Only 5 Degrees Away from Kevin Bacon!

After turning into quite the pop cultural phenomenon several years ago, the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game is probably at least vaguely familiar to anyone with cable TV and/or an Internet connection. Well I’m glad to report that due to my appearance in Nightmare on Film Street and my subsequent listing on IMDB, I was able to use a nifty CGI-based web service called The Oracle of Bacon to discover I was a mere five steps away from the omnipresent actor.

Heck, we’re so close we can be brothers. Maybe he’ll invite me over for the holidays.

'Tis the Season for Tim Rivers

A couple of years ago, I posted this tribute to Tim Rivers, a very dear friend who left us far too early. I hope anyone who didn’t have a chance to read that post will take a few minutes to do so to learn more about this incredibly talented and generous person.

To continue celebrating his life and music, I’m officially launching a yearly post with a link to his very impressive holiday recordings. My original post has the whole history of those recordings and how I was fortunate enough to produce a couple of them myself. But the long and short of it is that Tim managed to create very rich four-part a-cappella vocal performances, singing all the parts himself, through the magic of multi-track recording technology. Even more impressive was that all the recordings were from the predominantly pre-digital ‘80s/early ‘90s, meaning there was no pitch correction available and I don’t believe he even a used a click track (he certainly didn’t for our recordings).

So for some great holiday music, I encourage you to check out A Tim Rivers Collection, available for free. As I said in my original post, I felt making these recordings available to as many people as possible was the least I could do to pay tribute to someone who had such a big impact on my life and on countless others.