There are a tremendous number of musicians whose work I love, truly love.  And there are a tremendous number of playwrights whose work I love, truly love. And I love when they come together in sound design for a theatrical production.

I think of this today because while listening to a “party shuffle” (though the party is me, working), “River Rise” by Mark Lanegan plays and I am transported to “The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek” by Naomi Wallace, a play that I directed while at Rutgers. After a search for authentic Depression era music I found that there was a dated sound that was not always right for the very contemporary, immediate resonances of the play in production. I rediscovered Mark Lanegan’s music, formerly of the Screaming Trees, as contemporary but so very rooted in the same music I was listening to from the 1930s (such as Ralph Stanley).