Shawn Michalek, Feels so ok (2004)

feels so ok began as a collaboration with my friend and fellow composer Cayenna Ponchione. A few weeks into the project it was decided (amicably) that I should finish the project alone, having already strayed far from our original plan. I put the score aside for a while and didn’t get back to it until mid-May. At the time, I had just begun some preliminary research on Steven Mackey’s percussion writing and had become fascinated with two works in particular, his arrangement of Chuck Mangione’s Feels So Good, and his original Feels So Baaad. As I saw it, Steve’s Feels So Baaad was the perfect alter ego to the “rosy-cheeked” persona of Feels So Good; FSG was off picking daisies by day, while FSB was leather-clad in a dark alley by night. Meanwhile, back in my own score, I couldn’t help but notice a few striking similarities to both FSG and FSB. One section in particular was so similar that a friend mistakenly thought that it was FSB. I began to wonder if my destiny as a composer included trying to reconcile these two opposing worlds. In fact, I didn’t reconcile anything. I let the piece wander into both worlds in equal measure and sometimes into both at the same time. Instead of creating a perfect synthesis, I created Frankenstein: part Mackey, part Mangione, part Michalek. In the end, feels so ok may be a plausible addition to the Feels so… family but probably just a distant cousin.