Eclectic DVD compilation of selective performances featuring Adam Levin, Wendy Boulding, Valerie Gomes, Steve Wirts, Annette U-Bet and Caitlin Franklin.  Includes multi-video montage, animated graphics and incidental comedy.  Songs written by Adam Levin, with collaborative material by Wendy Boulding, Elena Rye Pellicciaro and Peter Stoller.  Produced by Adam Levin.  1 hr. 10 min.  "Truly enjoyable...serious musical talent...haunting intrigue..." -- Alan Schlein, Journalist, Billboard Magazine, Rolling Stone Magazine   [MORE DVD INFO & NEWS]   [ORDER]

 

Given the technical limitations of web videos,
the video (audio) clips are inferior to the DVD.

All recordings © 2007 Different Drum Music
All rights reserved (ASCAP)
Walls Start Falling (excerpt) Things Left Unsaid
Islands, Part One: Pandora's Box Not Coming Home (vocal)
Let It Go Hopelessly Liberal
Not Coming Home (instrumental) Keep Walking
Do You Feel It? Islands, Part Two: Needle's Eye
September Say It
Feeling What I Feel Islands, Part Three: Testament
Lying (in my sleep) Walls Start Falling (conclusion)
Emily  

DVD menu soundtrack:
Fanfare / House on a Hill / Undesirable Talent


 
 
Some related events...
 

 
Later performed at the Department of Peace Campaign's opening rally in New York City with speaker-founder Marianne Williamson, Walls Start Falling was written with Peter Stoller coincidentally a few days before the Berlin Wall was torn down.  This rare two-part performance features singers Wendy Boulding, Annette U-Bet and Caitlin Franklin.
 
Inspired by his experience near Ground Zero on September 11, 2001, Adam wrote Keep Walking for New York Artists Unite to Support World Trade Center Disaster Relief.  This premiere performance with Wendy Boulding was recorded at the relief benefit just days following the song's completion.  The song was later featured at Marianne Williamson's opening rally for the Department of Peace Campaign in New York City.
 
 
   
Hopelessly Liberal was recorded immediately following New York's Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, in anticipation of the 1992 General Election being held that week.  It lampoons Senator Alfonse D'Amato's reelection tactics against opponent Robert Abrams, as well as presidential politics in general.
 
 
Islands, September, Lying (in my sleep) and Things Left Unsaid were recorded during a performance of the play Things Left Unsaid, co-produced with writer-actor Kathryn Sanders, and include Steve Wirts on alto and tenor saxophones.
  

 		    
 
 

 Walls Start Falling is my personal favorite of all of our collaborative efforts.  Simple, solid and wide open, the music is as inspirational and supportive as a writer or singer could ever hope for.  Indeed, I think more singers we know have asked to do this song than any other.
 
One of Adam's most challenging and invigorating works, his magnum opus Islands engages in a bit of seriously playful one-upmanship, daring the listener to keep up with him as he takes us on a roller-coaster ride through an apparently haphazard collection of themes that is ultimately revealed to be an intricately balanced construct, bringing order out of chaos just as a kaleidoscope wrings symmetrical beauty from broken glass.  In the process, Adam shows us how all those islands are connected.
 
Sweet and soulful, Let It Go presents a hopeless love triangle.  Drawing from similar sources of inspiration is Not Coming Home, a bright, jazzy song crackling with the peculiar energy of thwarted expectations.
 
Emily is Adam's touchingly unsentimental historical romance and a sly tribute not only to Ms. Dickinson, but to all artists at odds with the aesthetic conventions of their time.  I think there's more good, real music in the intro than many composers produce in a lifetime.  Not one to disappoint, Adam follows that up with a soaring, classic melody that takes the piece up to a whole new level, culminating with the evocative, pealing funeral bells in the finale.  In the ever-so-aptly entitled Things Left Unsaid, one of Adam's most sinuous, sensuous melodies gets a rich, intimate jazz (a la Levin) treatment.  And check out the great bass work!
 
On a much lighter note (or slew of notes), Mr. Levin plants tongue firmly in cheek with Fanfare, a condensed compendium of his most excessive musical idiosyncrasies.  ("Islands Lite", maybe?)  That he manages to have so much fun and write such good music while pointedly bursting his own balloon is a particularly telling measure of his talent.  From the heavy-handed to the heavy-hearted, House on a Hill is a work of seething complexity, a darkly and densely beautiful piece.
  - Peter Stoller
    (Adapted from concert program notes)
 

Background music: excerpt from backing tracks of Walls Start Falling