TK Books LLC

Nothing has stopped Chris Wall from making music during an eventful life dotted with supreme highs and devastating lows. Chris’s latest and most compelling music can be found under the name Recwall. It is guitar-driven, original rock music with a metal edge and dark overtones. The tunes stay with you, especially his cover of the Alanis Morrisette song Uninvited, a virtuoso performance which, like all his recent music, features Chris playing all the instruments and singing.

With a day job as an editor/director for CBS News, Chris splits work duties between home and the New York newsroom. The post-COVID reality of working from home has worked for him as it has for so many others. He creates all his music there.

“The only thing that gets a little rough is vocals,” he says. “My neighbors probably want to kill me. I have taken a little interface that I have into the car when I really want to balls-out sing.”

Looking back on almost becoming rock stars on the RCA record label, now 30 years ago, Chris admits he and his band weren’t ready for the big time.

“We were not ready for that life and I think that was pretty clear to the folks who were listening to us and judging us,” he recalls. “We made a really great sounding record and we could sometimes achieve that on stage, and sometimes we were just downright awful. A lot of disorganization, a lot of immaturity, guys who just weren’t ready to work.”

Like many artists, Chris has drawn inspiration from the dark times in his life. He’s experienced career disappointments, divorce, depression and addiction and, like Andy Dufresne in Shawshank, has come out clean on the other side.

“It’s been an amazing outlet. I get to make angry music for the times I’m really angry and sad music. It’s my therapy.”

Today, Chris is all about Recwall, his musical trademark covering a prolific output of new songs just in the past two years. While he has recruited new, human musicians for a band, Recwall music is all Chris, his guitar and his computer. Watch our chat and hear Chris’s music on Type. Tune. Tint. Video. below.

[buzzsprout episode=’12124840′ player=’true’]

At a time before the war in Ukraine, before the global pariah that is now Vladimir Putin, Russia was a place that Americans not only visited but freely did business with. The business of television was particularly lucrative for companies like Sony Pictures, which found audiences in Russia and other countries hungry for American entertainment. Enter Rob Feldman, a native Philadelphian, experienced news producer and amateur photographer.

“We pioneered this business of remaking American sitcoms overseas,” says Rob, who was Vice President of International Production for Sony Pictures International in the early 2000s. “With local actors and local writers, we would adapt the scripts to The Nanny, Married with Children, Who’s the Boss and Everybody Loves Raymond. We did this all over the world. It was extremely successful. We would try to adapt the scripts to the cultural sensitivities.”

It was Russia where Everybody Loves Raymond took off in popularity as The Voronins. During the filming of the show’s 455th episode (there were 552 over ten years), it was inducted into the Guinness Book of Records as the longest-adapted television show in the world.

In his downtime, Rob took photos, and lots of them. Never hassled by police or the KGB, he snapped photos of Russia’s iconic locations including the Kremlin, landmarks in and around Red Square and many Russian citizens who gladly gave their permission to be photographed. Their many faces created a sort of poetry that only a still camera in the hands of a talented photographer could capture.

Today, Rob roams the farmlands of Bucks County, a northern suburb of Philadelphia, and captures the land in all its glory and decay. He is attracted to old barns, broken-down tractors, signs painted onto old brick walls as well as the beauty of Lake Nockamixon and working farms.

“I just started driving around here and one farm was more beautiful than the next. There’s kind of a cornucopia of conservancies that buy up these lands and conserve them from future development and it really preserves the rural character of this area. That’s what I wanted to capture because quite frankly, I’d never seen it before. I lived in Philly for 37 years and had never even been to Doylestown.”

To hear more about Rob’s Russian adventures and photo proclivities, check out the Type. Tune. Tint. podcast episode below:

[buzzsprout episode=’12031006′ player=’true’]

I had the pleasure of interviewing more than a dozen fascinating people whose creativity emerged from uncommon places at various points in their lives. I think most, if not all of us, have art lurking in our souls that is buried, asleep or undiscovered. My podcast seeks out these folks to prove that a job title does not fully define us.

I highlight the top four downloaded stories in my final episode of 2022, but all 15 episodes reveal individuals who stepped out of the shadows of creativity and made art, music or a book that will last forever. What is YOUR hidden talent?

Enjoy this look at my greatest hits of 2022:

Oceanography wasn’t in the cards for Steve Gabe. He had an early interest in aquaculture and saving the whales, but music drowned that out. He sang and played drums as a child, always singing along with rock and blues favorites until he grew into rock bands, some of which he led. Then came travels as a musician, a record label, and dozens of recordings that he either performed or curated.

It turns out, a man has to make a living. He decided to become an entertainment lawyer, a profession he still practices today. And the music has been his companion and inspiration all along. Hear for yourself on his podcast, Live from the Vault.

Most recently, he’s seen his dream of becoming an actor start to take shape. He had roles in regional theater including a role as Daddy Murphy in Bright Star at the Summit Playhouse, a role that came to him almost by chance.

“With COVID, I thought I was finished,” Gabe recalls. “I was never going to act again, never going to do music again, sit home and try to be a lawyer, give up. And then I got the Zoom audition for Bright Star. They picked me. She had seen me in something in Chatham and she’s like, I want you for one of the two dads. So that’s how I got back in it again. Just because someone happened to see me in another place. Life is amazing.”

His successful stint in Bright Star led to more opportunities including his most recent, a big-budget industrial film in which he plays a belligerent, bitter man who is saved by a home health aide.

Steve Gabe’s many multi-faceted career is relaunching, again, this time on the movie screen. Listen to our conversation on the Type. Tune. Tint. podcast below: