My friend and hysterical TV comedy writer, Maxine Lapiduss, has done a brill job on the just-released-and-going-exceptionally-strong video for a song I co-wrote with her, Mark Waldrop, with whom Maxx started the lyric, and Michael Orland, musical director and accompanist for American Idol, good friend, and neighbor of mine who came over with Maxx and with whom we banged out the music in a few hours.

I’m not traditionally big on parody songs but this is the cherry of the bunch. Maxx called a bunch of her friends to help and, if I do say so myself, we all performed masterfully. Wendy and Lisa, yes Prince Wendy and Lisa, produced the song and Jane Lynch, my favorite comedy actress and Sue Sylvester on Glee, does an hysterical cameo.

The melody of “Scared About Life Without Oprah” reminds me a lot of of my earliest songs,…

…totally Pop and slightly theatrically inspired, with bouncy Carole King/ Laura Nyro-ish inspired background vocals.

Maxx has true love for Oprah.

I, too, have true love for Oprah.

We met when she and her TV crew surprised the cast of my musical, The Color Purple, about a month before we opened on Broadway and told us she was joining the show as above title producer. Far from ”Scared About Life Without Oprah” I was “Elated about Life WITH Oprah”! Although you never could tell that from this photo where, when most people wait their whole life to be spoken to by her, I wasn’t even aware she was standing next to me attempting to make conversation:

If you live in LA, Maxx is doing one last performance of her hysterical comedy act, “Mackie’s Back In Town” at Sterling’s Upstairs at Vitello’s in Studio City this Sunday night, featuring a live performance of “Scared About Life Without Oprah”. And if you’re on Facebook, join the fan page,  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Maxine-Lapiduss/186264481403869. And here it is on itunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/scared-about-life-without/id427623190?uo=4. I swear you will love this, so hit Maxx’s nose now!

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…come see me and my latest piece of technology, this 1960′s wrist transisitor radio, on the “Indie Success: Caching in on Collaboration” panel, Tuesday March 15, 11:00AM at the Hilton, Salon C, 500 East 4th Street. Here’s what me and my wrist accessory will be talking about:

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Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not an avid club-goer. It used to be that I wanted to hear every detail of a record under headphones and didn’t want anyone standing up in front of me or humming along next to me when I went to hear someone sing. But now that MP3s and YouTube have become ubiquitous with fidelity crushed down to the size of an ant I don’t care as much about such things. So this weekend I hit one club for two acts. My only regret is that I didn’t bring my vintage noisemaker shakers along to rattle in front of my talented friends who were up on stage.

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I LOVVVVED conducting! I hope that’s evident in this clip. I’m grateful I got the footage I did though I’d planned to have at least five times as much of it to edit from. But as the journey below illustrates, the path was a little more crooked than I’d anticipated though well worth every swing of the drumstick!

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People always ask me what my favorite song I’ve written is. I hate to favor any of the babies but pound for pound I’d have to shout “September”!  I think it’s an eternally uplifting song. It makes people HAPPY, not just with a capital H but ALL CAPS!! I write a lot of happy songs but even perennial foot tappers like “Neutron Dance” and “Boogie Wonderland” don’t inspire the immediate mood shift that “September” does. I’ve never been in a room where people’s toes didn’t start tapping or heads start bobbing as soon as it comes on. I’ve never been to a Bar Mitzvah or wedding where it wasn’t played, including Beyonce and Jay-Z’s, where I wasn’t but learned from US Weekly that that’s what they danced their first dance to. And they didn’t even get married in September.

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This late 60′s Soul Grabber sign for Budweiser malt liquor is one of my favorite possessions. Everything about it screams late Afro 60′s, one of my favorite periods in Soul. In my personal life there’s one supreme SOUL GRABBER and her name is Patti LaBelle. She was the first singer to start regularly doing my songs, starting with “Little Girls” in 1978 and continuing throughout the years with others like “Come What May” and “Stir It Up”, which won me a Grammy when it was on the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack. When I first met her Patti also introduced me to Herbie Hancock and between the two of them that led to Earth, Wind & Fire.  So when it comes to grabbing souls Patti got a hold of mine, shook it loose and got it soaring.

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This starts out looking like a performance in a dinner theater and quickly spirals into something out of “Hair”. Between ’costumes’ from much earlier in the  ’70s than when my song came out and the exceedingly Caucasian phrasing of the lyrics and choreography this is, in a Kitsch lovers universe, a stupendous rendition of “September”.

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Winning the Grammy in 1986

Yesterday I wrote an open email to a widely read music industry newsletter re the longstanding mistreatment of songwriters in the entertainment industry, veering off into the music industry ignoring the Internet until it had almost swallowed them up. Today, Mark Cuban posted this on his Facebook page which led to it spreading virally. I’ve had so many people email me and send me Facebook messages today I decided to post what I wrote myself:

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