!: Here’s the first draft (shoddily edited for punctuation and stuff – I apologize up front for the many errors) of my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel project. It’s very rough, but I haven’t done much with it lately. Eventually, I’ll get around to a full-on re-write, but for now, I’m sticking it out there, because there are a few bits I quite like in amongst all the “first novel” garbage.

♦ – Beasts of Imagination – EA Bowen: I did a bunch of developmental editing on this one when it was a project with Antimatter before it folded. She self-published later; this is the result.

♦ – Bad Wizard – James Maxey: This was another Antimatter project (we did the ebook); I did a few copyediting passes to fix typos and inconsistencies.