Doo Wop

One of the things I love about creating music for media is that you never know what genre of music you'll get to work in next.

Writing in many genres of music is surprisingly liberating. After all, we are all rich, complex characters with more than just one simple aspect to our lives and working in different genres allows me to express myself in different ways.




"The Girl You Love"
written and performed by Don Bodin and Linda Abbott




The current film I am working on, Bobby Fischer, is a bio picture that documents the life of a world chess champion. The film spans from the 1940's to Fischer's death in 2008. In addition to instrumental underscore that I am creating for the film, music based on the popular music of each decade is needed as the film follows Fischer from childhood to his adult life.

Now, I am usually the last composer you want to hire to make "Sound-Alikes" - my forte isn't copying specific songs or themes. Luckily, director Damian Chapa trusts in my ability to create 'inspired' music that reflects the time periods and lets me run with it. I think of it like I am taking in the sound /language of the time, and creating something that could have been. In this case, one might even say I get to create across a "Phil Specter-um" of musical genres for this film ;).

I now call them 'Could-Have-Been' tracks. I usually only have about 4-6 hours to write, record, and mix the songs, but in that short time I invariably learn more about a style, music period or production technique that I otherwise might not have spent time absorbing.

Special thanks to vocalist Linda Abbott for a great performance as well as coming up with the lyric "You never told me the girl you loved, wasn't me."