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If you were affected by the recent winds blowing sheet music out of your shopping cart, take advantage of this 5-Day Sheet Music Blow-Out Sale!

For 5 days starting today (09/25/2018), you can have ANY piece of sheet music at 1/2 off the regular price!

If you weren’t affected by the recent winds blowing sheet music out of your shopping cart, I Don’t Care! – You can STILL have the same, amazing, half-off BLOW-OUT savings!

Load up now! Before these Wacky deals are Gone With the Wind!!

Today the winners of the Parent’s Choice Audio Awards were announced, and am pleased and proud to say that “I Am Your Food” won their highest commendation, the Gold award.  Only 6 others pulled down the gold ring (my friend and guest artist Frances England won for her latest release “Blue Skies and Sunny Days“).  The Parents’ Choice Award is a respected, distinguished yet unstuffy honor.  If I may crow for moment, every single one of my silly albums have won the Gold award, all 4 of them!  Caw, caw, caw!  (That’s me crowing on my soapbox perch).

I am deeply grateful for all the support I’ve received over the years for my work – fans, friends, family.  Life continues to be fulfilling and deep and pleasurable.  Thanks.

  Solid Gold!

I was alerted to a problem with my sheet music store by a lovely customer from Germany.  She claimed that whenever she added sheet music to her cart, a wind came up and blew it away before she could buy it.  And, she was right – some strange digital ether-wind was emptying the shopping carts before anyone could conclude their purchases.  It took a while for my web hosting genius to figure out a fix, but he did.  He describes it as a kind of digital ether-paperweight that keeps all the sheet music in your cart until you are ready to buy it.  Try it, it really works!

Apologies to my dear and loyal customers for any troubles this may have caused.  I will announce a sheet music sale soon as a gesture of good will – stay tuned!

yours,

Gunnar Madsen

I’m shouting it from the rooftops!  I’m coding and messaging and posting in preparation for the worldwide premiere of “I Am Your Food” tomorrow, June 15.  Here it comes, babies.  Enjoy the videos, here, or on facebook, or youtube, or vimeo.  Listen to the album wherever you want to, download it, stream it, spin it in a CD player, sing along and dance yer ass off to it.  Write me and tell me what you think.  Write your grandma, your grandkids, your grand canyon, let your words echo to skies.  Spread the word, spread the joy, spread the peanut butter and jelly!  And thanks – y’all are great.

Today, Zooblobble (the cool site for cool music for families) gave me the honor of premiering the 1st video from my forthcoming album “I Am Your Food.” Stefan, the man behind the zooglobble curtain, says this video will “help reinforce that hijacking of your brain.”  That’s got to be one of my all-time favorite press quotes!  You can watch it on Zooglobble, or right here, or on youtube, or anywhere on this octopus web.

I’ve been quiet lately.  Been working hard on writing songs for the screen adaptation of The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World musical, keeping my family on an even keel, and keeping myself healthy.  Oh, yeah – and the album I’ve been working on for the past 10 years or so is finally finished.  It’s a kind of all-you-can-eat buffet of songs all about one of my favorite subjects – Food.  No, these aren’t songs that are good for you.  They’re tasty.   They make you smile.  Like onions, there are a few songs that might make you cry, and yet they’re still tasty.  And while they don’t strive to be good for you, they are not bad for you.  They are nutritious.

Enough with the silly food metaphors.  Where or when can you hear this?  The release date is June 15, 2018.  But this Wednesday, May 9, Zooglobble will premiere the first video from the album, “10,000 Pancakes.”  The Radio Release for the song will happen Sunday, May 13 on KUTX’s “Spare the Rock.”  As other songs and videos ripen, I’ll be serving them via select radio and media sites, including this very website.  You can pre-order the album via Amazon, iTunes, GooglePlay and etc.  If you pre-order on this website (via BandCamp), Chef Gunnar will be serving you, on the house, 3 amuse-bouche tracks not on the CD – “Sweet and Sour”, a Beatles-esque exploration of the yin and yang of life, “Butter and Cream”, a Soviet-style ode to Full Fat, and “Sweet Parade (Catholic Tastes)”, a wax cylinder of a dream from about 1922.

So keep your eye on this blog – The menu may change daily.  Make your reservations now for this musical feast.

I live 3 doors away from Berkeley Fire Engine Co. 6 and the Berkeley training facility for firefighters.  For years I’ve enjoyed hearing the yelling of commands, the ratcheting clank of extension ladders, the reassuring sound of the trucks as they head off to help in various fire and medical situations.  There’s one firefighter who practices bagpipes in the courtyard – I like that.  The sound of occasional chainsaw practice is not my favorite thing (not conducive to writing elegaic melodies).   But watching this video I have a new and deep appreciation for their chainsaw work.

I don’t recall hearing their sirens before dawn last Monday when they raced off to Santa Rosa.  They themselves had no idea what they were heading for – the journey there is quotidian, chronicling the everyday nature of their work.  But upon arrival, things get hairy.  One of them filmed (and edited) their experience, and it’s heartbreaking, terrifying, amazing, brave, and uplifting.  Check the links at the end for ways to help.

I was 14 when my older sister (17) got a job as a nanny in Wyoming and was gone for the whole summer. Her room in our home in Palo Alto was a 6×6 foot space in the garage that was the ultimate teenagers’ hideaway. It had been built as a darkroom by the former owners, and when we bought it my dad had cut a hole in the wall for a window and installed a cot and some shelves. With her gone, I found refuge there, away from my younger sister and brother (ages 4 and 1 at that time).

She had left behind her nylon-string guitar. In my copious summer free time I picked up the guitar, and, using only the top three strings, would write little melodies. (I couldn’t for the life of me figure how you got your fingers all the way around to play the other strings). Unlike the piano in the living room, which somehow did not lend itself to ‘goofing around’, the guitar, and that tiny room, allowed me to just find my way into music.

After a few weeks, I hungered for more. My sister had also left behind her Joan Baez songbook. Not my usual fare, but I noticed that each song had little chord diagrams which showed you where to put your fingers to make chords. It was so simple! All of a sudden I could make C and G and D chords! I was in heaven. It wasn’t rock and roll, but at least it was a guitar, the instrument of rock and roll!

Then I took the guitar over to the piano, and found the same notes that were in guitar chords existed on the piano. You could make chords on the piano! Brilliant! Music was suddenly simple and grasp-able, and, most of all, fun.  The fun hasn’t stopped yet…

During the 60’s we spent every Christmas day at my grandparents’ house in Los Gatos, CA. Cousins from out of town were sometimes there with their moms and dads. It was noisy and fun. When Grandaddy picked up the phone to call his siblings in Denmark, we all had to be very quiet. It was so expensive to call overseas, we were made aware of how extravagant it was. He spoke first to the operator, and when the call finally went through, he spoke a strange language, loudly, into the phone. He smiled, he laughed. My mom remembers him crying. When he hung up, things returned to normal noisy celebration. He was just Granddaddy again.

He came to United States as a boy, by himself, in 1921. He was not a refugee. His mother, father, brother and sisters continued to live in Copenhagen, while he, at the age of 14, decided to go to work onboard steamships, first as a cabin boy and then as a doctor’s assistant. When he was 16 he jumped ship in San Francisco, and lived the rest of his life in the Bay Area. He was an illegal immigrant.

His life as an American was ultimately successful. He fathered a large family, and became a respected businessman. He was a funny and engaging public speaker. A warm grandfather. That’s the man I knew.

After he died in 1979, his sisters gave me a box of letters he’d written to Copenhagen from the time he left home. In them, his homesickness is laid bare. He loved his siblings, and his mother especially. He wanted so much to see them. But during the 1920’s he was illegal – he could not travel outside the U.S. He fell in love, married, and soon became a father. He earned U.S. citizenship and dreamt of bringing his young family to visit Denmark, but the depression of the 1930’s descended and there was no money. Then came the war. When the Nazis invaded and occupied Denmark, communication became censored and sporadic. His letters to Denmark are full of worry.

It wasn’t until 1947, two years after the war ended, that he was able to book passage on a freighter to Europe to finally see his family in Copenhagen again. He’d found success with a truck leasing company during the war years, and had enough money to bring his whole family, and mountains of food and clothing for his war-deprived siblings. They docked in Rotterdam, and took trains through the bombed-out cities of Europe to his old home of Copenhagen. They stayed for 4 months, until business called him back to the U.S. In the coming years he was able to visit Denmark again a few times, and every Christmas he treated himself to a phone call.

Why did he leave Denmark as a boy? A restless nature? A spat with his father? A yearning for opportunity? We don’t really know.

I recently took a Lyft ride in LA with a Bangladeshi immigrant. 35 years in the U.S., a citizen, owner of 2 successful liquor stores, proud of the Bangladesh community in L.A. He taught his children Bangla, they enjoy talking with their cousins in the old country, but they are fully American. He said he loves to travel ‘home’ every year, but that he doesn’t fit in there anymore. He’s too American now. But, he says, every hour of every day he thinks of home. It’s a constant ache. He is never fully at home in America.

I imagine my grandfather suffered similarly.

We are born somewhere, we grow up somewhere, it becomes a part of us. Why do some people emmigrate? Why do some people stay when opportunity is scarce, or danger imminent?  Even within a country, people could move to a new region or state to find work. But then there’s home.  While economic opportunity (or lack thereof) or escape from danger are powerful motivators for moving, home is a gravitational force. If we leave home, it will still, like gravity, tug at us.

If my residence was based on economic self-interest, I should be in LA or NY. The job opportunities are much better there for my line of work. And I’ve spent a few months living in each of those cities, but they’re just not home to me. I even tried living in my Grandfather’s country, Denmark – I loved it, yet I felt more comfortable when I got back to the U.S.  If circumstances forced me to, I could learn to live somewhere else. And it would become a kind of home to me. But I would always miss where I came from.