Album 6 - Roseanna Angel Lawrence

This is not my main album of compositions this year, my main album of compositions I released is called 'Cipher Criminal' which is part orchestral compositions with some synthesizer compositions. I worked harder on that album and the orchestral compositions were more complex and faster than this album.

However, I had fun developing this album as a little side project which I did over long months. Someone reminded me that I'd said I had some tracks in the style of 'Sisters of the Night' an album which I did last year and asked me when it was going to be finished so they could listen to it.

As I'm going to be really busy the next couple of months, I decided to put these tracks together now before July when I'll have much less time. Covid has been bad where I live the last month so that also gave me more time to work on it.

As usual I followed the same method which I used in Cipher Criminal and my other albums. I work with characters, I like composing around characters. I wrote a short fictional story about a character, a silent film actress, before composing.

The one difference with this album and Cipher Criminal is that although I wrote a short story for both albums, I also did a talk and review of the fascinating book by William J. Mann called 'Tilnseltown: Murder, Morphine and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood' at my book group.

This is a group where I can choose which book I talk about, so no one is given a particular book to read. The last book I reviewed and did a talk on was about the producer 'Phil Spector.'

I chose 'Tinseltown' because I was interested in the construction of early Hollywood and films. Historically it's a well researched non-fiction book.

This book had so many interesting people and themes: power relations and the great movie moguls Adoloph Zukor and Marcus Loew, who competed and fought for total control and of Hollywood, religion and its impact on censorship in early Hollywood, men who had to hide their sexuality for fear of ruin or blackmail, media and its interaction with the film world, an actress used and dominated by her mother to obtain vast wealth, drug peddlers, addiction and murder. The book also explores culture, racism, social class and inequality and environment, including the effect of environment and even the weather on the mind of residents. A place can have a personality and Tinseltown had a wild personality.

The core of the novel was the brutal murder of filmmaker and actor William Desmond Taylor, who was such an interesting man, very different from others in the book. He is a man that hid his past background from people, he was a man of secrets, he hid parts of his life and his identity because he felt pressured by society to hide parts of himself. He was very private and loved literature and had an amazing library of books. He was most almost certainly being blackmailed. He could not be himself in real life and this must have been exhausting. He helped a number of people in Hollywood, really went out of his way to help people in positions less powerful than himself in society, even at risk to himself and his own reputation. He'd already offered to help his African American Valet just before he died, a man who'd found himself in trouble with the law and police, his crime, walking in a local park! Taylor would always give him extra money as he knew he had little in life.

Taylor was a man that understood tragedy and that life could be very difficult for some people just because of the colour of their skin or because they were different in some way from others in society.

The actor Robert Harron acted in an incredible amount of silent films, unlike Taylor, he was very outgoing and open about his life, unfortunately, he shot himself in a hotel room. He died slowly over a week. His beginning childhood was tragic, one of many children in his family that were exceptionally poor and struggling to survive. He began working as a little boy to feed his family. His income completely supported his entire family for years. He was another character that hid a great deal about his feelings from other people. We do not know how he ended up with a gun in his hands in a hotel room. He said he shot himself accidently, though many believed it was deliberate. His last days must have been terrible as he was placed in the prison part of the hospital becuase of a law that said using a gun was a crime, whether used accidently or not or used to shoot yourself.

Other characters in the book were different psychologically and may have had personality disorders, some were simply flamboyant, thrill seekers, psychopaths or power mad who would go to extreme lengths to get what they wanted. Some people like the main actress in the book were completely trapped most of their lives and controlled and lived isolated lives despite the fact they were famous stars.

So unlike Cipher Criminal which was exhausting, this was a lighter workload. A break from my main album release this year. My next album should be next year.