In this series of blogs, I chronicle my path bringing The Singularity to life as a rock album, graphic novel, and concert experience. My previous blogs can be found here: “Discovering Metal,” “Writing the Record,” “Variety of Voices,” “Instrumentalists,” “Boingo Boys,” “Mixing the Madness,” “Finding Story in Sound,” “From Music to Images,” and “Three Monologues.”
At the end of the summer in 2022, having just finished my duties scoring the first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, I was able to focus once again on The Singularity. With the album masters, cover art, and graphic novel nearing completion, the time had come to focus on bringing The Singularity to the concert stage.
FROM KEYS TO STRINGS
When I closed my eyes and dared to dream of what a concert of The Singularity might be like, I visualized the ideal stage layout. I pictured myself surrounded by some of my favorite musicians (maybe Gene Hoglan, Slash, and Buck Dharma might all be there? A guy can dream, right?), with all of us silhouetted by the flickering flash of animation on a giant LED behind us. What might have seemed a fantasy a few years earlier suddenly felt possible! But, where did I fit in?
I have spent my musical life playing in bands. From thrashing out “Escape from the Machines” at the Lynden State Fair in high school, to playing in my various Los Angeles bands, playing in my wife Raya’s bands, my brother Brendan’s bands, Queen tribute concerts, Battlestar Galactica concerts – for all of these, I was relegated to the position of “keyboard guy.” I had taught myself the accordion and hurdy gurdy because they were instruments related to the keyboard that I could carry on my body! At some point early in life, I got the damaging idea stuck in my head that I would never be a great guitarist, so I never pursued learning the instrument.
Now, with the release of The Singularity approaching, and the prospect of living out my wildest rock fantasies, was I to be once again stuck behind the keyboard stand? An epiphany hit me: I wanted to be on that stage as a guitarist. I needed to learn how to play guitar. I had eighteen months to do it.
Through my friend, bassist Pete Griffin, I connected with Los Angeles based guitarist and teacher Sasha Birrittella and began weekly lessons. Sasha knew my goal, and we started with the basics – scales, picking exercises, and so on. Based on several recommendations from friends, I purchased a Strandberg NX-6 headless guitar because it is one of the lightest electric guitars on the market, allowing me to focus my energy on building new muscles in my hands and arms awhile avoiding neck and shoulder strain. I ran the guitar through a Neural DSP Quad Cortex floorboard amp modeler, into a Laney powered cabinet. Suddenly, I could make a sound that sounded like an electric guitar!
Even though my technique was initially clumsy, my hands played better because my ears liked what I was hearing! After the first year, I picked up a few more guitars, including a Gibson Custom SE, and a Schecter California Classic Solidbody. However, it was the ebony Gibson Custom 1968 Les Paul Reissue that most ignited my imagination. I was surprised because I never thought I would be cool enough to hold a guitar like this, but I couldn’t deny that when I played it, my guitar sounded the way I wanted it to sound.
Sasha is an excellent teacher, and patiently walked me through the basics of the instrument. We spent half of each lesson on fundamentals, and the other half working on songs from The Singularity. Sasha kept a working document for us that cataloged the toughest part of each song, charting my progress. My team made practice sessions for me using the mix stems from my album so I could isolate the guitar parts, study them, then mute them and try to play along with the bass and drums. After a few months, I was able to play a verse here or chorus there. After a year, I began to stitch together entire songs – then, multiple songs.
I had composed the album’s guitar riffs with my hands on keyboards, so I really had no idea how difficult the guitar parts were, though I suspected (correctly) that some of them were quite tricky! I finally understood why so many guitarists, even some of my heroes like Oingo Boingo’s Steve Bartek, had struggled to make my piano-based ideas translate well to guitar over the last two and a half decades. However, I savored the challenge of learning my album’s more complicated riffs. I practiced the opening riff of “Redshift” and the verses of “The End of Tomorrow” as if they were classical etudes, starting them painstakingly slowly and gradually, over the weeks, turning up the metronome. While the dexterous left-hand articulations were challenging, I found my decades of playing keyboards did help me retrain the muscles in my hands. I practiced intensely. In the midst of many video calls, I held my guitar out of the frame so that I could silently build up the muscles in my hands.
Mastering fast pick oscillations across the strings is essential to metal music, but the physical gesture was completely foreign to me, because nothing similar exists in piano technique. After months, quick rearticulations still felt completely out of reach. Suddenly, after nearly a year and a half, I had a breakthrough where I found myself able to play fast repeated notes for the first time. Without warning, my album’s fastest riffs were now within my grasp.
When I began learning guitar, I only dreamed I might be able to play blistering riffs like “Event at the Horizon” and “Last Stop,” and suddenly, a few months before my concert, the muscles in my arms and hands clicked into place.
ANIMATED VISIONS
As 2023 came to a close, my Sparks & Shadows production team and I set early May as our goal for launching The Singularity. We set the record launch for May 3rd, the graphic novel publication from Image Comics for May 8th, and capped these off with a planned live concert for May 12th at the Fonda Theater in Los Angeles. I wanted to craft a concert experience that tied directly back to the concept album and graphic novel’s narrative. For this, I would need to incorporate animated visual components into the show.
My first call was to my friends Adam Conarroe and Patrick Stannard, the two visionary animators who directed Masters of the Universe: Revelation and its follow up series Revolution. In scoring those two series, and collaborating with executive producer and lead writer Kevin Smith, my imagination had been ignited by the work they produced with their team. Truly, I never expected they would work with me on concert animation, since my project was entirely self-funded and on an order of magnitude smaller in financial scope than a Netflix television series. However, I was shocked and honored when they both immediately leapt at the opportunity to work with me on concert animations for The Singularity, bring their remarkable team at Knights of the Light Table.
From my first creative discussions with Patrick and Adam, I knew immediately they were the right people for the job. Both certifiable metalheads, they appreciated my efforts to augment the genre’s tendency for extreme emotion and powerful visuals. Over weeks, they pitched one incredible idea after the next, and each raw animatic sketch made me more excited than the last.
Their animations triggered deeply emotional responses. Some of their simplest were surprisingly the most powerful, notably their various interpretations of bringing John Hofstetter’s brilliant album cover art to vivid life. For “Incinerator,” they presented a pastoral alien landscape that turned into a lava-drenched hellscape before our very eyes. The titular “Automaton’s Heart” pulsed along with the gears, machine gun fire in “Event at the Horizon” rattled with the kick drums, while “Antikythera Mechanism” pulled the audience into a gorgeous Atlantean civilization under the waves.
For “Syzygy,” the team captured the song’s filthy 90s punk spirit, with a series of clever animated frames that merged into a single image. This video was among the most ambitious in the set, and I was prepared to say goodbye to it if we fell behind schedule. The animation team clearly felt as strongly about it as I did, because they burned the midnight oil to get it finished.
Some animations told a complete story by themselves. “Industrial Revolution” showcased gas-masked miners in a dystopian mine rising up in defiance, while “The End of Tomorrow” presented humanity’s last survivors gathered around the last star in the universe, celebrating from the rooftops before their star goes supernova. While both animations drew influence from the songs and graphic novel, Patrick and Adam also injected original material to present gripping stories suited to the unique visual medium.
The ideas Patrick and Adam shared were so ambitious and massive in scope that I was in constant fear of the whole project collapsing under the weight of our dreams. Though I braced for the project to downsize, Patrick and Adam, and their remarkable team continually amazed me with their resourcefulness and dedication. Though finished shots would fly in as late as the day before the show, every animation was completed.
True to my hopes, The Singularity concert animation was not merely derivative of the project’s other mediums, the album and the graphic novel, but offered a new vision of the narrative, built specifically around the concept of framing the band onstage. I was, and remain, grateful to Patrick and Adam for bringing their artistry to my project.
As April 2024 rounded in May, after having spent just over a year and a half learning guitar and preparing animations, I was excited to dive into my first live performance of The Singularity.
REHEARSALS
After playing keyboards and accordion in bands for more than thirty years, the first time I ever held a guitar while in a real rock band was in rehearsal for the launch of The Singularity. We booked a large rehearsal studio at Center Staging in Burbank. I was excited to jam alongside my brother, Brendan, my wife Raya, and my new musical family, including Gene Hoglan on drums, my long-time collaborator Pete Griffin on bass, Omer Ben-Zvi and Laura Christine on guitars, and special guests Asdru Sierra, Mega Ran, Buck Dharma, and Slash.
On the first rehearsal day, while the sound crew set up, I began practicing the opening riff of “Last Stop,” part of my daily warm-up routine. As I went into the song’s opening riff, I was suddenly startled by an explosion of kick drums and cymbals behind me – Gene Hoglan was playing along with me! As each merciless bar of 7/8 flew by, I felt a euphoric sense of excitement. For Gene, this was just another rehearsal. For me, however, it marked the first time I had ever played electric guitar with a band! I tried to mask the giddy glee on my face.
I found myself quickly acclimating to the role of band leader and guitarist. It really wasn’t all that different from conducting an orchestra – I just had to set aside mental energy for chords and picking instead of click tracks, beat patterns, matching picture, and cueing musicians. I was actually shocked by how comfortable I felt holding the guitar in this potentially high pressure setting. Other than the odd passage here or there (“Event at the Horizon” and “Last Stop” were especially demanding on my skills) I knew my entire set so well that I turned my focus to singing more backing vocal parts. I decided the week of the show that I would cover lead vocals on “Midnight Sun,” before diving into the accordion solo.
The last song I added to the set turned out to be arguably the most fun. Since Blue Öyster Cult’s Buck Dharma was already joining us for “Tears for the Dead Life,” I decided to conclude the concert with an encore performance of my arrangement of his iconic 1977 song “Godzilla.” On the last day of rehearsals, I had the distinct pleasure of introducing Slash to Buck Dharma. I enjoyed watching Slash light up meeting a musician he greatly admired.
Most of the last day of rehearsal was spent ironing out the epic and logistically complex “The End of Tomorrow.” On the album, Slash did not play on the verses or the bridge of the song, but we both felt he should play them live. Moments before we ran the song, Slash walked over to me and asked how the bridge chords went. He watched my left hand studiously as I casually played through the chords. However, the bridge for “The End of Tomorrow” was one part of the show that had slipped through the cracks of my own guitar rehearsal, and I had only really started working on it the night before. Now, one of my guitar heroes was standing two feet away from me and unknowingly put me on the spot! Inside, I was sweating bullets as I played through the bridge, praying I wouldn’t make a mistake. I nailed it, and Slash nodded at me, as if to say “got it, thanks.” When I casually turned away, I was grinning.
At the end of each rehearsal day, I felt fulfilled on a profound level. As I walked to my car each evening the words, “This is why I’m here,” reverberated through my mind.
PERFORMING LIVE
The songs of The Singularity had been burning a hole in my brain for years. I felt a deep catharsis in finally bringing them to the concert stage alongside the musicians who helped create them. On the afternoon of May 12th, I walked into the Fonda Theater in Hollywood for soundcheck, getting ready to play the record live for the first time.
Over the afternoon and into the early evening, I tried to savor every moment with my bandmates, who at this point felt like family. Having gotten to know my special guests very well while working on the album and rehearsing the show, I delighted in meeting their significant others, managers, and friends that they brought with them. My mother and father flew in, my aunt joined them, and three of my best friends from high school made the trek down from the Pacific Northwest to witness the event. And of course, my brother Brendan was by my side, as was my wife, Raya, with our nine-year-old daughter Sonatine in tow. (At just one year of age, our son Arakel was a bit too little. His first heavy metal concert will have to wait!) The whole backstage felt like a big family reunion. In a way, it was.
Morgan Sorne’s opening set shook the backstage floors and walls with throbbing bass frequencies. I was honored that Morgan agreed to open for us, and excited for the audience who, I suspected, had never experienced anything like his haunting original music. Morgan specializes in creating shocking vocal loops in front of his audiences in real time, forging them into hypnotic songs. His musical thumbprint is all over my album’s final track, “Tears for the Dead Life.” I peeked from backstage and saw half my band clustered to the side to watch Morgan perform, entranced. As Morgan’s final vocalizations echoed and the crowd roared, it was finally time to take the stage. My heart started pounding.
With my Les Paul strapped to my body, I walked out on to the blackened stage with my musicians, and the striking animation of “Overture” began. At the symphonic peak of that first track, Laura Christine began the opening “Incinerator” riff. Eight bars later, like a rocket ignition, the band exploded into the song. I felt like I left my body, as my hands raced across the guitar neck, while my right hand meticulously picked the song’s relentless rhythm. As I jumped to the mic to sing the chorus backing vocal lines, I felt a wave of euphoria.
The set flew by in a flash. I could hardly believe my own words when I said to the crowd “We only have a couple songs left!” As the set approached its end, I was giddy to tell the audience I had written the next song back when I was in high school, inspired having imagined a certain guitarist playing it, and then I was thrilled to introduce that very guitarist to the crowd. Slash emerged to thunderous applause. (I wondered what my three high school buddies in the crowd might have been thinking, as they all heard my 1995 demo of “Escape from the Machines” when I first wrote it!)
We dove into the epic “The End of Tomorrow,” and then Buck Dharma came out to join us for “Tears for the Dead Life.” When we launched into the show’s encore, “Godzilla,” I felt a sense of joy from the audience at hearing Buck Dharma himself play his own iconic guitar riff. With Slash on stage for “Godzilla” as well, trading solos with Buck, I had to remind myself I wasn’t dreaming, as I played one of my favorite rock riffs on stage with two of the guitarists I have admired most since I was a teenager. Watching these two icons trade solos would be one of the most memorable moments of the entire night for me!
In what felt like an instant, it was over. I returned backstage, as booming echoes of the cheering crowd reverberated through the concrete walls. As I took my in-ear monitors out and sat down, I reflected. Nearly three decades earlier, I had performed “Escape from the Machines” in a rock band on a cramped, blazing hot outdoor stage thrashing against a rickety keyboard stand before a gaggle of apathetic attendees at the Lynden State Fair Talent Competition in rural Washington State. Even though we only won Second Prize, I had known that afternoon that I had taken a major step towards writing and performing my own original music, a path that led me eventually to create The Singularity. Now, as I look towards the next thirty years of my life, I eager await discovering where the path will lead me next.
—Bear
