SHANE CHAPMAN

We Both Die First

Brooklyn-based band Permanent Moves releases their sophomore album, We Both Die First, as a follow-up to the electro-folk, indie dream-pop Chekhovian song cycle - Don’t Forget Us (2024). In a sharp stylistic turn, the duo harnesses their decade of playing together in a Dolly Parton cover band to produce a country-inspired, lyric-driven concept album. Featuring pedal steel guitar by Brett Parnell and fiddle by Deni Bonet, We Both Die First is a compassionate collection of storytelling that is a balm for the battered souls of our time, with cover art by Nate Ashley.

Listen here.

Don't Forget Us: A Chekhovian Song Cycle

After seven years of development including three workshops at La Mamma, Ars Nova, and the Exponential Fest, Permanent Moves is proud to share our album adaptation of our Chekhovian Song Cycle. The album, like the shows, features a number of Broadway stars including Jessie Shelton (Hadestown), Chris Giarmo (American Utopia), and Patrick Vassel (Hamilton) as Executive Producer. The electro-folk, indie-dream-pop offering also includes features from Starr Busby and indie-rock legend Karl Blau. We hope you like it.

Listen here.

Single — Better Days

It is always amazing to work with Starr Busby and having her on our album is a dream come true. Listen on Spotify here or check out the video.

Single — Don't Forget Us

The title track from our Chekhovian Song Cycle — Don't Forget Us explores the weight of hope.

Thank you to Mark Fox for hosting our video shoot and creating our cover art.

This one pairs well with a long drive. Listen on Spotify here or, if you're stationary, check out the video.

Single — 200 Years

The first single from our Chekhovian SongM@nwh0soldtheworld Cycle — 200 Years uses text and inspiration from Uncle Vanya mainly. For the video we got really lucky with a snowy day in Coney Island.

Enjoy with a hot beverage.

Music Lessons

As a music teacher I've taught at the Seattle Center Academy, Groundwork in East New York, NYC Guitar School where I wrote a number of curriculums in piano, guitar, songwriting and ukulele and, most recently, Brooklyn College where I teach music theory to undergraduate students.

All in all, it's been over 20 years of teaching and hundreds of successful students. Are you next?

I am currently accepting students for the fall semester. Contact me to find out if I'm the right teacher for you!

Also, check out this hardcore jam from last semester featuring Ike and Casper!

Dollylujah

With summer comes the return of Brooklyn's annual celebration of all things Dolly Parton presented by Doll Parts, Brooklyn's Premier Dolly Parton Cover Band. Join our ever-growing pilgrimage to the altar of Dolly and celebrate with a community of like-minded Dolly lovers, all of your favorite songs (with a horn section!) and burlesque by Corvette LeFace!

Find details here.

Doll Parts Heartbreak

Have you known heartbreak? Have you felt the devastation of unrequited love? Dolly can heal the injustices of your life and make you feel again!

Heartbreak is our annual Valentines-themed show! Yes, I'm in a Dolly Parton Cover Band and it is as fun as it sounds.

Permanent Moves

After years of development Julia Sirna-Frest and I form an official alliance. For this and future projects we have chosen the name Permanent Moves.

Thank you to the North American Cultural Laboratory for our residency that month which helped us finally decide.

Debut album here!

Master of Music

Further proof that if you just keep doing something, even very slowly, it gets done!

I'm so grateful to have been able to spend these years studying at Brooklyn College as a student, a teacher and the program coordinator for the composers concerts getting both my Bachelor's and Master's degrees.

Ash from the Trees

An unlikely quartet for Vibraphone, Celesta, Synth and affected Violin inspired by the Mt. St. Helen's Eruption of 1980.

This was also the final performance of my Master's Degree at Brooklyn College.

Check out the video from the performance and full program notes here.

Sociophonic

This piece was one of a series of experiments in sound generation for the International Electro Acoustic Music Festival. This is the rehearsal version.

Twenty-Five

Lemonade napkins blue rubber gloves.

Cleopatra Boy

This opportunity to work with the Detroit makers of theater — A Host of People, gave me a great reason to explore vintage synthesizer sounds as vehicles for golden-age-of-cinema-style scoring.

From AHOP — "Cleopatra Boy brings to light how women (and other non-straight/white/male) leaders' histories are re-written, maligned, or erased. The iconic Egyptian pharaoh's historic, mythic, and fictional representations across time inspired our ensemble to create a performance that speaks to the present moment."

Fisher Center at Bard

Julia Sirna-Frest and I were really excited for the chance to head up to the beautiful performance spaces at Bard College and further develop music for Daaimah Mubashshir's play Emily Black is a Total Gift.

You Deserve to Be Here

Painted on the side of a dumpster in the middle of white sands — it's good news for some people. Not everyone though. Watch the video here.

Paint Her Eyes Seasick

"Everyone needs some time with their neighbors." That's what the five year old girl from apartment 3 says. To that end, this was written specifically to be performed by the people in my apartment building. The text, provided by the aforementioned little girl, explores the chilly solitude of post-covid life, while embracing the wonders of the natural world and finding comfort in community.

Those were the program notes when this was presented at one of the early-pandemic online concerts at Brooklyn College.
Listen to the recording here.

Down the Yellow Brick Pod

Composing the theme music for this great podcast was a really fun project. Emily Kay Shrader and Tara Tagliagerro are still at it as of this website update. Find the latest episode here. You can watch my process for the music here.

Saturn Radio

Pioneer — 1979 — The ghost ship — first to head out into the void. Plagued with mechanical problems, a fading light farther and farther from home. This recording (of the second movement) is performed by the Brooklyn College Percussion Ensemble.

Silent Forests

"SILENT FORESTS is an intimate, character-driven portrait of activists who are fighting to stop forest elephant poaching and other endangered species trafficking in Africa's Congo Basin."

I scored this film in close collaboration with the director, Mariah Wilson and it was one of the most rewarding (and labor intensive) projects I've worked on to date.

Since then, it has been screened at dozens of festivals all over the world and won some impressive awards.

Learn more at SilentForests.com.

Modulus of Elasticity

The modulus of elasticity is the spectrum engineers use to denote the strength of materials as they undergo different loading conditions. There are five loading conditions — tension (stretching), compression (squishing), flexure (bending), shear (a kind of horizontal pressure along the surface) and torsion (twisting). This quartet applies the musical equivalent of these conditions (as I've interpreted them) on the melodic and harmonic content in a kind of test of its structural integrity.

Listen to the recording with the Xanthoria Quartet here.

Atlantic for 32 Guitars

When the Brooklyn Composers Collective asked for venue suggestions at the beginning of the semester I suggested the Brooklyn Guitar School where I was the director for five years. Within days they had set up a date and solicited compositions for guitar works. A few meetings later I discovered that because of the difficulty of the pieces, they would all be performed by either teachers at the school or the composers themselves. Hoping to bring in some of the students, I set out to write a piece in four parts for beginners — as many students as we had guitars. I assumed the student read no music and wrote each part successively harder (the first being for someone who barely played guitar at all). I made an instructional video and included audio links for people to practice along. Like the Atlantic, it was meant to be accessible to everyone in NYC.

The Kaddish Millet '48 Composition Award for Songwriting

After a busy semester at Brooklyn College I got some exciting recognition. This award honors students who evidence a special talent in songwriting. An award winning songwriter, that's me.

105A-R

This piece for solo piano was written in a few rainy afternoons and performed at the brand new performing arts center at Brooklyn College. It employs some of the impressionist styles that undergraduates often study. Starting in A minor and ending up in Eb, it's a story about coming home to find that home is not what it used to be.

Welcome to the Gunshow: A Chekhovian Song Cycle

Directed by Patrick Vassel (associate director of Hamilton).

After a successful run at Target Margin Theater setting text from Eugene O'Neil's The Iceman Cometh to music Julia Sirna-Frest and I turned our attention to Chekhov. Welcome to the Gunshow was workshopped at La Mamma in January 2017, premiered at Antfest in June 2017 and was included in The Exponential Festival in 2018. Its most recent performance was at City Winery as part of The 9th Annual Chekhov Variety Show.

Songs of Love Foundation

The Songs of Love Foundation is a national nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that creates free, personalized, original songs to uplift children and teens currently facing tough medical, physical or emotional challenges.

They let me write a song for them. Find out how you can help here.

Song Cycle for Oliver Sacks

Directed by Patrick Vassel (associate director of Hamilton).

Julia Sirna-Frest and I started writing song cycles from the text of plays in 2016 when Target Margin Theater assigned each of the four acts of Eugene O'Neil's The Iceman Cometh to different groups to perform with "use the text" as the only hard directive. For us that turned into a song for each of the 15 characters using lines from their dialogues. In 2017 we produced Welcome to the Gunshow: A Chekhovian Song Cycle for an 11 piece band and now in 2018 it's a four movement work featuring text from and inspired by the works of famed neuroscientist Oliver Sacks. The movements are divided, like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, into the subcategories of neuroscience. In this work we explore the connections to other humans that stay with us forever even in the absence of self. Song Cycle for Oliver Sacks was directed by Patrick Vassel (associate director of Hamilton) and supported by a residency at the Bushwick Starr. It also featured Brian Lawlor on synths.

Emily Black is a Total Gift

This was the time we workshopped two new plays in the same week. A few days before our Oliver Sacks workshop, Julia Sirna-Frest and I premiered four new songs for this workshop from New Georges Theater, written by Daaimah Mubashshir and directed by Tara Ahmadinejad.

New Cartography

The Brooklyn Bridge or the Panama Canal; any number of engineering wonders are examples of people not accepting the world the way it is and making a decision to change it. Often against overwhelming odds we remake the world.

We make the same kinds of choices in our everyday lives. Do we accept what is, or do we try to bend our stories in a way that leads to the endings we spend our days dreaming about?

Cartography is the practice of looking at the world and making your map. "New Cartography" is about looking at your map and making the world.

The album was recorded at Mission Sound, mixed by Myles Turney, mastered by Dan Millice and features cover art by Cameron McCool.

Sing for Hope

These guys bring the healing power of the arts directly into healthcare settings throughout the city each week at hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, and treatment centers. These are also the folks that put those crazy pianos all over the city every summer. This was the month I first signed up in 2017. Ever since I get to go into hospitals and play guitar and piano all over the city. You should too. Check it out here.

The Iceman Cometh

"Target Margin Theater present the ICEMAN Lab, our radical new approach to The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill, with four diverse theater artists each tackling a separate act of the play. This fresh take on O'Neill's classic will allow audiences to see each act as a separate experiment, all four together as a unified whole, or both." This was the first creative task that Julia Sirna-Frest and I shared. In just a few weeks we co-wrote an album of songs together using text from the first act.

"As audience members took a shot with a character's name on it, the band launched into songs that ranged from hardcore rock to indie ballad to cheery duet and a lot of things in between. As I nodded my head along to the music, I found myself really wishing that Sirna-Frest would transform more plays in this fashion, and I began to imagine what that might sound like." Bess Rowen, Huffington Post. She goes on to write an entire song in the review featuring lines like "Fourteen original songs from Chapman and Sirna-Frest, Make this Act I, in my opinion, better than the rest."

Tempus Fugitive

The new album from The Peter Ulrich Collaboration — the second album in the trilogy which brilliantly follows up "The Painted Caravan", an album RollingStone.com praised as "an unexpectedly rich and song filled showcase" and a record which Popdose lauded as a "riveting and intriguing album". Collaboration leader and renowned percussionist Peter Ulrich performed with the iconic Dead Can Dance and contributed to the legendary UK supergroup collaboration This Mortal Coil.

Featuring this guy on lead vocals — track 1.

Comfort Dogs

"Here, the notion of integrating dog and human performers is terrific, and the canine songs — composed by Shane Chapman in shambling roots-rock style and played by the cast — are groovy." Alexis Soloski, New York Times.

anacortes

anacortes is a journey that explores the gray lines of disaster and disease, and the peace that follows the loss of expectations. Musically, for songwriter Shane Chapman, it has been an experiment to write music without any tricks to hide behind; just two guitars, a bass, and some drums. "You can play these songs on a ukulele if you want," says Chapman. "They're simple stories."

The debut speaks to and is inspired by the albums that Chapman grew up listening to, music from the '90s Northwest grunge-scene as well as '70s artists discovered in his father's record collections. The first track on the album and unofficial single, a Great Unknown, is inspired by the quiet streets of NYC during a major snow storm. It receives radio airplay in Chapman's hometown of Anacortes, Wash., and in small towns across Alaska, very fitting considering the song's video was shot in frozen Prospect Park during a polar vortex swell with temperatures 5 to 10 below zero.