Retroduction

When I was 9 years old, I heard Burt Bacharach’s “This Guys in Love with You” as it played over a transistor radio in the summer of 1968. I didn’t know what the song was about, but it was so beautiful sounding that it made my eyes well up with tears. This was the first time that I truly felt the power of music. Fast forward to years later and a composition professor asked my class to recall one of the first pieces of music we could remember hearing that had an impact on us. The assignment was to then perform a detailed harmonic analysis of that piece to see if we could identify how the composer’s craft furthered the effectiveness of the music. I have been analyzing music ever since and traveling the world in order to understand the culture and context that contributed to the work of my favorite composers. An offshoot of this passion resulted in my setting out to create this record as an homage to the 60s and 70s American and British rock/pop music that I love to this day. Retroduction is an “introduction” to my “retro” take on that era and I hope you sit back (perhaps in a bean bag chair next to a lava lamp?) and enjoy the trip as much as I enjoyed revisiting that era and creating this music.

Carl Baldassarre