Albums by Steve Savitzky

So far, Steve Savitzky has actually published only one album, so most of this collection is more a matter of ~~wishful thinking~~ ~~planning~~ advance marketing than anything else. However, the first album, Coffee, Computers, and Song, is finished, and available now: see its listing below.

He has also appeared on a number of convention compilations, and is hoping to produce an album soon with Lookingglass Folk, as well as his next planned album, Amethyst Rose. The latter has been on hold for a couple of years while life intervened.

Note: in the list below, the full name of the album links to its "home page" if it has one, while the "short name" links to the uploaded portion of its working directory. Go there to see the current state of an album's "to.do" list, its track list, and my working notes. In the near future, each album will have an RSS feed that you can subscribe to.

Real Albums

Coffee, Computers, and Song (short name: coffee): The first real (full-length, production-quality) album. As the title suggests, it consists entirely of computer-related songs. It was released at ConChord 2007, and is now available from DAG, Random Factors, and CD Baby, among other places. Dealer inquiries welcome.
About Bleeding Time! (short name: bleeding): There had to be a bonus of some sort for pre-orders. The list price of CC&S is $15 plus sales tax and shipping; pre-orders were $20 which got you free shipping, no tax, and a limited-edition bonus disc that I could burn myself and hand out on the spot to anyone who handed me a twenty. The disk itself consists mostly of concert tracks, plus a CD-ROM with high-quality oggs and mp3's of everything on both albums, all of my lyrics, all of my website- and album-bulding scripts, and a selection of previously-unpublished fiction. A limited number of $20 sets are still available.

Unreal Albums

These albums are at varying distances from the real line, but are approaching reality closely enough to qualify as "works in progress" rather than pure fantasy.

Amethyst Rose (short name: amethyst): I've been planning this as my second album for years, now. This one will be highly personal; mostly songs about family, fantasy, dreams, and the passage of time. I was originally targetting 2000, and then 2006. Even that is impossible now, but I had a directory and tentative track list up by August 4^th, 2007, and with any luck may even have disks to ship ~~in summer or fall of 2008~~ sometime in ~~2009~~ ~~2010~~ the future.
Quiet Victories (short name: qv): I think that my best song so far, Quiet Victories, would make a good single, with the profits going to a small list of women's charities. It would have been nice to have pulled it off by September, 2008, which would have made ConChord, where I was Toastmaster, the target convention. Oh, well.
Hackers' Heaven (short name: hackers): A good number of my songs came out of a couple of SF stories I was working on back in the late '80's and early '90's. They never got published, and have become distinctly dated. But one of them in particular had a couple of good songs in it, and a few song titles, so I naturally had to go write them. The basic premise is that Earth becomes too stifling, regimented, and anti-technological for the sort of wild creativity hackers (in the original sense of computer lovers) prefer, so they take off for space. This album really wants to be a CD-ROM rather than a conventional CD. It will have a narration.
Wandering Stars (short name: stars): As it turns out, there are too many songs for two more albums, especially since amethyst and hackers are so strongly themed. I'm still not sure about the title of this one; I was also thinking of Rose Among the Stars and Dreaming of Stars, sort of based on these lines in the last verse of "The Rambling Silver Rose":
...As she drifts out in the darkness
sleeping wrapped in shining stars...
... but the current favorite comes from the first line of the chorus.
She always knew that she was born
To follow a wandering star.
She's had a love in every port;
A drink in every bar...
... and also from one of my favorite poems by Yeats:
For Fergus rules the brazen cars
And rules the shadow of the wood
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all dishevelled wandering stars.

Imaginary Albums

These are so far out on the imaginary axis that they're basically just placeholders. But someday...

Sufficiently Advanced? (short name: demo): I originally intended to do a demo album; the title comes from a corollary to Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo". This was originally meant to be the demo and fundraiser for the first real album, Coffee, Computers, and Song; it was meant to have most of the songs, mostly with preliminary mixes, plus one or two extras so that people who buy both won't feel cheated. But as it turned out, I went straight to the real thing, to save time. The title is too good to waste, though.
Jacked In: If I ever do an album with synthesized arrangements...
Undead at The Starport: If I'm ever crazy enough to try recording live in the living room at Grand Central Starport.

Occasional Albums

Is This Thing On? (short name: test): The generic, cannonical test album. This is where I experiment with production techniques, scripts, and so on. All test disks are dated, since the content changes; they are never sold but may be donated to charity or distributed for promotional purposes.

Super Singles

A "Super Single" will be a bootable CD-ROM containing one or two songs in the form of Audacity projects. It will also contain a small but useable Linux distribution (probably Debian Live), and installable packages of Audacity and other essential software for Linux, Windows, and MacOS.

The idea is that you could re-mix the songs, add your own tracks perhaps, and then possibly upload the results to a growing body of collaborative work. I've made a couple of very small experiments in this direction; a great deal of work remains to be done.

Licensing:

License for Lyrics and Music:: The licensing legalese for my songs is still unsettled, but the basic license for the music and lyrics is the Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license with a few extra permissions granted to make it more filk-friendly. In particular, if you record your own lyrics and only use my music, you'll only owe me half the usual royalties; permission for mechanical licensing of music only will automatically be granted (but you'll still have to contact me first because that's the way the law works).

License for Audio Files:: Audio files for all songs both written and performed by me (when I get around to posting them) are posted under the Creative Commons Music Sharing License. (I'll try to get permission from other people to license their performances of my songs, and my covers of other peoples' songs, the same way. Trying to license my occasional covers and filks of songs by people outside the filk community promises to be something of a nightmare, so for now I'm simply not going to post any. If you're a songwriter whose songs I cover, and you don't mind my posting them, please let me know. If you're a listener, you'll just have to wait for the CD.)