Album Collection Quotes

Oddly, I had never thought of myself as a feminist. I had been denounced by certain radical feminist collectives as a ‘lackey’ for men. That charge was based on my having written and sung two albums of songs that my female accusers claimed elevated and praised men. Resenting that label, I had joined the majority of black women in America in denouncing feminism… . The feminists were right. The value of my life had been obliterated as much by being female as by being black and poor. Racism and sexism in America were equal partners in my oppression.

I made my way to the living room and sat down on the sofa. Hannah followed a moment later and sat down opposite me. She looked exhausted. ‘You look exhausted,’ I told her. ‘Thank you.’ ‘No, no, it’s not that you look bad,’ I said, backtracking. ‘You just look more tired than usual.’ ‘Mmm hmmm,’ said Hannah. ‘Not that you usually look tired.’ Hannah rolled her eyes. I decided I was talking too much and turned my attention to the pitiful collection of ‘80s music cassettes that she’d inherited when she moved into the apartment. Then I started talking again. ‘You know, you’re only one album away from owning Bananarama’s full back catalogue.’ I looked over to Hannah. She wasn’t laughing. That felt strange. She always laughed at my crappy music cassette jokes. I tried another.

The weird part is not that I collected scratch and sniff stickers until I was a teenager. The weird part is, I still have that sticker album and the stickers when scratched still erupt with scent.

an institution is where they put Aunt Maggy when she began collecting Wheaties in a stamp album.

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.

I remember how, as a boy, I used to collect the cork tips of my father's cigarettes and stick them in my stamp albums. I believed they contained his unspoken words, which one day would explain everything. I have not changed. Now I explore my memories, trying to discover the substructure hidden beneath my past actions, searching for the link to connect them all.

Motherfucker was like three hundred years old, but because he had a car and a record collection and foto albums from his Vietnam days and because he bought her clothes to replace the old shit she was wearing, Nilda was all lost on him.

I Feel Love,” by Donna Summer, and this had a profound influence on how I perceived music from that point on. Additionally, it led me toward a greater appreciation of disco; Chic were now filed next to the Clash in my album collection. These elements, merged with many other stylistic references, formed the basic blueprint for Duran Duran: the raw energy of punk, disco rhythms, electro pulses, and the panache of glam rock, which was already deeply embedded in our consciousness.

Outward calm prevailed in the room, subdued voices, the tranquillity of fancy-work, and the peace of albums; yet Anna could not avoid a chilled impression, a feeling as though each person present were distrustful of the others, and more or less on the defensive.

They dubbed cassettes were the links of our friendship, and we forged them, one clacky plastic square at a time. One of us would buy a cassette or LP and dub it for someone else, and on we would pass the album, pooling our resources- our own teenage Marxist collective.

I had my wife unearth from under a collection of shoes a thirty year old album, so that I might see how Lotte had looked as a child; and even though the light was wrong and the dresses graceless, I was able to make out a dim first version of Lolita’s outline, legs, cheekbones, bobbed nose. Lottelita, Lolitchen.

I had memorised Deep Purple’s Made in Japan note for note. Every drumbeat, every thud of Ian Paice’s bass-drum beater, I had tried to replicate. Ditto the first Black Sabbath album, Aqualung by Jethro Tull, plus my eccentric collection of Van der Graaf Generator albums and treasured copy of Wild Turkey’s first offering.

I look through the old record collection my dad gave me. Stress relief. I shuffle through the albums feverishly and find what I'm looking for-the Proclaimers. I chuck it on and watch it spin. The ridiculous first notes of "Five Hundred Miles" come on, and I feel like going berserk. Even the Proclaimers are giving me the shits tonight. Their singing's an abomination.

Carl Franzoni perhaps summed it up best when he declared rather bluntly that, “the Byrds’ records were manufactured.” The first album in particular was an entirely engineered affair created by taking a collection of songs by outside songwriters and having them performed by a group of nameless studio musicians (for the record, the actual musicians were Glen Campbell on guitar, Hal Blaine on drums, Larry Knechtel on bass, Leon Russell on electric piano, and Jerry Cole on rhythm guitar), after which the band’s trademark vocal harmonies, entirely a studio creation, were added to the mix. As would be expected, the Byrds’ live performances, according to Barney Hoskyns’ Waiting for the Sun, “weren’t terribly good.” But that didn’t matter much; the band got a lot of assistance from the media, with Time being among the first to champion the new band. And they also got a tremendous assist from Vito and the Freaks and from the Young Turks, as previously discussed.

There was, of course, the dildo that I have described (though the device, or the instrument, was what I learned, following Diana, to call it: I think the unnecessary euphemism, with its particular odour of the surgery or house of correction, appealed to her; only when really heated would she call the thing by its proper name - and even then she was as likely to ask for Monsieur Dildo, or simply Monsieur). Besides this there was an album of photographs of big-buttocked girls with hairless parts, bearing feathers; also a collection of erotic pamphlets and novels, all hymning the delights of what I would call tommistry but what they, like Diana, called Sapphic Passion.

That was a very pretty image, the idle ladies sitting in the gazebo and murmuring lasciate ogni speranza, but it depended entirely upon the popular view of the movement as some kind of collective inchoate yearning for “fulfillment,” or “self-expression,” a yearning absolutely devoid of ideas and capable of engendering only the most pro forma benevolent interest. In fact there was an idea, and the idea was Marxist, and it was precisely to the extent that there was this Marxist idea that the curious historical anomaly known as the women’s movement would have seemed to have any interest at all. Marxism in this country had ever been an eccentric and quixotic passion. One oppressed class after another had seemed finally to miss the point. The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having. The minorities seemed to promise more, but finally disappointed: it developed that they actually cared about the issues, that they tended to see the integration of the luncheonette and the seat in the front of the bus as real goals, and only rarely as ploys, counters in a larger game. They resisted that essential inductive leap from the immediate reform to the social ideal, and, just as disappointingly, they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to exhibit a self-interest disconcerting in the extreme to organizers steeped in the rhetoric of “brotherhood.

Mrs Coote was a good friend of their mother and the source for the ‘small thin sour woman’ who comes to tea to be served ‘wafer-thin bread and butter’ sandwiches in Company.96 Mr Coote was a dedicated, highly professional philatelist and obtained many of Frank’s rarer stamps for him.97 For Beckett remembered his brother as being a much keener collector than he ever was himself.98 Memories of such hours spent browsing, but also bickering, with his brother over their favourite stamps insinuate themselves into Beckett’s mature writing. Jacques Moran asks in Molloy: Do you know what he was doing? Transferring to the album of duplicates, from his good collection properly so-called, certain rare and valuable stamps which he was in the habit of gloating over daily and could not bring himself to leave, even for a few days. Show me your new Timor, the five reis orange, I said. He hesitated. Show it to me! I cried.99

Several years ago, I was invited to deliver a lecture on art and literature to the Tinworth Historical Society. While searching in the attic for a treatise of mine written during my student days at the Sorbonne, I came upon a large, dust-and-cobweb-covered trunk bearing the initials W.W. which I had never before noticed. Inside were stacks of paper tied in neat bundles and a large quantity of fascinating memorabilia - faded flowers, old invitations, scraps of satin, velvet and lace, postage stamps, jewelry, postcards from foreign capitals. The variety was endless. As I examined several bundles of paper more carefully, I realized I was holding a collection of drawings by Amelia Woodmouse, a promising young artist and a member of the family who had lived in the house at the turn of the century. From the delightful portraits and paintings depicting the life around her, and the accumulation of personal mementos, it was obvious that the artist had begun her collection in order to compile a family album, which for some reason, sadly, she never completed.

In one of the notebooks he carried with him, Nietzsche wrote, "We have art lest we perish from the truth." For those leading afterlives, the unadorned facts of what's happened to them can be brutish to bear on their own terms. Contextualizing that hardship through our intellects and imaginations is a critical salve, an act of transforming our perception that can guide and color how we experience our lives. We can knead our experiences into a larger arc, providing the cohesion that helps us form new narrative identities. Or we can look deeper into our afterlives until we ferret out a way of construing them that rouses our spirits or points them toward salvation. In her essay collection The White Album, Joan Didion delivered a pronouncement that was a natural descendants to Nietzsche's line, an admission of how desperately we rely on the subjective fictions we construct: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Those stories--whether they take the form of redemption narratives, personal parables, or the pearlescent beliefs we kneel before each day like shrines offering eternal grace--can elevate our lives and serve as the vessels of private deliverance.

Sam was about to travel to Asia with her boyfriend and she was fretting about what her backers would think if she released some of her new songs while she was 'on vacation'. She was worried that posting pictures of herself sipping a Mai Tai was going to make her look like an asshole. What does it matter? I asked her, where you are whether you're drinking a coffee, a Mai Tai or a bottle of water? I mean, aren't they paying for your songs so that you can... live? Doesn't living include wandering and collecting emotions and drinking a Mai Tai, not just sitting in a room writing songs without ever leaving the house? I told Sam about another songwriter friend of mine, Kim Boekbinder, who runs her own direct support website through which her fans pay her monthly at levels from $5 to $1,000. She also has a running online wishlist of musical gear and costumes kindof like a wedding registry, to which her fans can contribute money anytime they want. Kim had told me a few days before that she doesn't mind charging her backers during what she calls her 'staring at the wall time'. She thinks this is essential before she can write a new batch of songs. And her fans don't complain, they trust her process. These are new forms of patronage, there are no rules and it's messy, the artists and the patrons they are making the rules as they go along, but whether these artists are using crowdfunding (which is basically, front me some money so I can make a thing) or subscription services (which is more like pay me some money every month so that I can make things) or Patreon, which is like pay per piece of content pledge service (that basically means pay me some money every time I make a thing). It doesn't matter, the fundamental building block of all of these relationships boils down to the same simple thing: trust. If you're asking your fans to support you, the artist, it shouldn't matter what your choices are, as long as you're delivering your side of the bargain. You may be spending the money on guitar picks, Mai Tais, baby formula, college loans, gas for the car or coffee to fuel your all-night writing sessions. As long as art is coming out the other side, and you're making your patrons happy, the money you need to live (and need to live is hard to define) is almost indistinguishable from the money you need to make art. ... (6:06:57) ... When she posts a photo of herself in a vintage dress that she just bought, no one scolds her for spending money on something other than effects pedals. It's not like her fan's money is an allowance with nosy and critical strings attached, it's a gift in the form of money in exchange for her gift, in the form of music. The relative values are... messy. But if we accept the messiness we're all okay. If Beck needs to moisturize his cuticles with truffle oil in order to play guitar tracks on his crowdfunded record, I don't care that the money I fronted him isn't going towards two turntables or a microphone; just as long as the art gets made, I get the album and Beck doesn't die in the process.

When I decided in my mid-fifties to return to a hobby I’d abandoned twenty years earlier, I didn’t know what sort of a collector I’d be. As a boy I’d started out collecting everything, then narrowed my focus to British Empire—specifically, to the Scott Specialty Album for Great Britain, British Europe, and British Oceania. In my mid-twenties I’d begun collecting Benelux as well, and in my mid-thirties, when my first marriage ended, I sold everything.

Books were supplied by his private librarian, whose job it was to provide the Tsar each month with twenty of the best books from all countries. This collection was laid out on a table and Nicholas arranged them in order of preference; thereafter the Tsar’s valets saw to it that no one disarranged them until the end of the month. Sometimes, instead of reading, the family spent evenings pasting snapshots taken by the court photographers or by themselves into green leather albums stamped in gold with the Imperial monograph. Nicholas enjoyed supervising the placement and pasting of the photographs and insisted that the work be done with painstaking neatness.

You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing — beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code — what is “right” and what is “wrong,” what is “good” and what “evil.” I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of “morality” seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything: they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work.

You can find meaning in the smallest of things. Remember the traditions she used to love and keep them alive. Name family traditions in her honor. You can make a journal of all her happy memories with you or an album of family pictures. You can have a little collection of something that she owned, like a specific pin, which you can keep with you. These things might look small or difficult initially, but eventually, they will bring you a sense of peace. You can use her favorite ring as a necklace, so you never have to feel her absence. She’s always with you.

The process today gives everyone a chance to participate,” Tom Hayden, by way of explaining “the difference” between 1968 and 1988, said to Bryant Gumbel on NBC at 7:50 a.m. on the day after Jesse Jackson spoke at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta. This was, at a convention that had as its controlling principle the notably nonparticipatory idea of “unity”, demonstrably not true, but people inside the process, constituting as they do a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite, tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is. They tend to prefer the theoretical to the observable, and to dismiss that which might be learned empirically as “anecdotal”. They tend to speak a language common in Washington but not specifically shared by the rest of us. They talk about “programs”, and “policy”, and how to “implement” them or it, about “trade-offs” and constituencies and positioning the candidate and distancing the candidate, about the “story”, and how it will “play”. They speak of a candidate’s performance, by which they usually mean his skill at circumventing questions, not as citizens but as professional insiders, attuned to signals pitched beyond the range of normal hearing: “I hear he did all right this afternoon,” they were saying to one another in the press section of the Louisiana

Many of the first generation of Psychobillies were often ignorant about the history of Rockabilly and gained their love of Rock’n’Roll not from lovingly collecting twenty-five year old 45’s tracked down in dusty American record stores but by watching ‘Grease’ and ‘Happy Days’ alongside seeing Matchbox and The Stray Cats on ‘Top Of The Pops’. This was a generation weaned on ‘The Wanderers’, ‘Lemon Popsicle’ and stacks of low-rent TV advertised Rock’n’Roll albums.... They may not have known who [1950s rockabilly-country singer] Narvel Felts and [1950s rockabilly artist] ‘Groovey’ Joe Poovey were but they sure as hell had heard of Darts and Showaddywaddy and they undoubtedly knew “who put the bomp in the bompshoobompshoobomp” never mind the fucking ramalamadingdong.

My phone is vibrating, telling me: You have a new memory. Here is a stream of pictures collected into an album, all taken somewhere far away. Home is not a place but a string of colours threaded together and knotted at one end.

It is only within comparatively recent years that the homely stories in the mouths of the country-people have been constituted a branch of learning, and have had applied to them, as such, the methods and the terminology of science. No doubt a very noteworthy gain to knowledge has resulted from this treatment, — a curious department of research has been opened up, and light has been cast upon various outside things of greater importance than the subject of study itself. But, side by side with this gain to knowledge, is there not, involved in the method of treatment indicated, a loss to the stories themselves ? Classified, tabulated, scientifically named, they are no longer the wild free product of Nature that we knew and loved: — they are become, so to speak, a collection of butterflies in a case, an album of pressed wild flowers. No doubt they are still very interesting, and highly instructive ; but their poetry, their brightness, the fragrance which clung about them in their native air, their native soil, is in large measure gone!

In the last decade and a half a revival of plant behavior research had brought countless new realizations to botany, more than forty years after an irresponsible best-selling book nearly snuffed out the field for good. The Secret Life of Plants, published in 1973, captured the public imagination on a global scale. Written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, the book was a mix of real science, flimsy experiments, and unscientific projection. In one chapter, Tompkins and Bird suggested that plants could feel and hear—and that they preferred Beethoven to rock and roll. In another, a former CIA agent named Cleve Backster hooked up a polygraph test to his houseplant and imagined the plant being set on fire. The polygraph needle went wild, which would mean the plant was experiencing a surge in electrical activity. In humans, a reading like that was believed to denote a surge of stress. The plant, according to Backster, was responding to his malevolent thoughts. The implication was that there existed not only a sort of plant consciousness but also plant mind-reading. The book was an immediate and meteoric success on the popular market, surprising for a book about plant science. Paramount put out a feature film about it. Stevie Wonder wrote the soundtrack. The first pressings of the album version were sent out scented with floral perfume. To its many astonished readers, the book offered a new way to view the plants all around them, which up until then had seemed ornamental, passive, more akin to the world of rocks than animals. It also aligned with the advent of New Age culture, which was ready to inhale stories about how plants were as alive as we are. People began talking to their houseplants, and leaving classical music playing for their ficus when they went out. But it was a beautiful collection of myths.

In Brothers: Black and Poor (1988), the story of twelve African American men in a housing project on Chicago’s South Side, one of main characters, Half Man Carter, has a prized record collection that includes “Mama Sang a Song,” by Walter Brennan. In the early 1960s, Brennan became a recording star, narrating brief stories like “Old Shep” and “Tribute to a Dog,” and producing several popular albums, which have had an extended life on CDs and the web, where many of his songs can be downloaded. In A World of Miracles (1960), to the accompaniment of orchestra and choir, he recites the stories of Noah, the Ten Commandments, and the Resurrection, transforming his familiar way of speaking into a solemn, yet friendly New England accented prophetic voice.

Although in 2005 compact discs still represented over 98 percent of the market for legal album sales, Morris had no loyalty to the format. In May of that year, Vivendi Universal announced it was spinning off its CD manufacturing and distribution business into a calcified corporate shell called the Entertainment Distribution Company. Included in EDC’s assets were several massive warehouses and two large-scale compact disc manufacturing plants: one in Hanover, Germany, and one in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. Universal would still manufacture all its CDs at the plants, but now this would be an arms-length transaction that allowed them to watch the superannuation of optical media from a comfortable distance. It was one of the oldest moves in the corporate finance playbook: divest yourself of underperforming assets while holding on to the good stuff. EDC was a classic “stub company,” a dogshit collection of low-growth, capital-intensive factory equipment that was rapidly going obsolete. In other words, EDC was a drag on A that added little to B. Let the investment bankers figure out who wanted it—Universal had gone digital, and the death rattle of the compact disc had grown loud enough for even Doug Morris to hear. The CD was the past; the iPod was the future. People loved these stupid things. You could hardly go outside without getting run over by some dumb jogger rocking white headphones and a clip-on Shuffle. Apple stores were generating more sales per square foot than any business in the history of retail. The wrapped-up box with a sleek wafer-sized Nano inside was the most popular gift in the history of Christmas. Apple had created the most ubiquitous gadget in the history of stuff.

Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album.

many of the 1977–1978 punk generation “flopped the hardcore testo rage rite,” and gravitated to a new breed of roots-based rock bands with a foot planted in the O.G. punk firmament. These included Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs, a brawny, hard-drinking blues–rock unit fronted by “Top Jimmy” Koncek, a close friend of and sometime roadie for the punk band X; the Gun Club, a feral, unpredictable punk–blues unit led by vocalist–songwriter Jeffrey Lee Pierce, a blues devotee and frequent contributor to Slash magazine; and Phast Phreddie and Thee Precisions, a cranked-up R&B unit featuring singer Fred “Phast Phreddie” Patterson, former co-editor of Back Door Man, the first fanzine to explore L.A. punk. By late 1980, the NYC-by-way-of-Cleveland psychobilly quartet the Cramps had relocated to Los Angeles. The Flesh Eaters—one of the earliest L.A. punk bands, led by singer–songwriter Chris D. (born Chris Desjardins), another Slash contributor and head of the magazine’s in-house subsidiary label, Ruby Records—would begin to probe punk–blues terrain with the 1981 album A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die, a swampy collection on which the bandleader was backed by members of X and the Blasters.

Whole different story this time,' Bosco began. 'I'm going to make you work, Stephi-babe. This album is going to be my comeback.' Stephanie assumed he was joking. But he met her gaze evenly from within the folds of black leather. 'Comeback?' she asked. Jules had been wandering the loft, eyeing the framed gold and platinum Conduit albums paving the walls, the few guitars Bosco hadn't sold off, and his collection of pre-Columbian artifacts, which he hoarded in pristine glass cases and refused to sell. At the word 'comeback,' Stephanie felt her brother's attention suddenly engage. 'The album's called A to B, right?' Bosco said. 'And that's the question I want to hit straight on: how did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about? Let's not pretend it didn't happen.' Stephanie was too startled to respond. 'I want interviews, features, you name it,' Bosco went on. 'Fill up my life with that shit. Let's document every fucking humiliation. This is reality, right? You don't look good anymore twenty years later, especially when you've had half your guts removed. Time's a goon, right? Isn't that the expression?' Jules had drifted over from across the room. 'I've never heard that,' he said. '"Time is a goon"?' 'Would you disagree?' Bosco said, a little challengingly. There was a pause. 'No,' Jules said. 'Look,' Stephanie said, 'I love your honesty, Bosco - ' 'Don't give me "I love your honesty, Bosco,"' he said. 'Don't get all PR-y on me.' 'I'm your publicist,' Stephanie reminded him. 'Yeah, but don't start believing that shit,' Bosco said. 'You're too old.

unceremoniously as “John F. Kennedy: The Photographic Archive of Cecil W. Stoughton.” I knew—even sight unseen—that this was no ordinary scrapbook collection of scratchy Polaroids and faded albums. No, this might be the treasure trove of one of Camelot’s court photographers, a man who had visually documented some of the most important events in the presidency of John F. Kennedy, including a secret party in New York City attended by the president and the most glamorous movie star of the time: Marilyn Monroe.

April 1965, then, marked the beginning of a new epoch for the new breed of singer-songwriters in Britain. As well as Collins and Graham’s Folk Roots, New Routes, in that year there appeared Donovan’s What’s Bin Did and What’s Bin Hid and Fairytale; John Renbourn’s self-titled first album; Mick Softley’s Songs for Swingin’ Survivors; Martin Carthy, a collection of folk songs with violinist Dave Swarbrick; Jackson C. Frank’s Jackson C. Frank; and Bert Jansch, the debut by the fastest-rising star of them all. Jansch, who was born

For me, many albums are much more than a collection of songs. They’re testaments to the courage to live above the minimum requirements of merely getting by.

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag.

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent

anise tea. “Meditation turns us on,” Sandy says. He has a shaved head and the kind of cherubic face usually seen in newspaper photographs of mass murderers.

Going back to Devon, Sisco, then I promise to check in with Ma. Have some amazing recordings from South Dartmoor and Brickburgh. Going back for more. A website, GaiaCries, are going to post my collection. The best bits. I’m getting an album on there! An album! This stuff is so freaky they thought I’d faked it. It’s better than anything I’ve heard on their site, recorded in all those train tunnels, nuclear bunkers and disused mines. Think I’m only happy inside a tent too, Sisco. I have been in a state of ecstasy and awe in Brickburgh all summer. And no, it’s not only down to the weed ;-) Have uploaded some stuff for you to play to the baby – seals in a cove [here]. Promise I’ll call mum. Lin xxxxxxx

When Cash sat down for his annual New Year’s Eve reflections, he was too close to the situation to appreciate fully that he had just finished one of the most remarkable years in pop history. He’d not only made what is perhaps the greatest country album ever—a work so powerful and rich that Rolling Stone magazine would one day name it one of the hundred best albums regardless of genre—but also recorded a gospel album that was light-years away from the conventional collection of hymns.

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

Sami Abouzid Singer | Songwriter | Music Producer | Author | Publisher Profile: A versatile and accomplished artist with over two decades of experience in the music industry. Sami Abouzid is a singer, songwriter, music producer, and music arranger who has established himself as a creative force in both the music and literary worlds. Renowned for his original compositions and innovative soundscapes, Sami is also a published author with a passion for storytelling. Professional Experience: Founder & CEO White Horse Records (2003–Present) • Established an independent record label to promote original music and artistic innovation. • Managed all aspects of production, marketing, and distribution for multiple projects. Band Leader Romantic Star (2003–Present) • Formed and led the band, releasing music that resonated with audiences worldwide. • Released debut album Romantic Dreams, featuring the hit song “Vanessa,” which gained airplay on multiple U.S. radio stations. Soundtrack Composer (2013–Present) • Transitioned into the world of soundtracks, starting with Isabella in 2013. • Composed, arranged, and produced 657 original soundtracks, known for their emotional depth and cinematic quality. Music Artist (2001–Present) • Released 54 albums and 50 singles available in stores worldwide. • Composed, arranged, mixed, mastered, performed, and produced all his music independently. Books Authored: • Love, Life, and Music – A reflection on creativity and personal experiences. • Scarlett Johansson Forever – A tribute to art, passion, and inspiration. • Arabic Poetry – A collection of poetic works exploring love and emotion. Skills & Expertise: • Music Composition, Arrangement, Mixing, and Mastering • Songwriting and Lyric Creation • Soundtrack Development for Film and Media • Publishing and Record Label Management • Literary Writing and Poetry Notable Achievements: • Pioneered a new era of music with over 700 compositions, soundtracks, albums, and singles. • Gained international recognition with music featured on major radio stations in the U.S. • Successfully bridged the gap between music and literature, creating a lasting artistic legacy.