A new series for the TAPAS blog. I wrote down names on little slips of paper, the names of everyone currently in the TAPAS Facebook group and Discord server, 41 people altogether, and will be drawing one name every day to write about them and their history with the group.
Today we have Brian LaGuardia, I composer I recruited into TAPAS early in the team's life, in late 2018. Having gone through two composers for my Drizzt musical who met with me but then swiftly flaked out, I sought another and approached Silver Letomi, a musician I met at a party once back in Colorado, who did a lot of World of Warcraft-themed parody songs at the time and, merely weeks ago, did an epic cover of a Baldur's Gate III song. Letomi didn't think composing a musical was in her wheelhouse and has never been a member of TAPAS to date, but I hope to get her to sing something one day; at that time, she introduced me to Brian.
By early 2019, Brian had whipped up something for "We Got This", the first of the half of the songs in the show for which I had lyrics but no melody ideas. I was so delighted to finally have something composed that I never even considered telling a single soul, especially not Brian himself, that it wasn't at all what I was looking for, which is a huge flaw of mine as a director, early on I could hardly bear to tell anyone that they had made a mistake, and I've gotten a lot better at it over time, but sometimes I still get socially drained enough that I accept things that still aren't right, so, my directing still has some growth to do.
That was the end of his involvement with the Drizzt musical. He just didn't seem to have time to dive into the project a second time, and by the middle of that year, I was starting to prioritize a newer project, Keys & Kingdoms: The Choices, and by a huge stroke of luck, he had the time to give us the songs "Get It Done" and "Stacky's Ballad", and so with completed songs, we managed to storyboard that pilot. No complaints about those compositions, just my own lyric-writing. I've managed to fix the more awkward lyrical moments, and we have had the cast recordings of the songs for some time.
In 2020, I consulted Brian about whipping up songs for the Irregular Fantasy! trailers, something I was taking from the very top as I didn't even have lyric ideas yet. There, Brian had to call it and admit he simply didn't have time for TAPAS, he was deep in some real professional composing jobs and had to prioritize. I thanked him for his time and said I was sorry it wasn't working out, and he told me to quit being so nice about it; he saw the previous two years as a pretty big failure of professionalism on his part and was down on himself about it. It was sad to see.
So, he brought in a friend -- Robert Mullis, who we'll talk more about when his name comes out of my little bowl, initially intending to split duties with Robert, each of them assigned to three of the six songs, but that didn't last long and Brian had to duck out entirely. Now we're working just with Robert and whatever assistants he has at a given moment, and that's working out really well.
Robert remarked to me once, at a later date, that songwriting was never Brian's forte either, his deal is composing score, usually for video games. I have an appreciation for video game score, as a guy with a wandering mind who needs help concentrating. Video game background music has a rather steady quality, as it has to be designed to play in uninterrupted loops for as long as it needs to, not ending until you, the player, have moved on to the next scene. That makes it great for studying.
Naty and I were once gushing over the work of Jeremy Soule, pretty excited at the realization that one guy had scored all our favorite video games, but Brian quickly cut in and explained that Jeremy Soule is a well-documented asshole, so... typical, really. That was a bit deflating. But only for our desire to work with the guy, we'd still like to compose like him. Without his business practices, and while hoping he doesn't work again. That's how I handle good artists who are jerks.
Brian's main project that I'm aware of is Shujinkou; as I understand it, it's something of an action RPG that also teaches you Japanese. Brian showed us the Kickstarter some years ago, which updated last month, looks like they're beta-testing after five years of coding. And Brian is the composer! I'm excited to see what comes of the game's future.
So, yeah, big shout-out to the first TAPAS composer who actually did anything, who eventually introduced us to the first one who does anything regularly... I love music and want my projects to be heavy with it and I wish I had the capability of contributing some myself, because Robert was pretty flabbergasted to discover that his workflow was delightfully productive by our standards. As with the first entry with Chris, I'm trying not to be bitter and crap on the composers -- I'm not upset to have worked with composers who just had the ill luck to have taken on more than they could handle. I think in the end it's all worked out perfectly.
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