My personal blog is at https://swb72.us
A beginning of things. I had originally intended for this to include excerpts from the beginning of Genesis to go with each layer that I was adding, and I had gone as far as acquiring a copy of the original Talking Bible records (on fifty-two 16 2/3 RPM long-play records!) produced by the American Foundation for the Blind and issued by the American Bible Society as a complete set in the 1960s featuring "the voice" himself, Alexander Scourby. However, I wasn't able to get any response from the legal folks at ABS *or* from Litchfield Associates (the current owners of Scourby's later recordings and copyrights) about the copyright status of the recordings, which were made from the late 40s into the 1950s, despite repeated requests. This became especially necessary given that copyright law has changed multiple times since the recordings were made, to the point that works that were considered to have previously lost protections have gained them back, and that may include the AFB/ABS recordings. Rather than risk being sued I erred on the side of caution and released the song without the readings.
The original was programmed by hand into Cakewalk in the late '90s, and was inspired by a visit to my then-fiancée in Florida while I was still living in California. We stayed in her parents' house and spent one night out in their covered back patio listening to the thunder as lightning flashes scattered across the sky like fireworks. A lot has changed since then (the marriage came to an end a decade later, and a second marriage ended in me becoming a widower), but I still love to listen to the afternoon and late night thunderstorms here in Florida during the summer months. Unlike the programmed piano melody in the original, I'm actually playing it for real in the rerecording and with much better synth instruments than the cheap white-label Soundfont device from the late '90s.