I first worked with Noah Marlowe a couple of years ago on our Miracle Of Faith CD project that I wrote with Dora Redman and produced for Watchfire Music. He sang one of the three songs along with Julia Wade and me that told the Bible story of the five loaves and two fishes.

Back then Noah had just turned twelve and was already an experienced Broadway performer having worked in such shows as Mary Poppins, Elf, The Musical, Moss Hart’s Act One and I Am Harvey Milk.

I was so impressed with his voice and especially his sturdy character and professionalism that when the CD project ended, I approached his parents with the idea of doing an album with Noah and capturing this amazing child’s sound and instrument for posterity before he grew up and his voice were to change from boy soprano to teenager.

All were excited about the idea of the project and so once the business of contracts and schedule were taken care of, I got to work writing and finding songs for Noah to record.

In the meantime he was hired to perform a role in the Goodspeed Opera’s musical, LMNOP. I was fine with this because I needed to write and make some difficult decisions as to just what kind of CD we wanted to produce. Was it to be a Broadway album of songs or a pop album or something in between?

Both Noah and I decided on something in between.

Though absolutely the right idea, this turned out to be the hardest choice for me because that opens the field to just about anything and that’s not always a good thing when it comes to creating. I prefer specificity and that means narrowing down the field, not opening it up.

But as I got to know Noah better over the coming months, various subjects arose as we talked that seemed to be reflections of this brilliant child’s mind. Though most of his schooling was tutoring on the road and not at all normal, he was a straight A student whose interests were not always the typical interests of a 12-year old boy. For one, he was deeply interested in quantum physics. In our very first meeting we had found that we both had a mutual hero in Albert Einstein.

His experience doing LMNOP at Goodspeed and a ridiculous performance schedule of sometimes 12 shows a week left him exhausted and voice tired at a time when I really wanted to get going and begin recording. The pressure of getting this voice recorded before it began to change grew stronger month after month as I waited for the voice that I had anticipated to come back. Then when he finally got over his voice fatigue, he went through a series of colds that again played havoc with this most special instrument.

Then he turned 13. Over a year had gone by.

“Yikes,” thought I. What if all of my orchestrations had been created in the wrong key? Over a year of work down the drain …

But then the summer started and the sun came out and the weather warmed the land. Noah had grown six inches and begun to fill out. His speaking voice had begun to lower. The change was inevitable.

But finally he was able to sing like the Noah that I had signed about a year and a half ago. We created a killer recording schedule that took us through last summer and, though the work was grueling and oftimes taxing for both Noah and his family, the vocal sessions were completed by the beginning of September 2015. The soprano voice that I had written for had survived the summer. The album had been completed in time.

I breathed a sigh of relief as I began the mixes. We’re releasing it in early November. Stay tuned and I’ll take you through the journey of Noah Marloe’s Inventions Of The Mind on a more insightful level. There are some funny and fascinating stories regarding the making of this most special CD.