Pascal Dennis and David Logan made a record together a long time ago, when they were both young and foolish. The record went nowhere and Pascal and David went off separately to seek their respective fortunes.
Pascal launched a management consulting company and travelled the world helping companies improve. David went to California and became a big-time music producer in film and TV. But they never forgot their work together or their friendship.
Pascal kept writing songs and poems, usually in hotels and bars around the world, late at night, as a way of recording his experience for his family. Music and song writing were his beloved avocation. He never expected his songs would be produced.
During the 2020 pandemic, Pascal began to write new songs and to polish his older songs. What began as a trickle turned into a torrent of music. Encouraged by the quality of the songs, Pascal decided to look up his old friend, who was now living in Rome and teaching composition at the renowned Santa Cecilia Music Academy.
After almost thirty years, Pascal and David began to work together again. Their goal was to create the best possible music, the way they felt it, and to record Pascal's experience for his children and their children. As the album evolved, they realized it might have broader appeal.
Crazy Angels is the result of their collaboration, and the first of four planned albums. Crazy Angels tells the story of Pascal's childhood in Toronto on Spadina Avenue, and in Greektown, and his coming of age. Pascal's parents were migrants who barely escaped WWII and the terrible Greek Civil War. His father was a dishwasher at Grossman's Tavern, and his mother a garment factory worker. Eventually, they saved enough to open a small diner, the Imperial Grill, which sustained the family, and where Pascal worked from the age of eight.
The Crazy Angels album comprises music 'the way we feel it'. 'Come to Your Window, Sarah' is a Romeo and Juliet story set among Spadina Avenue immigrants. 'Crazy Angels' is a retelling of the Great Gatsby story. The bridge 'our fathers and their fathers built' is the celebrated Prince Edward Viaduct which separates Toronto's exclusive Rosedale neighborhood and the gritty Danforth Avenue Pascal grew up on.
'Summerside' is an epic story of love gone wrong on Toronto's waterfront. Songs like ‘Once Upon a Faraway Time’, 'The Day You Went Away', and 'Ashes of Love' are homage to Sinatra, Jobim and Bennett. 'The Way Things Had To Be' is homage to the Big Band era. 'Only the Spotlight Remains' is homage to Seattle's lost 'underground' city. 'San Francisco Bay', 'Cry Cry Cry', and 'Jack Kerouac's Blues' are joyful urban bops. Three more albums are in the pipeline, and the songs 'keep coming'.