I'm an American composer for film, television and video games, and a session and live drummer for radio and records.
I'm also very passionate about creating resources for and providing mentoring opportunities to creative artists all over the world. I am founder and editor-in-chief of SCOREcast, the popular online consortium of global film music and post-production professionals. I author the creative resource The Conversation, which is distributed monthly to more than 550 subscribers across all disciplines of the creative arts space.
I speak internationally to creative artists about the convergence of art and business.
I'm interested in working with incredible people who love to initiate extraordinarily creative projects. If that resonates with you, please get in touch and let's do something great together!
We all remember our first love. Even if it wasn't a positive experience in the end, the memory of the wild-eyed discovery of that feeling for the first time is something that will never leave your heart. Mine was clear back in the 2nd grade, and her name was Kathy Holden. We didn't play with the same friends. She didn't like "boy stuff" — like riding your Big Wheel or playing cops and robbers. She was all girl, and that's why I liked her. First Loves First love experiences are pretty much all the same. You are completely lost. You don't know which way is up. You have no idea how things are going to turn out. You might crash and burn. It's all uncharted territory. And that's the greatness of it. You don't know what isn't possible... yet. That knowledge comes several years later when you get into adolescence and start to understand how the relationship game really works....
I had something infinitely more profound to post this morning. I swear I did. But, yesterday, "something happened on the way to heaven..." I've posted a little about this on my Facebook page, but not much here at [deaneogden.com]. Eastern Chronicle I'm entering the mix phase on the first personal project I've undertaken in nearly twenty years. It is a world music album, based on my travels in 2011. The album, entitled Eastern Chronicle, fuses ethnic textures and world environments with live orchestra, intricate percussion, vocals, international soloists, and digital electronics in a way that I think is comfortably intimate and beautifully expansive at the same time. It has been one of the greatest joys of my life to write and produce this record. Rarely do I get the chance to indulge my own creative impulses in the sense of going completely "off the reservation" and doing my own thing, 100%...
Competing sucks. Let's just get that out there. I don't like competition, but it is necessary to what we do. Just don't try to convince me that you actually enjoy competing. If you try to convince me of that, I'll call you a liar. And I'd be right. I'd be right because nobody likes to compete against others. Even the most competitive people in the world (likely, highly driven and conditioned athletes), if given the choice, would rather compete against themselves than compete against other athletes. In fact, if you ask around, most of them will talk about competition in self-reflective terms. They'll speak from the perspective of self-improvement. Why? Because competing against other people is never a real competition. It can't be. You are you and not them, and therefore there are no absolutes from which you can draw perfect conclusions. Because of that, you are left competing against unknowns. Essentially, you are fishing in the dark. It is far more effective...
I spoke this morning with someone who is mutual friends with someone from my past. Someone who I was once close to. Someone who I now haven't been close to for a long time. They are not over the fact that we are not close like we once were. Things that person said and did forced me to end the friendship. It's been gone, done, dead for a long time now. And it's time they get past it. This post might not be for you. Maybe it is. I'm going to go off the reservation here and assume that it's for somebody out there. Maybe it's for the person in the paragraph above. Maybe I'm teaching them. Still. You cannot dwell on failures. Failures happen. They are part of life. Failure is the catalyst to success. Always. Something always has to fail in order for something else to succeed. It's...
I'm an awards show junkie, and I love Oscar® night. Last night, Brian Ralston and I hosted a video-chat with several people who came out for SCOREcast's Oscar® Crowdcast. We met with folks from the UK to Germany, Toronto to Los Angeles. It was awesome. We discussed the Academy's rules for Best Original Score and Best Original Song, who we thought should win versus who would probably win (and boy, was *that* a conversation!), the history and pedigree of Academy Award show music directors and conductors, and a lot more. During all of it, I kept thinking about our community. That room, those seats, all the actors and actresses and directors who were in them — it's not that big a group of people, really. The composing community is even smaller. We talked a lot about that in the crowdcast — the community of composers that we belong to. It's one hell...
