COMING FULL CIRCLE

After twenty years of playing music for kids and families, all along watching our own kids grow up, it’s exciting to revisit the old Love Riot and Beyond Words music. I have been spending time going through boxes of pictures, press, letters and souvenirs of a musical time gone by - a time when I played my guitar and didn’t wear tutus.

I could see this time coming. After all, Milkshake wasn’t supposed to last this long. Initially our kid-music (or kindie) music project was meant to end when our children became teenagers. It’s gone past that and now my daughter is 21.

But we have been inching towards this place, as if almost coming full circle.

In February of 2019, we had played a special Valentine's Day Concert bringing together some of our favorite musicians for a show at Baltimore's Creative Alliance. It felt liberating and fun. I especially enjoyed not wearing a tutu and talking about adult things with the audience. The band was a mix of Love Riot and Milkshake - like we smashed the two groups together. Needless to say, there were a lot of people on that tiny stage!

A couple years ago I discovered old 2" tapes from the very first Love Riot session we did with Eric Ambel and remembered some of the great songs on there. I felt this incredible need to save the music before the tapes disintegrated, so I talked to my producer friend Victor Giordano. "Gotta get 'em baked," he said. "Baked?! what's that?" I asked, wherein he gave me a quick tutorial and told me to drive out to Frederick, MD and get the tapes baked at SoundSaver. Then he could transfer the files to ProTools and remix as necessary. Muscle was a cassette-only release. But I reached out to Eric Ambel, who produced that and Maybe She Will and he sent me his original mixes. This is what you hear on our bandcamp and other online stores.

Since then, I have added three releases to Itunes, Amazon, Spotify and built a bandcamp home for Love Riot music. I am still working on adding unreleased songs, and just discovered and transferred a cassette that I had forgotten about called Love Riot. It was a transitional release circa 1993, with some music from Beyond Words and our good friend and Beyond Words drummer George Kondylas playing on some songs. I will add this to our Bandcamp as well.

Milkshake still continues - we love to play for the kids and it’s been an amazing 20 years. But I am excited to write songs for adults again. I am not sure what form this will take, or even it will happen. But it is good to save this important part of my past here on this website.

xo,

Lisa