My Secret Career 9: QE3

Here again my career and My Secret Career directly intertwine.

I had been acting in readings of “Searching For Certainty” by my cousin Mike O’Malley for several years in the early Aughts. We did it many times in New York City at different venues, at the Williamsburg Theater Festival in The Berkshires, in Cleveland as a workshop, and finally and most impactful for me, as an actual theatrical run in Los Angeles in winter 2003.

It’s a GREAT play. 

My character was a songwriter who is stuck in a rut, pining away for a girl he had a platonic friendship with at the tail end of his college years. He comes to New York City to try and mend fences with her after he learns that she is newly divorced. 

On arriving in LA to begin rehearsals, I headed straight to Mike’s house. He gave me a mix CD (!!!) of songs he thought were applicable to my character’s emotional state. He also challenged me to write a song about the woman my character was in love with: Betsy.

So, like so many other things in my life, the following song is solely thanks to Mike.

Here is “QE3” by High School Hero. 

My Secret Career 11: Sun Zed’s 2018 short album “Sun Zed”

So the last nom-de-plume I adopted was Sun Zed. 

Sun Zed is an umbrella that encapsulates tracks I recorded sporadically in Los Angeles that were never associated with any other imaginary musical outfit. 

Four of these years overlapped with the advent of my official screenwriting career and the seasons I was privileged enough to work on “Survivor’s Remorse”. I have never worked as hard as I did on that show and I am forever grateful to my cousin for taking a chance on me. True trial by fire.

To call it a learning curve is to do injustice to curves.

One great side effect, though, was that my focus was so intently trained on that process that I started recording almost without paying attention. It was a release that I needed to deal with the pressure that comes along with writing for a television show.

It was so all-encompassing that I let go entirely of music as a public pursuit. Oddly this led to a kind of relaxation into it, and the ease of GarageBand made experimentation more accessible and more fun than ever before.

I was also routinely filming myself sing cover songs I loved and posting them to Facebook which scratched my performance itch. But I was always uncomfortable with asking friends and family to be an audience.

Up til 2009 I usually did one or two shows a year, either with a full band or solo acoustic. Now it has been fifteen years since I did a full show. 

This coming weekend I will be singing a few songs at an event created by my sister Siobhan called The Wedtchester Songwriters’ Circle.

I am determined to get back on the horse after she has given me this leg-up. So coming soon to a theater near you: Brendan O’Malley as Bull De Jour.

In the meantime, follow me into the recent past and enjoy Sun Zed’s eponymous EP/short album.

Sun Zed. Los Angeles 2016-2018.

My Secret Career: Everybody Hateful

All of a sudden it is 2000.

I am living in the Windsor Terrace neighborhood of Brooklyn with my cousin Timothy. I had somehow secured a basement apartment with two “bedrooms” and Timothy agreed on a whim to move from Portland, Maine to the Big Apple. The quotation marks around “bedrooms” should give you an indication of the size and luxury of this haven.

This is where an intersection of my real careers with my secret career magically happens. A playwright I worked with gifted me an old drum machine he had no use for anymore. I hadn’t touched the thing. It stared at me from a shelf, intimidating me.

But Timothy was undaunted. He had been programming drum machines since the ‘80s. This was just one he hadn’t seen. He had also recently created an alter-ego. Pimp Fu, aka Poppa Foxtrot.

I would leave the apartment to go into the city for an audition and by the time I returned he would have recorded something insane to show me. I looked forward to each one.

I immediately began incorporating drumbeats into the songs I was composing. The sense of darkness and dread that pervaded my writing to that point evaporated and my music started to be what it had heretofore never been: 

Fun.

Timothy taught me as best he could but the mechanics of the drum machine essentially eluded me. By accident I would create something I liked and then I would pick a riff I’d had and see if it fit. The lyrics now might happen spontaneously instead of as deep, dark personal, finely-crafted revelations.

I had never been experimental in how I recorded. I am not a skilled enough musician to “jam”, so my songs were painstaking affairs that were eked into existence by the skin of my teeth.

Now a song could occur out of the blue.

One such song came to me in a dream. In the dream I was in a band playing a Clash style reggae punk song called “Everybody Hateful”, clearly a ripoff of the actual Clash song “Hateful” from “London Calling”.

Well, I attempted this song. But my months-long relationship with the drum machine meant that I couldn’t really predict what would happen once I started recording.

So what began in my sleep as a Clash-tiche became something entirely different. To this day I have never performed this song again. Someone else would have to teach it to me. The riff of the song has been played exactly two times, each take used in the recording you are about to (hopefully) hear.

Et, voilà. Bomer-B creates the latest dance craze, the “Everybody Hateful”.

And it’s all because of Pimp Fu.

And Steve Rossiter at Axis Sound. I may have Produced this album but Axis Sound Executive Produced it and where I come from, that is the senior credit. It would sound nothing like what you are about to hear without Steve Rossiter. Thank you.