MIXED, MASTERED AND READY FOR RELEASE!
Welcome to the website for my musical about the end of the world.
I wrote Judgment Day between 2003 and 2007, in a total panic that religious extremism was going to destroy civilization. Now, fifteen years later (!) I finally got it together to make a record. We finished production in early December and are preparing the album release as we speak, starting with a few singles.
It’s been a thrill working with my amazing (and very patient) producer Gregg Leonard and an extremely talented cast of principals and session musicians like Tia Simone, Big C Coley, Jody Raffoul, SORNE, K.F. Jacques and IVA.
The backstory
How does one come to write a musical about the end of everything? Well, here’s short version: if you’re old enough to remember, in 2002 US then-president George W Bush invaded Iraq on false pretenses in the wake of 9/11, and tensions had ratcheted up between the West and Islamic nations. My PTSD from being raised Christian was at a fever pitch – I had been deeply into evangelical Christianity for a couple of years as a lad – and I needed to do something to cope with how much I was freaking out about the apocalypse all over again as an adult. Fresh off producing an epic, one-of-a-kind version of Jesus Christ Superstar at Burning Man in 1999, I got divinely inspired to make my own rock musical based on stuff in the Bible– though this story is the completely other end of the book. I started writing the musical in 2003 and finished around 2007. There it sat for over a decade, until a confluence events inspired and compelled me to bring the project to the world.
The plot
The plot of Judgment Day is simple: 1. boy meets girl 2. boy gets girl 3. boy loses girl because the Antichrist enslaves humanity and 4. the world is destroyed in an ultimate battle between good and evil. All this against a backdrop of the collapse and decay of modern civilization, i.e. the world we’re all dealing with today. The synopsis is here. While many of the themes are religious, it is not a work of worship; rather, it’s an exploration of ideas like faith, reason, love, loss and judgment. I would go so far as to say that Judgment Day is agnostic: at the show’s end, the audience gets to decide what just happened– and what, if any, meaning there is to all the drama in our lives.
Stylistically, the music is rock, pop, and electronic, with a hearty dose of orchestra.