Musician David Arkenstone provides soundtrack to World of Warcraft

David Arkenstone (Courtesy photo)

A New Age musician, recording for Windham Hill no less, certainly can be expected to perform a Winter Solstice concert, as David Arkenstone will be doing Saturday (Dec. 19) at AMSDconcerts.

It’s a bit disconcerting, though, to discover that Arkenstone, the three-time Grammy nominee who’s had two No. 1 albums in the bliss-kissed genre (his music was once called a “dreamy soufflé”), has spent the last few years composing for the online game World of Warcraft. (Could he be following in the footsteps of that revered New Age wartime leader, George Winston Churchill?)

“At first the audio director of Blizzard (Entertainment), Russell Brower, hired me to do music for all the taverns in WoW,” Arkenstone said of World of Warcraft, the (I’m citing Wikipedia here) massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).

“I think he hired me because I have a Celtic style that runs through my music, and that seemed to fit what he was looking for. It turned out to be a very good fit, and I went on to do several more hours of in-game music for them. Russell was working for Disney in 1992 when he programmed several of my songs from “In The Wake Of The Wind” for the soundtrack for EPCOT, which runs to this day.

Related: More stories from Mikel Toombs | More SDNN Music stories

“It’s extremely fun to do game music, as quite often it’s an open canvas,” added Arkenstone when reached last Friday in Santa Cruz, the first of six cities on his Solstice tour. “There may be some direction, but your imagination really becomes important. Looking at the aspects of the area of the game you are scoring sends you down a musical path you may never have taken.”

And on the subject of taking unexpected paths, one might spot a familiar face Saturday: Victoria Paige Meyerink is shooting Arkenstone’s concert series for a DVD release.

Meyerink is a former child actor who once co-starred with Elvis Presley (and Nancy Sinatra) in “Speedway” and ensured herself permanent cool status by appearing in five episodes of the TV cult classic “Green Acres.” But she ended up behind the camera, becoming the youngest female producer in Hollywood with the 1983 release of the grindhouse flick “Young Warriors” (also known as “The Graduates of Malibu High”), starring Ernest Borgnine and Richard “Shaft” Roundtree.

Event info
What: David Arkenstone
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 19
Where: AMSDconcerts, 4650 Mansfield St., Normal Heights
Tickets: $25
Info: www.AMSDconcerts.com

Overlooked (mostly by me) music of 2009: It’s time once again for the Christmas wrap(up) of the year’s bypassed albums, starting with a vintage-sounding gem from a former San Diegan who headed north (nearly to the Arctic Circle, in fact).

Prize “Consolation”: Gary Heffern, lead singer of local new-wave faves The Penetrators, relocated to Seattle many years ago. And now Heff has taken his Americana and moved to Finland (he was born there). That makes his current album, “Consolation,” a bit hard to find here, but it’s worth the extra effort. (It’s available at http://www.dadastic.com/heffern_splash.html.) Along with covers like “All His Children (Theme From “Sometimes a Great Notion),” with guest vocals by Mark Lanegan, and “Down Time” (Alejandro Escovedo here), there are such originals as the Tom Waits-evoking “Friendly Fire” and the lovely “(I Am Your) Destroyer” and “La La Land.” (One of Heff’s songs also should be available soon at Angie Bowie’s charity site AidsBeGone.org.)

Hip “Tattoo”: With the news that Jack White is making an album with Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Wanda Jackson, rockabilly is officially hip once again. Britain’s Imelda May should have a head start on any revival; her delightful album “Love Tattoo” was overlooked even by her own record label (Verve Forecast), bearing a 2007 copyright. Mostly May originals, “Tattoo” moves from the rollicking “Johnny Got a Boom Boom” to the sultry “Knock 123.”

Co-starring with the other Elvis: Combining the soul of Memphis (he was born there) with the elegance of jazz, London-based Charlie Wood often has been compared to Elvis Costello; tellingly, the title song of Wood’s winning ‘09 album, “Flutter and Wow” (Archer Records), was written by Costello. Of course, the singer-keyboardist, along with penning some of his own tunes, also draws from the likes of Paul Simon, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen (“Everybody Knows”).

Now boarding, “Ça plane pour moi”: It’s hard to think of international superstar Shakira as being overlooked, but in its first week of release her album “She Wolf” sold 600,000 or so fewer copies than Susan Boyle’s debut. Now, SuBo (can we call Ms. Mebarak ShaMe? I thought not) doesn’t offer pearls of wisdom like “eternal creatures are not so prudent” or “only run with scissors if you want to get hurt.” Nor does she recall Plastic Bertrand’s old new-wave hit, on “Mon Amour.” “She Wolf” may be my guiltiest Shakira pleasure since “Peligro,” and there was little danger of embarrassment there, since the before-they-were-stars album rarely has been heard outside the singer’s native Colombia. Here’s Shakira at 13, tackling one of her role models, La Chica Material (see YouTube video).

Tags: AMSDconcerts, Charlie Wood, David Arkenstone, Gary Heffern, Imelda May, Jack White, SDNN, Shakira, The Penetrators, Victoria Paige Meyerink, Wanda Jackson, Winter Solstice, World of Warcraft

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