In 1990 I recorded an album with Krysia Kristianne and Leslie Chew called Tyger and Other Tales. It was distributed in the U.S. and internationally by JVC Records. It was what I would characterize as a concept album English romantic poetry set to music. Although I don't have much of a taste for that particular genre now, the album was something I had wanted to do for a long time, probably ever since high school. Some of the music had been swirling around in my head for years. Leslie and I auditioned several singers, including Annie Haslam (Renaissance) and Sonja Kristina (Curved Air). For various reasons none of them worked out. We still were looking for that ice princess of British rock sound. I knew Steve Chapman from having worked previously with Al Stewart and Peter White. Steve recommended Krysia, who was amazing. Unfortunately, she recently passed away, which is very sad. The first track on the album is "Tyger" by William Blake.

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley is without question the finest poem in the English language. Although couched as a meditation on the Great Sphinx, Shelley captures the temporality of human life, the transitory nature of human culture and the despair and pathos it entails. Egypt is a particularly appropriate locale for Shelley to conduct his reverie. Geographically the Nile seems to flow backwards, from south to north. It flooded and receded in cycles of drought and abundance. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, which seems reversed in relationship to the river. Civilization thrived only along a narrow strip along its banks. This metaphysical landscape constrained the ancient Egyptian concepts of space and time, attuning their consciousness of place, their ontology and their theology. It determined the dynamics of their personal, social and mercantile interactions. As first observed by the Islamic philosopher Ibn Khaldun, nomadic Bedouin tribes roamed the desert from oasis to oasis. Lithe, nimble and agile, they developed their own ethos and religion. When they amalgamated into great cities they lost this cohesion, which inevitably lead to their decay. Recent philosophers such as Steven C. Levinson and Jeremy Naydler have brought Khalduns insights about the influence of spatiality into the present. Ozymandias is a profound lesson on the hubris and arrogance of the 21st century. We tried to articulate these sentiments in this musical version of the poem.

This arrangement of Keats' haunting poem is for flute, violin and guitar with cello continuo. It was one of the tracks on the "English Romantic Poetry Project." As I recall the guitar transition into Am7th proved difficult to play but listening to it again it sounds like we got it right.

One experiences a time-warp effect when reading old poetry anthologies. To begin with there is the mystery of why poems are there, only to disappear over time in later editions. Is this merely an artifact of public taste, or can it be the criteria for inclusion in the literary canon have changed? This was a complex 56-track production from the album “Tyger and Other Tales.”

Daffodils is a pretty poem by William Wordsworth. It conjures a mood of languorous reverie; the airy, luminous feeling of reclining on a hillside in mid-afternoon (much the same way as imagined by Charles Monet in Les Coquelicots).

"Love" is a pretty poem by Coleridge about his affection for Sara Hutchinson. This would be in his pre-opium phase. It allegedly inspired Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" although I have to say the woman depicted in "Love" is somewhat of a simpleton compared to the one in "La Belle," who is a powerful vixen.

A short piece for guitar in Am, adapted from a folk song I remember hearing when I was in high school in San Diego. I frequently played at a place called the "Heritage" in Mission Beach, I wonder what happened to it.

This is a musical interpretation of the closing sentences of Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights." I wanted for it to be atmospheric and to recreate imaginally the sense of openness and spatiality Brontë so deftly evokes.

I started performing this in high school way back in 1968. Who could not fail to be influenced by Tennysons mystical, romantic vision, and John William Waterhouses famous interpretation? I established the basic Em C chord changes early on. This was another one of the project’s big production numbers.