Arbor Close Music : Perry Serpa

Before I found music, I loved movies.

The first record I ever bought was not by the Clash or Led Zep, or even the Beatles. It was John Williams' soundtrack to Star Wars. I was 11 years old and I couldn't play a musical instrument. I was lucky if I knew how to play the radio. The piano wouldn't arrive in our house for another few years, but once it did, of course, I was hooked like heroin. The following 30 years would yield neat adventures in music making with all kinds of interesting people wearing all kinds of hair... and a perpetual hemorrhaging of money, the sum total of which, would surely make me nauseous if I were to ever tally it up.

But before that, I was spending my meager allowances on movies, back when one could actually spend a meager allowance on movies (showing my age, aren't I?). So before I touched a keyboard or a guitar I was keenly aware of the marriage of images to music. In fact, I was obsessed with it. I remember reeling to Bill Conti's triumphant score to Rocky, (another album I actually bought with my own money... what a geek!), shuddering in fright with Jerry Goldsmith's creepy soundtrack to The Omen and hearing Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" for the first time whilst I watched Linda Blair spew infamous green slime. It was a few years before I would own Give Em Enough Rope, or Who's Next, or Speaking In Tongues, n' all.

A few years after the piano arrived and I became the Kid With The Golden Fingers, (because of the addiction, not the skill), I started composing things. Little things. Themes with no words. The words only came later when I thought I had something to say, but the music was always there, tacked to faces and action and various scenarios floating around in my mind. I have kind of a knack for it.

I diverted for a moment when my friends and I started a rock band in the late eighties. Despite a pervasive identity crisis, we were pretty good for what we were... or what I thought we were. I warbled and shrieked my way through it all and we stomped around the stage like we meant it, whether we did or not. Sadly and for the most part, we cast the concept of melody and tone color to the wind, although not without its sense of dynamics, the rock band ended up not being where I was at, truly and when it was all over, I worked solo on my music for a few years — just another indie songwriter seldom leaving his bedroom. When I came to, I started The Sharp Things — an 11-member symphonic pop band for whom I am the principal singer/songwriter and pianist.

More than anything, it is film music that has informed the Sharp Things. The group is, in a lot of ways, the exorcism of much of this cinematic influence. From Bacharach and David and Randy Newman to Bernard Herrmann and Henry Mancini, we seem to channel the stuff. Sometimes these decisions are deliberate and sometimes I need my band, my wife, or a music critic to tell us that we are.

We've made 2 critically acclaimed albums and our latest (and third) A Moveable Feast, to be released in June on Bar/None Records, gave me the opportunity to arrange for a 40-piece orchestra — an endeavor not for the faint of heart.

I have since contributed cues and works for hire to Supertroopers, Red Light August, MTV, Earthlink and others, and have arranged and written songs for a number of notable artists.

I hope my luck keeps up. I urge you to listen and enjoy.

— Perry