After months of preparation, Strong Songs Live is almost here. Next Saturday, July 11, I’ll take the stage at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Oregon, along with a large backing band to… well, to play a bunch of music! It’s going to be great!

We’ve sold a lot of tickets but there are still seats available, so you should come join us if you’re able. You can buy tickets here. I’m sure this won’t be the last Strong Songs Live, but there’s always something cool about being there for the first one of something.

If you aren’t in the PDX area or can’t make it that night, we’ll be running a livestream of the show, so you can buy tickets to that instead. If you aren’t able to watch the stream live, the archive will stay up for about a month after the show.

I’ve already shared a Listening List of Strong Songs episodes to check out in advance of the show, and I hope those of you who will be attending are catching up on old episodes. The show will definitely include a lot of Easter eggs for longtime listeners.

Next week is our big rehearsal week, with horn, vocal, and full band rehearsals down in The Caldera. I’ve been in a chart-writing frenzy as I prepare.

We’ve got something like sixteen charts for the show; some are only for a few instruments, but the majority are for the full seven-piece band. That has translated to an intimidating amount of work, mapping out each song while arranging/adapting the music for the specific musicians in the band.

I used MuseScore 4, the open-source notation software, to write everything, and have been impressed with the software overall. This is my first major project using MuseScore since Tantacrul joined their team and helped oversee the design overhaul to MuseScore 4. The software is now much more competitive with Dorico and Sibelius, the latter of which had been my notation software of choice for more than 20 years.

MuseScore definitely still has its issues—problems laying out rehearsal marks, expressions, and staff text often drove me to distraction, changing input types would frequently make my screen jump around, drum set note input is a mess and drum notation itself seems very much a work in progress, it would occasionally crash, and there are a number of other bugs both large and small. But for free, open-source software, it’s remarkably robust, particularly for my purposes.

The playback engine is solid, and I appreciate that it adds chord symbols to playback. I love options like “fill with slashes,” given how I mostly write rock and jazz charts. The organization of page elements—called palettes—is intuitive, and categories like “Breaths & Pauses,” “Arpeggios & glisssandi,” and “Barlines,” helped me find what I was looking for more often than not. And I appreciate that it maintains Sibelius’s “R to repeat notes, arrow keys to quickly move them” input method, since that remains my bread and butter for basic note input. I’m a huge fan of Tantacrul’s withering critiques of notation software UI/UX, and he’s clearly assembled a core team with a similar design ethos to his own.

As I finish preparations for rehearsal week, I’m struck anew by how important it is that I’m able to write and arrange sheet music. Without a set of reliable, easy-to-read charts, putting on a show like Strong Songs Live would require a prohibitive amount of rehearsal. These musicians are all skilled professionals, but as a result they’re incredibly busy, and it just wouldn’t be possible to learn all this material by ear in the time we have.

With most of the logistical prep done, I'm excited to get to rehearsing. We have a lot of music to get together, and the show date isn’t moving. I can’t wait to see some of you there.

The newest episode of Strong Songs is about ABBA, and their 1975 hit “Mamma Mia.” I had a blast making it, and learned a lot of new things about ABBA in the process. Lately when making Strong Songs, I’ve sought out some authoritative, if not definitive, documentary or written biography of the artist I’m covering, to see what I can learn about the making of the song. In this case, that meant Carl Magnus Palm’s Bright Lights, Dark Shadows: The Real Story of ABBA, published in 2001.

It’s not a surprise that Palm’s book is interesting, given the subject matter, but I found ABBA’s early days of stardom particularly fascinating. They had just won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest and their careers were far from assured; “Mamma Mia” was the single that, with an assist from their army of Australian fans, truly launched their follow-up album into the stratosphere and cemented ABBA as worldwide stars. The world of music promotion is just so different these days, so I enjoyed learning more about the complex logistics of launching an international promotional campaign in the mid-70s.

Anyway, the song is great—precisely composed and more avant-garde than I think it was given credit for at the time. I hope you all enjoy the episode, and thanks as always for listening.

A few other things to share, both from me and from elsewhere:

That’s it for now. If you’re reading this on Friday, July 3rd, I’ll be streaming the new Rhythm Heaven game today for an hour or two on the Triple Click YouTube channel, as a promised during a charity stream I recently did for my friends at the Ranged Touch Network. I’ll start streaming at 7pm Eastern; you should swing by.

I’ll leave you with this pic of Appa, who has been at maximum schmoop lately. I can assure you that I scratched her ears immediately after taking this.

Take care, and keep listening-
~KH
7/3/2026 - Portland, Oregon