All music and lyrics by Tyler Thomas
A Song of Once Upon a Time
Performed live, November 9th, 2021, with:
Ethan Nguyen, piano - Will St. Peter, guitar
August Bish, bass - Austin Crawford, drums
Caleb Pitman, trumpet - Jack Courtright, trombone
Simeon Davis, alto sax - Trevor English, tenor sax
Inspired by the cycles of the Western art song and musical theatre traditions, these eight songs form a single narrative arc that broadly mirrors the plot points of the hero’s journey or monomyth. While they do not tell a specific story, the songs are intended to evoke the feeling of any number of familiar myths, legends, and fairytales. Throughout, I have attempted to build on a shared symbolic vocabulary, both lyrically and musically, in an effort to strengthen that sense of narrative cohesion.
Sailing
The summer I was 14, I first learned how to sail. I don’t remember ever having been on a sailboat before then, but from the moment I first wrapped my hand around the mainsheet and felt the pull of the wind, I was in love. For as many hours as I could, I learned to maneuver that Sunfish back and forth across the surface of Waneta Lake. To this day, those early sailing memories and those of the catamaran at our family reunions on Hayden Pond remain as vivid as a brightly-colored sail against the bluest sky.
The Boy From Outer Space
As a child, I often took my play too far, and my games would spill over into out-and-out mischief. In those times, the line between chaotic capers and something more destructive blurred, only to come sharply into focus with my mother’s intervention and reprimands. Once I was sufficiently contrite in time out, I would explain to my mother that “the boy from outer space” was gone. Thankfully, she understood my scapegoating as a child’s desire to separate himself from his actions and seek forgiveness.
Wait
My initial concept for this song was a traditional jazz ballad, with a slow four feel and lyrics of unrequited love. But when that began to feel indulgent and cliché, I transformed a breezy waltz from an earlier sketch into a vehicle for a more expansive and suspended ‘slow’ song. ‘Wait’ is almost entirely composed of various suspensions, anticipations, and delayed resolutions, in an effort to give it a sense of forward motion, in spite of its slow harmonic rhythm and economical melody. Meanwhile, the lyrics are, perhaps obviously, an attempt to express those same ideas in words.
April Love
Designed as an uptempo vehicle, ‘April Love’ is inspired by some of my favorite standards, and for me, there are no better models for uptempo tunes than the songs of Rodgers and Hart. For example, the B section borrows heavily from the bridge changes of ‘Have You Met Miss Jones?,’ while the end of the tune builds on fragments from ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’ and ‘Almost Like Being in Love.’
Christmas In Corning
Among my childhood memories, few are precious as those of Christmas Eve with my grandmother in my dad’s hometown of Corning, NY. In those idyllic scenes, the houses glow warmly under fresh blankets of snow, the office lights of the old nine-story Corning Inc. headquarters spell out N-O-E-L, and Bing Crosby’s 1957 A Christmas Story crackles from the car’s cassette deck on the drive home.
Tiburón En Vuelo
When my great-grandfather, Ramón Valle, left Puerto Rico for New York, he came without family as a teenager. While other Puerto Rican immigrants established communities in Upper Manhattan and the South Bronx that preserved elements of their culture, Ramón lived and worked in the rural North Country region of the state, near the Canadian border. Whether by choice or as a result of that cultural isolation, he passed on very little Puerto Rican identity to his children. He died before I was born, and I have always felt a kind of estrangement from this part of my ancestry. I was probably eleven or so the first time I watched the 1961 film of West Side Story; I wanted to connect with the Puerto Rican characters, but I struggled to see myself in Bernardo when so much of my lived experience makes me more like Tony. I’m a Jet, not a Shark, and I am left to wonder: At what point between Ramón and me did a Shark become a Jet?
To A Friend
The canon of jazz standards gives voice to many shades of love, but few are the songs that celebrate the bonds of male friendship. Too often, men in contemporary society adopt a sense of masculinity that renders them emotionally unavailable, even to their closest friends. To be the change I want to see, so to speak, I set out to write an earnest anthem to honor the love, joy, and assurance such friendship has brought to my life.
We Will Not Know
Life is filled with milestones, big and small, both expected and unexpected. I find that for as many ‘lasts’ as have become honored turning points in our collective experience—high school graduation, moving out of a childhood home, retirement—many more go unmarked until long after the opportunity to do so has come and gone. I think this is more often than not the case with those people and places we assume will always be in our lives. We believe there will be a next time, and there is—until, of course, one day there isn’t. We fail to mark the end of an era, a tradition, or a friendship, because we believe it hasn’t come, when in fact it’s already beyond return.
Unfolding
Genealogy has been one of the most rewarding interests I’ve inherited from my parents. Over the past few years, I’ve helped them build on their existing notes, accessing digitized primary documents which clarified and at times rewrote existing family lore. The scenes I describe in each verse blend the resulting research with imagination. I find that by envisioning these turning points in my ancestors’ lives, history transforms into something both personal and present.