The Bardic Depths offers an interesting combination of genres.  At its core, the band plays a progressive rock that revels in subtlety, as even the heavier riffs are gentle and easy on the ears.  However, you will find that some of the tracks are akin to progressive electronic/ambient, so not “rock” at all.  Even further, and as the album progresses, you will find a huge portion of jazz fusion in the mix, so be ready for quite a lot of saxophone and bassy grooves.  Somehow, the band puts this all together and makes it work well.
— Read on theprogmind.com/2020/03/13/the-bardic-depths-the-bardic-depths/

This was, to be sure, a more innocent time. And, to be certain, there was even a time in my high school years—a less jaded time—in which I assumed most Americans were raised in the same manner and believed as I did. President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II were normal leaders of the West, not extraordinary ones. Many of my teachers—clearly the children of the New Left and the 1960s—revealed to me a blatant hypocrisy.  While they shouted for love, they behaved as would-be tyrants, hypocrites . . . not all . . . but many.

Somehow, and in a myriad of disturbing ways, my delusions and illusions and wishes and hopes and dreams and subjective realities collapsed over the years. Not that I lost faith in liberty, but I’ve certainly lost faith that others kept the faith, if they ever actually had it.

The evidence is more than clear. Communism, socialism, and progressivism have each made huge comebacks, re-entering political discourse blatantly and, just as importantly, very quietly, over the past decades. Even the very words “socialism,” “communism,” and, especially, “progressivism,” have reacquired respect and a semblance of dignity in many circles of public thought and discourse.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/03/revival-socialism-bradley-birzer.html

The Bardic Depths | The Bardic Depths
— Read on thebardicdepths.bandcamp.com/releases

The download is now available for preorder.

SDE: What is it, do you think, about the album, that resonates so much with people? Is it just the fact that it’s got massive hit singles on it, or is it something more than that?

RO: I think… I mean, at the time it felt completely disjointed, that we were clutching at straws regarding available songs. We started off with two or three songs and bits of b-sides and within one month I came up with ‘Shout’, ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’, and ‘I Believe’. And I think it was when we did ‘Shout’ that we really moved to a completely different gear.

The secrets are in the arrangement and production, because it really is superb
One of the reasons it was called ‘Songs from the Big Chair’, I probably told you this a million times, is that it felt disparate; it wasn’t like The Hurting which was almost like a life work for us. Albeit we were teenagers. Hence the title ‘Songs’ because it just seemed to me like eight separate songs, and even the track ‘Listen’ was an Ian Stanley [keyboard player] demo and made while we were recording The Hurting. But I don’t know why… I think it was possibly the fact that we’d done our initial first demo’s in Ian’s house in Bath. And then he won a little bit of money from the publishing, we built the studio there in a bigger room, in his house. And I think it was almost like coming back to the West Country and even [producer] Chris Hughes had links to Bath, because his mum lived there. So, I think getting out of the huge studios and into this real intimate [setting], the birthplace of Tears for Fears almost, which was Ian Stanley’s house. I think that created this, you know, more of a calm but hot-housed environment. Plus, this massive input of new technology, like the Fairlight, the Synclavier and the Drumulator. We had all these cutting-edge sounds to play with and I think that the secrets are in the arrangement and production, because it really is superb.
— Read on www.superdeluxeedition.com/interview/tears-for-fears-roland-orzabal-in-the-big-chair-the-sde-interview/

BACKGROUND MAGAZINE – Critical and honest magazine for progressive rock and closely related music.
— Read on www.backgroundmagazine.nl/Specials/InterviewTheBardicDepths.html

In the past you made also albums with Salander and Birzer Bandana. Can you give us an inside how this got together? 
I recorded the Salander albums with my friend Dave Curnow as a fun project. They were recorded in my home studio and mixed to a very basic level by me so we released them to BandCamp as pay as you like or pay nothing at all. When I moved out here, I continued writing so asked my professor friend and prog enthusiast Brad Birzer if he would write some lyrics for me. Two albums were made under the Birzer Bandana name. Again, recorded at home and mixed to a certain level but nowhere near professional quality although there are some good ideas there. I am thinking about trying to remix them.

BACKGROUND MAGAZINE – Critical and honest magazine for progressive rock and closely related music.
— Read on www.backgroundmagazine.nl/Specials/InterviewTheBardicDepths.html

In the past you made also albums with Salander and Birzer Bandana. Can you give us an inside how this got together? 
I recorded the Salander albums with my friend Dave Curnow as a fun project. They were recorded in my home studio and mixed to a very basic level by me so we released them to BandCamp as pay as you like or pay nothing at all. When I moved out here, I continued writing so asked my professor friend and prog enthusiast Brad Birzer if he would write some lyrics for me. Two albums were made under the Birzer Bandana name. Again, recorded at home and mixed to a certain level but nowhere near professional quality although there are some good ideas there. I am thinking about trying to remix them.

We will return to this point shortly. Brad Birzer’s Beyond Tenebrae is subtitled Christian Humanism in the Twilight of the West, which lets the reader in on the main thrust of the work. As Russell Amos Kirk Professor of History at Hillsdale College, Dr. Birzer’s breadth of knowledge is more than equal to the task. Much of the book reads like a sophomore survey course, with Dr. Birzer taking the reader on a tour of people who express what he is trying to convey. He covers a lot of terrain in this survey, including characters expectable and unusual. There are scholars (Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin) and artists (Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, Ray Bradbury); social critics (Russell Kirk, Alexander Solzhenitsyn), and politicians (Ronald Regan, Edmund Burke); the prominent (J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis), and the obscure (Dr. Birzer’s own grandparents, as well as one of his Notre Dame instructors). All are chosen because each exemplifies some aspect or principle of the true humanism that Dr. Birzer is trying to convey. The examples are woven into a tapestry to illustrate his points—indeed, if the book has a weakness, it is that the weaving is at points not as smooth as it could be. But even that serves to illuminate the point that comprehending humans as human means surrendering the wish for everything to work out as smoothly as a mathematical formula or well-designed computer algorithm.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/03/beyond-tenebrae-brad-birzer-roger-thomas.html

[N.B.  This is a talk I wrote to deliver August 20, 2014, in the Sewall Academic Residential Program, UC-Boulder, but decided to give spontaneously at the last moment.  A version of it appeared at The Imaginative Conservative]

To begin, I want to offer the most profound thanks possible to several people: Martha Shernick, Ann Carlos, Doug Bamforth, and Steve Leigh.  Also Kim Bowman and Clint Talbott and Christian Kopff.  I’m a bit overwhelmed by the generosity and the kindness of everyone.  I must state—and I hope this sounds as humble as I mean it to be—it’s wonderful to be wanted.  Really, truly wonderful.  So, thank you.

As to the now, I’ve been asked to speak just a bit about my position as the second holder of the titles Scholar in Residence and Visiting Scholar of Conservative Thought and Policy.

[Yes, try to say this five times in a row]

Two weeks ago, my college roommate and still one of my closest friends, asked me what it felt like to be entering a place with CONSERVATIVE tattooed on my forehead.  

He knows me well, and he also knows that from our first conversations in the fall of 1986 (our first semester in college) I despise labels.  I always have, and I probably always will.  And, Kevin (my friend) agrees with me.  

Almost all labels, even well intended ones, tend to allow us to categorize one another, to consider one aspect of an extremely (incomprehensibly) complex person as the sum total of that person, or, when not well intended, to dismiss another—more often than not in history because of the accidents of birth.   

Regardless of intent, labels almost always diminish rather than elevate.

But, here I am in front of you, bearing the mark of “Conservative” in one of my two CU bestowed titles.  Perhaps it’s emblazoned in neon or mere ink.  I’m not sure.

And, I do bear the title proudly.  And, why not?  I have a great job, I’m surrounded by amazing people endowed with seemingly limitless amounts of energy (Martha, Ann, and Kim, in particular, seem like forces of nature; and I’m hoping to write a Celtic ode to them before the end of the academic year), and I’m speaking in what is arguably one of the prettiest spots in all of North America, if not in the world.  

But, what about that label, “conservative”?  Well, let me explain—as I see it—what a conservative is NOT.

A real conservative is not a loud, platinized, remade and plastically remolded talking head on Fox.

A real conservative is not that guy on the radio who seems to hate everything and everyone.

A real conservative is not the head of the Westboro Baptist Church.

And, a real conservative never wants to bomb another people “back to the stone age.”

My own tradition of conservatism—whether I live up to it or do it justice—is one that is, for all intents and purposes, humanist.

Indeed, I believe there is a line of continuity from Heraclitus to Socrates to Zeno to Cicero to Virgil to St. John to St. Augustine to the Venerable Bede, Alcuin, and the Beowulf poet, to Thomas Aquinas to Petrach to Thomas More to Edmund Burke.

The last one hundred years saw a fierce and mighty revival of the humanist tradition, embracing and unifying (more or less) T.E. Hulme, Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, Willa Cather, G.K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, Sigrid Unset, Nicholas Berdayeev, Sister Madeleva Wolff, T.S. Eliot, Romano Guardini, Dorothy Day, Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Leo Strauss, Flannery O’Connor, and Russell Kirk, to name a few.

George Orwell, both shocked and impressed by the movement, noted in December 1943 that it was nothing more than neo-reactionary: a strange mix of traditionalism in poetry and literature, religious orthodoxy in ethics, and anarchy in politics and economics.

I must admit, though I’ve never called myself a neo-reactionary, almost all of those who Orwell reluctantly admired are certainly heroes of mine.

But as I see it, the conservative or humanist—or, the conservative humanist, if you will, only possesses one job and one duty, when all is said and done, and she or he performs it to the best of her or his ability: a conservative attempts to conserve what is most humane in all spheres of life: in economics, in education, in the military, in the culture, in faith, in business, in government, and in community.   The conservative is, at the most fundamental level, a humanist, reminding each and every one of us what it means to be human.

And, empirically, we can state that the record of humanity over the last 100 years (considering this is the 100^th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I is a fitting time to announcing the beginning of our own “time of troubles” as Kirk liked to argue) is rather mixed.

Think of several persons over the past one hundred years:

Perhaps you are a Japanese American watching the California business and home of your parents auctioned off as you and your family are forcibly removed to the deserts of Idaho, under the sanction of Executive Order 9066 from the U.S. President.

Or, perhaps you’re in the second row of Carnegie Hall, listening to Miles Davis perform “Teo” in 1961.

Or, perhaps you are a nurse on the early morning shift at the Shima Medical Facility on August 6, 1945.  Little do you know that at any moment the wind will increase to 600mph and the heat to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit—all stamped with “Made in America” across them.

Or, could you are lounging on the couch in pure leisure with a wealthy Tennessee couple, as a young handicapped Georgian reads her latest story, “The Misfit.”

Or, perhaps you might be overwhelmed by the smell of bodies, alive, dead, and somewhere in-between, as a railway car carries you to a supposed “health resort” in semi-rural Poland.

Or, perhaps, you’re sitting next to a young man from St. Louis in an Irving Babbitt seminar at Harvard, the young man—you, like everybody else, calls him “Old Tom”—is joking about poems about cooking eggs, hippos, and waste lands.

Or, perhaps, you’re holding hands with hundreds of others, signing a hymn after Sunday service, facing very angry looking armed men with water cannons and attack dogs, hungering to “put you in your place.”

Perhaps, you’ve just escaped from the hell that is Pol Pot’s Cambodia, made it to America to resume not only a medical practice but even begin an acting career.  Perhaps you’ve even won the Academy Award for Best Actor, 1985, only to be gunned down on the driveway in an LA gang slaying.

Perhaps you are holding your breath as the third movement ends and you anticipate the fourth as a five-hundred person choir in Bloomington, Indiana, along with a full orchestra pays homage to an early nineteenth century German composer.

Or, maybe it’s not all that dramatic, at least in terms of world changing events.  Perhaps you’ve simply come home to the happy exclamations of children, rushing to you to tell you of the day and assume—quite rightly—that you will hug them with all the love that is in you.

This is humanity.  This is the human condition.  The tragic, the noble, the accidental, the willful, the good, the evil, the true, the false, the ugly, and the beautiful.

Each one of us in this room, each one of us at this university, each one of us in existence is unique in time and space, clothed with particular ethnicities, languages, religious faiths, and a million other things.  

Yet, however different, each person is connected to every other person, from the beginning of time to the very end.

This continuity, this universal quality of human existence, is a blessing, pure and simple.  When we speak, we speak not just to our neighbor, but to Socrates, and he to us.  When we speak, we speak to our children and our grand children and their grandchildren.  What Perpetua did in the Roman area or Thomas More in the Courts of Henry VIII do not become trapped only in that time and place, but resonate across, through, over, below, and next to the ages.

In a spirit of overwhelming gratitude, the humanist looks out upon the world, sighs in frustration at the horrors of the past, and cautiously anticipates what good can come next.

In our first duty—the duty to be human, we must be humane.  We must love, and we must cherish.  We must, when warranted, give thanks.  We must celebrate creativity and peace.

Today, in this room, with this audience, and in this time and place, I thank you.