Sara Teasdale wrote a lot of complex love poems, but her Halloween adjacent fall poem that I sing today has a child's playfulness. 

For more than 600 other combinations of various words (mostly poetry) and original music, visit frankhudson.org

We start our Halloween Series this year with Emily Dickinson's sly and charming ghostly encounter performed with 12-string guitar.

For more than 600 other combinations of various words (mostly poetry) with original music, visit frankhudson.org

William Butler Yeats short parable "A Coat"  about challenge and change performed with acoustic guitar. 

For more about this poem and over 600 other performances combining various words (mostly poetry) with original music, visit frankhudson.org

A poem, now a song, about the challenges, duties, connections, and consolations of life. As it speaks of those things, it also says something about why poetry, why song.

The LYL Band performs a short passage from Leonard Cohen's The Favorite Game. For more about this and over 600 other performances of various words with original music, visit frankhudson.,org

English Tudor-era poet Thomas Wyatt wrote this timeless poem of love lost in the early 16th century, yet it can still seem immediate when read or performed today. Or so I hope, having set it to original music and performed it now. 

There are over 600 other examples of various words (mostly poetry) combined with original music available in our archives at frankhudson.org. Or subscribe to the Parlando Project and get the new ones as they are released.

American poet Emily Dickinson wrote this charmer, and I set it to music. Is she observing birds or little gnomes? Maybe they're hanging out together?

My project has combined over 600 sets of words (mostly other people's poetry) with various forms of original music, and you can find more about this and the others at our archives kept at frankhudson.org

We normally present short musical pieces, but today, in our annual observation of the day Jimi Hendrix died, I decided to present instead a story, audiobook-style, of how guitarist Richard Lloyd met Jimi Hendrix while Lloyd was still a teenager. 

Long time listeners will note this isn't what we usually do. which is combine other people's words (mostly poetry) with original music we compose and record ourselves.  You can find over 600 examples of that in our archives at frankhudson.org

I wrote a sonnet based on a couple of things writer Vlautin said in an interview many years ago. Yes, it contains a certain bleakness, but its final question is a question. Now over a decade later I've performed this as a song for this Project.

In a break from our usual practice of setting other people's poems,  here's a sonnet of summer desire performed with original music. For more than 600 other examples of various words (mostly poetry) combined with original music, visit frankhudson.org

Few poets wrote as often about working people and their lives as Carl Sandburg. Here then are three poems from his 1916 collection "Chicago Poems" performed for this year's celebration of American Labor Day.

A performance of American poet Emily Dickinson's tightly compressed meditation on time accompanied with my original "Punk Orchestral" music. 

Today's National Radio Day, and radio hosts who spin records are part of that legacy. Here's a piece I wrote and performed a few years ago to memorialize a kind of radio DJ you've probably never heard sung about: an all-night classical musical host. 

For more about this and over 600 other pieces combining various words with original music visit frankhudson.org

I wrote this little ode to Leo Fender's swoopy electric guitar design on the occasion of it being added to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art collection. This is an older performance of this by The LYL Band.

For more on this and over 600 other combinations of various words with original music, visit our archives at frankhudson.org

This is the 2nd in my series observing Atom Bomb Day, the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. It's a performance of a poem by a survivor of that bombing, Japanese poet Sadako Kurihara trans. by Richard Minear. My performance and original music today is simple and direct, the most I could do in my present life, but Kurihara's poetry can carry itself without elaboration I think.

This Longfellow poem I'll perform here with my original musical setting has a title that's beyond most vocabularies. It roughly means rebirth, but in the section I perform it is more about loss and grief. I'm performing this old American poem as part of two anniversaries: the anniversary of my late wife's death and Hiroshima or Atomic Bomb Day.

For more about this and over 600 other performances from the Parlando Project that combine various words (mostly poetry) with original music, go to frankhudson.org

American poet Dickinson considered work on a summer's afternoon and I managed to make this song to sing her regarding. For more than 600 other combinations of various words (mostly poetry) with original music (varied styles) visit our archives at frankhudson.org

I adapted and transformed a poem by John Gould Fletcher to make this original song about summer, heat, and atmosphere. For more than 600 other examples of various ways to combine various words with various original music, visit frankhudson.org

John Gould Fletcher is not much read today, but this 1916 prose poem seeks to meld modes of Blake, Rimbaud, and Whitman into a prophecy of a potential America. I may be late for American Independence Day, but I performed the ending of this multi-part poem with lots of drums and a prominent horn section part.

A very short piece that hides a little Möbius strip paradox in the middle. For more about this or over 600 other combinations of various words with original music visit frankhudson.org

Here's our last episode's original composition in a music-only mix that perhaps more clearly shows my "Orchestral Punk" approach to orchestral music. We'll return with a words and music combination soon, and there's are over 600 of those combinations available in our archives at frankhudson.org

Li Bai is one of most esteemed classical Chinese poets, and this is my adaptation./interpretation into English of what he might have been expressing in the 8th century. I performed it along with a short original musical piece I also composed.

Dave Moore's 7-minute compression of hard-boiled detective fiction tropes. He says he was inspired by Robert Coover, but he turns the pages his own poetic way in this one, with vocals by the author and backing from The LYL Band.

WARNING: in this crescendo of inuendo, bad words and flawed people show up.

My elegy for poet Kevin FitzPatrick performed live by The LYL Band. For more about this, or for more than 600 other Parlando Project pieces combining various words (mostly poetry) with original music go to frankhudson.org

This is our musical performance of a poem by Kevin FitzPatrick. Kevin wrote many fine poems about the world of work. This one, from his last collection Still Living in Town, is but one example. For more about this and other combinations of various words with original music, visit frankhudson.org