**NOTE**
TO VIEW ALL OF THE ARTWORK ON THIS SITE: Click on each song’s title (not the arrow) to be taken to a separate page to see the artwork and liner notes for that song!! Once there, click on the photo, which pops out for a larger, clearer image!!
Alternately, when you click on the play button at the top of *this page*, it simply cycles through the music, which is handy for turning up the volume and working around the house or reading.

All artwork & liner notes © 2020 Samuel Bissell unless otherwise stated

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NOTE: All album proceeds shall be donated to Nashville’s own Adventure Science Center. If not for the ASC, there’s no album, no liner notes and the songs in my heart would have never been birthed. The ASC is a gift not only to Nashville, it is a resource for wonder and exploration into science, the arts and technology for every Tennessee family and visitors to this exciting city. Sadly, and necessarily, COVID-19-related health priorities have cut deeply into the ASC’s budget and its doors have had to remain closed.
On a personal note, classes for seniors, similar to the one which I took to inspire these words and my music, were funded by the Aroha Foundation; these classes, like school trips and Saturday outings with friends and family, anxiously await re-opening.

Therefore, with deep gratitude for the encouragement and inspiration, the ASC and the Aroha Foundation gifted me to begin this incredible journey into music and, perhaps more importantly, into myself, I ask for *your generous donations* for Nashville’s beloved Adventure Science Center. Who knows if you, your child, your grand-daughter or your sibling takes a class, participates in a demonstration, fascinated by an exhibit or finds a book in the gift shop sparking an “Aha” moment! And that moment may well lead fresh insights in the arts, the sciences, an innovation in the marketplace benefitting our Nashville community, the State of Tennessee and the world. Thank you for your support.

The Adventure Science Center is a non-profit museum for children located near downtown. The museum features over 175 hands-on interactive exhibits with themes including biology, physics, visual perception, listening, mind, air and space, energy and earth science. The building incudes 44,000 square feet of exhibit space, a 75-foot-tall adventure tower, and the Sudekum Planetarium.
[ www.adventuresci.org ]

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Welcome to my first “Best of Christmas” album highlighting nine favorites my fans chose from amongst my 2020 compositions. Additionally, I have included a new song resonant of Christmas, a time and celebration exceptionally close to my heart.

2020 kept me close to home and composing, composing, composing. I refuse to confirm if I was in my pajamas at any time, although I suspect many of you were! A gift I did not know was aching to emerge to enrich my mind and my soul beyond any creative endeavor I dreamed possible. A scant twelve months ago, I was transforming sound – arcane, familiar, discordant, and some just plain fun – into my compositions. I scrounged clanging metal, steam trains and their whistles, children playing, mud volcanoes going bloop bloop bloop, public domain songs from the early 1920s, espresso makers blowing off steam, gunfire, heartbeats, pinball machines and poetry readings. Planet Earth contributed lightning strikes and thunder from 2000 miles away; my admitted favorite is a band playing the ice formations on Lake Baikal, Russia!

Now, it is Wintertide 2020. As some of you know, I blend samples of music to infuse into my compositions and layer-in with a defter hand and more finely tuned ear those sounds I have used time and again to provide a deeper sound and broader scope. My music tells a story as my Dad would tell a story to his children. I use music as words as my canvas music and when I write I use everything – I use everything! An overheard conversation, fallen leaves, memories of wild mountain weekends, an a capella gospel tune or moonlight revels on the Mississippi River. So, it was really not a surprise when frequent listeners insist that my music is perfect for the cinema of their mind. And perhaps my next enterprise shall be with an enterprising filmmaker: watch this space!

*On this album* is “Verse 52,” my recitation of Walt Whitman’s famous poem from his long poem “Song of Myself”, just part of his much-longer work, “Leaves of Grass”. Few have heard this piece of work. I enter the album walking in the crunch of fallen leaves. I composed this work in December 2019, post-graduating from a class on circuit-building and sampling at the Adventure Science Museum in Nashville, TN. I exceeded the expectations of my teachers and released my first album on Bandcamp on New Year’s Day 2020!

In June 2020, I released my next album, Collegiate Peaks Volume 1, as tributes to my Dad and my fifty years living in and loving Colorado. I chose from that album “She Sang Like Leather”, one of my most popular songs to date. In the summer and autumn of 2020, I released four additional albums; I was cranking out song after song, furiously composing music in a single minded and ecstatic pace.
From the thunderous opening of “Rainin’ On Her Parade” to sound effects of a pinball machine, church bells and Solfeggio tones of “The Tuning Fork”. The tone shifts gears as you hear the heartbeat of “The Long-Distance Runner on the Beach,” to the pomp and circumstance of the “Peer Gynt Suite,” the rhythmic clatter of Huey helicopters, coupled with digital symphonic tones. Next up, drift lazily away on the shores of the Mississippi River, dive into my childhood with a song sung late into the star-strewn night “Floating in Lotus Lounge Around Midnight” ……then deeper, “As Far As The Eyes Can See,” with actual sounds of the solar system and a mechanical music box. “Mount Princeton” returns to the mountains of Colorado in my homage to my Dad and that much-missed and wonderful sky-blue state.
Lastly, I present “Wintertide Reflections,” my first Christmas song, which brings to life my own family memories inspired by six excerpts from Dylan Thomas’s delightful “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”. In this composition, you will also find the famous Welsh song, “Ar Hyd Y Nos,”/ “All Through the Night”, in both Welsh and English lyrics.

I envision many “Best of…” recordings in future Yuletide seasons.

Last but not least:
If you buy this album, you will also receive an excerpt from a future release, “Background Music For My Coma Dreams”, which easily fits the title of this very album!