Our Projects

These are some projects that are in progress. It might appear that they are completed and done with, but it increasingly appears that at Hensley Farms a project is never finished. Yes, the album came out some years ago, but that doesn't mean it's done. The quarantine shutdown sent us back to the archives and then to the drawing board. We've conjured up video interpretations of a lot of the music that we turned out, and that has led to a lot of re-interpretation. So feel free to dip in here and see what you find.

Taking America to America

Behind the Scenes in Diamondville

You may know all about Neil Diamond, but there's a lot more to find out about the Neil Diamond tour.  You'll discover a lot of it on this, an album recorded by the musicians in his band, playing and often singing songs about life on the road. 

Hotel life, the tour accountants, the string players, the horn players, the charter jets, the poker games, the percussionists, all those towns...

It's all here, it's funny, most of it, but some of it might make you cry for what used to be. 

Jazz Time

2015

I have been playing Neil Diamond's songs for more than half of my life, and at some point I began to wonder what it would be like to do them in completely different ways.

So I very slowly began to do just that. Over the last year it became an album called "Jazz Time."

That's also the name of a song I wrote with Neil 30 years ago, and that's the only one that's left fairly untouched.

The others are all over the place, with a lot of help from my talented and generous bandmates.

SPOILER ALERT:

•"Holly Holy" imagines Arturo Velasco sitting in on an Ahmad Jamal record.

•"Kentucky Woman" could be an outtake from "Birth of the Cool," featuring John Fumo.

•"Headed for the Future" heads to the future by way of roughly 1961, with Don Markese and myself appearing in the roles of Paul Desmond and Les McCann, perhaps.

It's not just the hits we revisited. Larry Klimas channels his inner Coltrane on "Home is a Wounded Heart," while we make "Dry Your Eyes" into something maybe a bit more mysterious. “Summerlove” is a cheap trip to Paris.

Oh, and we did a modern-day version of “A Modern Day Version of Love.”

If these notes don’t make sense to you, perhaps you will still recognize the songs.

The album is available for download at all the usual locations.

This stuff has been Simon-ized

This is SO miscellaneous

Simon Stokes left us at the end of 2020, but I didn't see him mentioned in any of those "in memoriam" tributes that pop up a year's end. Simon wasn't a big name, but he was certainly big name-adjacent. I don't have a one-sentence description to make you fully aware of him. It's moe like bits and pieces that add up to a big deal.  To get more about him, you'll have to click the button below, but it'll worth your time to do so.

The Joy Circuit Joy Circuit to the World

The Joy Circuit Palm Springs (Eternal in the Human Hand)

The Masters of Deceit Hensley's Electric Jazz Band and Synthetic Symphonette)

The WFBM-TV Orchestra

The Pigeon Hill Boys

Etc.