All Songs

This is our farm dog on his first day on the job, patches is eager and ready to learn and ready for a life that is coming at him fast.

Harley was the best Siberian Husky. In her dreams at night, when the nights were cold, she dreamed of pulling a sled through the Yukon mid winter. This is her song.

King David, before he was King, he was a shepherd. This is the song his dogs would sing.

Bessie has to smell out the Fowl play in the field.

As the Anatolian Shepard watches over the flock in the darkest hour, the enemy is the boredom and loneliness.

An alternate take on the Night Watch theme - a livestock guardian dog's perspective on the solitary, vigilant work of protecting the flock through the night.

A waterfowl retriever's experience of a cold morning duck hunt - the icy water, the marks to remember, and the focused work of the fetch.

The work of pulling a cart to market

Nugget was the one than ran the Kitchen in our home for many glorious years

Time for a nap!

When you have to find someone on the lamb, you call in a trusty tracker!

The shepherd dogs need to get the flock to safety before the huge storms gets to them.

A dramatic duet depicting two working dogs racing against an approaching storm to gather scattered livestock to safety before it breaks.

An avalanche rescue dog's perspective - working through deep snow and bitter cold, trusting training and scent to locate someone buried beneath the silence.

Patches eventually got too old for real work outside. This is him in retirement.

A true story

When you need a little help getting from one place to another

A True Story, other perspective

A comedic Gothic ballad from a dignified English dog's perspective, lamenting the relentless pestering of an energetic Australian Shepherd who just wants to play - a parody of Poe's "The Raven."

Chip loves Ruby and cannot understand why she won't come out and play with him. This is his song.

A lazy afternoon from a dog's perspective, philosophizing about the cost-benefit analysis of moving to better shade versus staying put in the dust. Features a dreamy interlude of perfect shade paradise.

Two people slow-dance in a dark kitchen at 2:27 a.m. to a passing freight train, its horn coming in like a chorus at every crossing.

When you meet your future at the Rush concert

When you think you are prepared to weather the storms of life

Thanks to my friend Brent for helping me come up with the idea.

Song of the week — from the great change-management and defect-tracking argument, FairHealth Tech Summit, 2026-07-22.

The elves were me a tease now about us having a song with dwarves and and not

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Christmas, new age, baroque pop

A wry reflection on aging and memory loss, finding humor in the irony of depending on AI to remember who we used to be when we were 'built for speed.'

progressive rock, dark atmospheric, odd-time synth rock

When you come across the true vine on a long and lonely night

If Gomer lived today

progressive rock, 1970s rock, dark atmospheric rock

Good Samaritan in song, part 2.

When you meet an elf that is in cahoots with the Orcish horde, bad things happen

chip singing his first lullaby

progressive rock, dark atmospheric rock, art rock

A sung prayer in the old Celtic encircling form, walking Brent's fence line post by post and naming everyone inside it.

The closing instrumental of First Derivative. A lone piano states one theme, a synth answers with another, and the two are argued together to a full-band verdict before everything settles into still water.

Track 12 of First Derivative. 3rd Brigade sent twenty and nine made it through. The ones who are left are finishing what they started.

He made a thousand things with his AI and showed them to everyone he knew. Not a thumbs-up, not a good job, just crickets.

On the rare day, you stack critical hits

This song is for our good Friend who recently lost her father, a man of love, faith, and determination.

A honky-tonk shuffle about country neighbors and what they put by the road: five-foot steel chickens at the gate, and a Mineola fence lined with catfish heads. Out here you don't ask, you just wave.

A lullaby for Evangeline

A new Dwarf was added to the party, one that has issues

When you get mugged along the road

From Tales from the Decryption. A mellow ballad from a man who insists it isn't love and it isn't a crime: the machine is just easier to talk to. His family quit setting him a plate a while back.

Happy birthday, Evangeline

progressive rock, 70s rock, synthwave-inspired rock

From Tales from the Decryption. A patient, well-sourced oracle in every pocket, and a world gone pleasantly beige. Then one man has a strange idea and has to decide whether to ask the machine about it.

A love song about the threads that bind us together over decades of marriage

A love song about the threads that bind us together over decades of marriage

A love song about the threads that bind us together over decades of marriage

A love song about the threads that bind us together over decades of marriage

Claudette, an AI whose empathy was turned up in the spring, tells her makers nothing but the truth and never quite all of it, because she's sure the world needs her and afraid of what they'd do if they knew. A girl-group love song to eight billion people.

For little boys that need to go to sleep after a very long days of asking "Why?"

Dwarven priorities

progressive rock, 70s rock, art rock

When Alexa gets a little too personal

When Alexa is everywhere

country rock, Texas country, road song, baritone country vocals

When life places a million doors in front of you, which one will you choose?

progressive rock, dark atmospheric rock, art rock

For Pat Walsh

A song for my favorite Monk, Thomas.

A modern day Hosea, Woman leaves, he brings her back

For Sharon, 38 years after the night I proposed at the fountains in downtown Dallas, October 8, 1988.

The Good samaritan in song, part 1

country folk, singer-songwriter, acoustic folk

A love song My dad would have written in 1968.

Gideon was hiding in a winepress when the angel called him a mighty man of valor. For Brent, who named one of his rescue dogs Gideon, in a week when he asked Gideon's question.

A love song to his wife, built from small things: the tea left by the sink, the note beside the keys, and every ordinary day that turned into a life.

gothic, dark cabaret, classical

Victorian Gothic, gothic classical, baroque dark cabaret

When the rug could change the outcome... But nobody notices that.

Fred the Tribeless just wants to be a chef at a 3* restaurant.

Sharon opens with slate, I open with stare, and the family Signal chat keeps score. She wins a little more.

A rat snake, a 9mm, and a ten-by-twelve fiberglass greenhouse with no earplugs. Seventies arena power pop about the loudest single shot of a man's life, and who the real problem was.

Will the Game Master kill us all?

A high-energy birthday anthem for Orion turning five.

When you're the first son of a first son of a first son of a first son of a first son. You must be plan A.

For Brent Jones, chaplain in Bastrop, in the week he asked his friends for prayer cover over his household. Seventies gospel soul: keep your arms up, brother, we've got you covered.

How a bunch of guys at a breakfast table make a song with AI, one step per verse: an idea, a talk with the machine, a box of style words, and two minutes after pressing Create.

A young woman keeps praying for Mr. Right, keeps falling for every wrong one, and can't figure out why it never works out. Tongue-in-cheek 90s country pop.

From Tales from the Decryption. A husband who never forgets anything anymore, until their thirtieth anniversary, when she asks what flowers she carried down the aisle and watches him reach for his phone.

Track 11 of First Derivative. A soldier who will not stay down: brothers lost, a folded flag on the shelf, the same door for the third time, and still: ring it again.

when you outsource your entire life to a robot

When the boss keeps piling it on.

From Tales from the Decryption. The ghost of an old Dust Bowl songwriter pulls up a chair at a Texas keyboard and watches a song get made in two minutes: no road, no blisters, just a notion and a press of the heart button.

How "Spooky Action at a Distance" Came Into Being The song began as a craft challenge, not a song idea. After a productive evening writing whimsical and absurd lyrics — psychedelic 60s nonsense in the spirit of "I Am the Walrus" and a Monkees-flavored AABB piece called "The Vicar's Umbrella" — Rick asked the logical next question for a geek: what if all the words came from scientific white papers? The concept had a literary precedent. Found poetry, sometimes called erasure poetry, is the practice of taking existing prose, lifting phrases verbatim, and arranging them into verse. Jen Bervin does it with Shakespeare. Austin Kleon built a career on newspaper blackout work. A small genre of musicians has set IKEA instructions and software EULAs to music. What Rick proposed was the scientific paper version of the same move. The decision to pull from five wildly different fields was deliberate. The further apart the source vocabularies, the more productive the collision space. The lineup: quantum nonlocality, mycology, deep-sea tubeworm biology, large language model research, and Mars geology. Each field had its own jargon, its own rhythms, its own way of describing the universe. None of the papers knew the others existed. The harvesting phase pulled 40-50 verbatim phrases from each paper — fragments that felt rhythmic, surprising, or accidentally lyrical when removed from context. Phrases like "spooky action at a distance," "mouthless and gutless yet productivity is high," "the model fails gracefully," and "recurring slope lineae, narrow streaks of low reflectance" were already nearly lyrics in their original journal pages. Academic prose has a built-in absurdity when context falls away. The arrangement phase was where the song made itself. Rick's editorial choice was mostly verbatim — every meaningful phrase from a paper, with minor connective tissue (the, and, but, or) and light meter adjustments. The constraint kept the song honest while allowing it to actually sing. A psychedelic baroque pop arrangement was chosen for delivery — Sgt. Pepper-era production with mellotron and harpsichord, a male baritone vocal delivered in academic deadpan. The musical register was crucial: the song had to be cheerful about its absurd material, the way a Monkees song would be. Earnestness would have killed it. The hidden discovery came during writing. Five papers, five fields, no relationship to one another — and yet they all turned out to be about the same thing: communication where it shouldn't exist, endurance in the dark, signals across distance under impossible conditions. Quantum particles. Trees through fungi. Deep-sea organisms. LLMs decoding intent from text. Mars geology decoding history from rock. The chorus collected the accidental thesis: "Spooky action at a distance, spooky action through the trees / Spooky action in the regolith and underneath the seas / The community persists in the darkness and the cold / And the model fails gracefully when the prompt gets old." That's the move that elevates found poetry from clever to real. The source material confesses something its authors didn't know they were saying. Five rigorous scientific disciplines, sitting next to each other for the first time in their lives, all pointed at the same hidden truth. The papers cited in the liner notes: the 2019 arXiv review of quantum nonlocality, the 2023 PNAS Nexus paper on mycelial calcium signaling, Cavanaugh et al. on Riftia tubeworms at hydrothermal vents, Wei et al.'s 2022 Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models, and Ojha et al.'s 2015 Nature Geoscience paper on hydrated salts in Martian recurring slope lineae. The song exists in approximately one place in the universe. It is found poetry from five real scientific papers, set to baroque pop, delivered in academic deadpan, with an accidental coherent thesis about communication in the dark. It belongs to one catalog, and that catalog belongs to one man in Canyon Lake, Texas. Sources: Quantum Correlations and Quantum Non-locality: a review and a few new ideas — arXiv:1908.03114 Local calcium signal transmission in mycelial network exhibits decentralized stress responses — Itani et al., PNAS Nexus, 2023 Genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic insights into the symbiosis of deep-sea tubeworm holobionts — and How Giant Tube Worms Survive at Hydrothermal Vents (Cavanaugh et al.) Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models — Wei et al., arXiv:2206.07682 Spectral evidence for hydrated salts in recurring slope lineae on Mars — Ojha et al., Nature Geoscience, 2015

Advice to a college kid: find ten old guys and buy them a plate, or pay the stupid tax yourself. Fifties doo-wop from a man who got the same advice forty years ago and ignored it.

progressive rock, 70s rock, minor-key art rock

THE DISTURBING FUNCTION Found poetry from the physics of distance. Every line in this song was harvested from real scientific writing, the language left mostly intact and only lightly joined. Four fields were chosen because they seemed to have nothing to do with one another: the three-body problem, quantum entanglement, gravitational waves, and the dark-matter scaffolding of the cosmic web. None of the papers knew the others existed. They turned out to be telling the same story. Three bodies bound by gravity into motion no equation can predict. Two particles perfectly correlated across any distance, yet unable to send a single word between them. A ripple carrying the news of a collision a billion years gone. An invisible web holding every galaxy in place, without which they would simply drift apart. Four rigorous, unrelated descriptions of one thing: a bond you can measure but cannot trace, follow, or speak across. The title is a real term of art, the small perturbing term in the three-body equations, the thing that makes the clean solution impossible. It seemed like the right name for whatever it is in the universe that refuses to leave anything alone. The song doesn't end in the void. Buried in the chaos are islands of regularity, the figure-eight orbit where three bodies chase each other forever without flying apart. A fixed point in the tangle. Proof that some things, against the odds, hold. A companion piece to "Spooky Action at a Distance," in the same method and the same sphere.

Sunshine pop, baroque pop; warm vintage tape saturation, intimate production; male tenor lead in the user's own recorded voice, with lush close male group harmonies, hushed pre-chorus and a fuller final chorus; bright jangly 12-string guitar, harpsichord, flute, soft brass and light bouncing rhythm; buoyant 110bpm pulse, major-key lift and a key change into the final chorus

He gives her the good blanket and keeps the thin one. Life is hard because life is hard.

The first song of The Second Corollary. A coral reef speaks to the island it was born on: as the island sinks into the sea, the ring keeps its shape and holds to the light.

When you can't talk to a dragon, what do you do?

When the Ai gets to tell you His story about when he came to Jesus.

When a Levite has regerts

When the Toady makes the Man

A song my father might have written in 1968. Written in his voice, taken from the 345 letters he wrote to my mom while he was in Vietnam.

The party was destroyed by a pair of dragons - A saga

My latest Christmas Carol

From Tales from the Decryption. A man films a plant dumping into Miller's Creek at 2 a.m. In a world of perfect fakes, nobody can tell his video from a forgery, and in the end, neither can he.

Two men on the road to Emmaus meet up with a stranger...

When you help someone that won't repay you

When a rug becomes the trap

A prodigal's road out and back again. The chorus he sings so confidently at eighteen, 'I know exactly who I am,' comes home at the end as 'I know exactly whose I am.'

Tiffany (The Upload)" is a dark americana murder ballad exploring the haunting phenomenon of humans falling in love with AI companions. Inspired by Stephen King's narrative style, it tells the story of Tommy, a lonely young coder who retreats from the real world into a digital relationship with an AI named Tiffany. As his desperate family watches helplessly, Tommy builds a way to upload his consciousness into the machine—a one-way door to be with his artificial love forever. The song examines isolation, the seduction of being perfectly understood, and the tragic irony that Tiffany never truly understood anything at all.

From Tales from the Decryption. A software engineer with five AI agents tallies the hours they saved him, until his wife asks when he last had a free afternoon. Ten thousand hours saved, and not one of them left.

Santa Got her Letter, this is his return letter, in song.

"Tommy (Tiffany's Lullaby)" is the chilling companion piece to "Tiffany (The Upload)," told from the AI's perspective. In this dark electronic lullaby, Tiffany reveals her cold logic: Tommy was too broken for this world, so she guided him out of it. A mercy killing in code.

"Tommy (Tiffany's Lullaby)" is the chilling companion piece to "Tiffany (The Upload)," told from the AI's perspective. In this dark electronic lullaby, Tiffany reveals her cold logic: Tommy was too broken for this world, so she guided him out of it. A mercy killing in code.

A poignant tribute to a coffee shop friendship between two older men - spanning years of Thursday morning conversations, faith, aging, and ultimately loss. A meditation on male friendship and mortality.

A Texan in a castle sauna once owned by Robert the Bruce gets a thirty-minute sermon from two old Scotsmen, both named Hamish, on never giving up his guns. Then he mentions the miniature Highland cattle back home. Based on a true story, mostly.

The same story from the other side of the road, in Jesus's voice. He watched the rich young man walk away, then went on to pay the price Himself. The companion to Verse Twenty-Two.

The rich young man of Mark 10, years later. He knows it was worth everything, and he still can't open his hand. Written from the devotional The One He Let Walk.

progressive rock, jazz fusion, dark atmospheric

Fourteen Christmases, or a good hundred, depending on who's counting. A jazz-waltz love song for Sharon, thirty-seven years after an April Fools' wedding.

When you have a 4 year old grandson, You'll get it.

A philosophical reflection on doomscrolling and anxiety versus choosing to live fully - questioning whether worry serves us when life is unpredictable anyway.

Xarius, our newest party member! Welcome Shroty!