Hello from Tim in 2020!
Hello everyone,
Hope you are staying healthy amidst this pandemic. I've been doing lots of piano & voice video lessons, singing & playing the piano quite a bit, writing a song about systemic racism called “None of Us Are Free” (which I hope to record soon), going on lots of runs & walks in my neighborhood as well as the nature parks near Bloomington, and occasionally meeting with family & friends at a safe physical distance.
Also, I've been working on a new website!
I'm thrilled to announce timothyreedmusic.com :) Hope you enjoy perusing it! You'll see that I have many projects underway, but for this blog post I'd like to focus on Childrenopolis:
In case you didn't know, I'm writing a movie/musical called Childrenopolis. It's a fantasy dramedy movie/musical about a utopian community of children of many colors who live in harmony in the hollow of the earth, but know about the hatred, war, and pollution infecting the earth's outer shell. A select few children make a goodwill ambassador pilgrimage to detoxify the earth as we know it.
Currently I have finished the music and lyrics for 11 songs for Childrenopolis. So far I've recorded demos of 4 of them:
Love Makes the World Go Round | Most of the demos for the Childrenopolis songs are just piano and voice, but this is one that I have arranged more extensively. This song will appear several times in the movie, in different arrangements. In one scene, the kids in Childrenopolis sing it in 30 different languages, changing to a different language in each line! But here is the basic song, from which we will extract various elements for each way it's used in the movie. In this version the lead vocal in the chorus is sung by the mega-talented Ariel Herzberger! All of the other vocals are sung by me, at times 7 parts at once, in the section where the "Do Unto Others..." lyrics comes in.
The Paper Song | This song is sung in Childrenopolis by Jingjing, recalling when she encouraged her friend Ts'ai Lun to come up with a way to efficiently make paper, in China in 105 AD. My 10 yr old voice student Makayla King sings the lead vocal!
Listen to The Paper Song demo on YouTube now.
Tell 'Em About the Dream | In Childrenopolis, Mahalia Jackson recalls when she helped Martin Luther King with his I Have a Dream speech, at the March for Jobs and Freedom, in Washington D.C., in 1963. Avery Njau, a teenager who lives in Bloomington, sings the lead vocal!
Listen to "Tell 'Em About the Dream" here.
All the Things I Used to Love | Sung by Ogden Fletcher, one of the major characters in the movie. It's almost Christmas, and Ogden is missing his Dad, who died 3 years ago in a motorcycle accident. Gabriel North, my intermittent piano student, recorded the lead vocal, just before his voice changed!
Listen to “All the Things I Used to Love” here.
Hopefully these songs will pique your curiosity about the movie/musical Childrenopolis :)
I am in the process of recording demos for the rest of the songs. More coming soon!
David Heavener is mentoring me on writing the screenplay, which is pretty locked for the first 90 pages. We are now working on the last 30-40 pages. When we finish the screenplay, and I write a few more songs, and when we have demo recordings of all of the songs, we will go to Los Angeles and set up appointments with film companies, to get one of them to produce the film. It's a big budget film, so I am thinking Disney or another big company. Childrenopolis is similar in scope to the 2017 Beauty and the Beast, with elaborate sets, costumes, and many big song and dance numbers. If any of you have connections with decision makers at Disney or any other big film companies, referrals would be most welcome and appreciated.
For more detailed info about the creative process of Childrenopolis, please check out this previous blog post: