About

Novel Romance is an international music project featuring original songs written by Brent Malnack. Based in Omaha, Brent collaborates with drummer Tom Cannon locally, while vocalist Lucy R. and keyboardist Andrés Blanco contribute remotely from Argentina.

The group occasionally features additional musicians from around the world, and has also recorded a number of cover songs — many of them paying homage to The Beatles.

Novel Romance is mixed and produced by Mars Booth, Brent’s wife and long-time creative partner. The two met in the 1980s while performing with The Modern Day Scenics, where Mars served as lead vocalist. The band released several records during that decade.

Outside of music, Brent is a veteran software developer and is currently creating an original puzzle game titled Sum 15.

Song Stories

🎵 Tell Me

This is the first song that I worked with Lucy R. on. It was an interesting back and forth to get the melodies figured out. I had sent her the melody for the verse and a bit of the chorus and she took it from there. It was clear that she had a knack for writing catchy melodies and would take over that duty going forward.

This was also the first time we worked with Andres Blanco (keyboards) and he provided the energy to the track through some tasty B3. Like Lucy, Andres is also located in Argentina. Tom Cannon provided the drums in our home studio and I performed bass and guitar. As always, Mars put together a fantastic mix.

The lyrics came about in an interesting way... I'll have to expand on this at a later time.

The song made the Long List in the Talent is Timeless song contest making the top 150 out of over 3,500 submitted songs.

While I love the work we have done since this song, our process has evolved and gotten much better. There is something special about this song for all of us involved.

🎵 White Lies

This is our latest release. I had been playing around with the chorus progression for some time on guitar. It had a smooth jazz rock vibe that I thought would push the band in a new direction. In addition to finally constructing a complimentary verse pattern, I thought it would be nice to have a dramatic intro. As we were a lot of songs into this project already, each time out I wanted to mix it up a bit so we didn't always follow the same pattern.

Then came the lyrics... by this time I had written several love songs in keeping with a romantic theme for the band. I felt like I'd hit the wall and decided to look at some of my favorite songs for inspiration. Black Cow by Steely Dan was always a favorite of mine and I picked up a bit of film noir vibe. There are many sources on the web that try to explain Steely Dan lyrics, so I took the time to read as many as possible. The result was a theme of what happened after Black Cow. Steely Dan fans can be a serious bunch. When I posted a link to our lyric video release, someone was quick to chime in that it wasn't even close.

While I laid down some basic guitar and bass. I sent my demo track (built to drum loops) to Andres Blanco and he returned a version with all of his keyboard parts. I soon realized that having a more sophisticated bass line would be beneficial, I reached out to a friend of Andres in Argentina named Marco Toba to play bass. With the new version in hand I had Tom Cannon over to our studio to lay down the drums. This track was really starting to shine! It was missing a jazz flavored guitar track to push it over the top. I contacted Salvo Di Piazza in Italy and he just killed it. Now it was in Lucy's hands. She put together some incredible vocals that in some ways are my favorite work she has done for us. I had sent her Black Cow as a reference and I do pick up some Steely Dan inspired phrasings throughout.

This song ended up having a fair amount of tracks and was going to be a complex mix, which Mars did an outstanding job on.

🎵 A Letter from Katy

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