Here We Are, Kid
The song that became the film — an elegy sung from a porch to a kid under the stars.
words & voice Derek Claude Simmons · music Suno · coming to Spotify & Apple Music
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More songs ship through the summer. They land here first.
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In production
Hallway Walz in D Minor
A five-minute chamber piece. Composed and performed by one diminished man, in the saddest key, in a hallway he keeps returning to.
Nine Latin requiem movements. No windows. Doors only. The opposite of lightning/bug — the inside of the same year.
Buffalo Parade
A buffalo carrying an electric guitar turns into the storm — because the only way through is through.
Northern plains, late afternoon into storm. Empire Builder country. A parable for the moment we're in: the storms you have to walk into rather than around. Song first; the visualization serves it.
River Pigs
He recovers bodies from the river. It’s the only honest job in the logging trade.
A frontier noir set on the St. Croix River during the 1880s Minnesota logging boom — when lumber barons built their fortunes on the backs of the men who rode the log drives and died in them. Fargo meets Landman, set in an era when white pine was America's most valuable commodity.
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Films and songs ship when they ship. Notes from the studio go out through the same door as the writing.
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