Galen Badeaux was a singer-song writer - multi-instrumentalist whose own interests and influences were widely varied enough to include The Alan Parsons Project, The Beatles, The Moody Blues, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, ELO, The Beach Boys, Yes...consequently his own original music can be difficult to categorize: sometimes it's Pop, sometimes it's Classical-Rock, sometimes it's Folk-Rock, or Art-Rock.
Galen died of Cancer on November 18, 2002 at the age of 37.
Brad Goins, Editor of LAGNIAPPE MAGAZINE wrote: Close your eyes and dream. When Port Arthur songwriter, musician and singer Galen Badeaux succumbed to cancer in 2002, he left behind numerous recorded original songs. Some have been collected in the UNFINISHED SYMPHONIES CD..
UNFINISHED SYMPHONIES has 13 cuts making use of a wide variety of popular 1960s and 1970s styles. What seems most prevalent to me is a kind of 70s sound in which folksy rock ballads were complemented by string and synthesizer back-up...a sound I associate with Dan Fogelberg or Seals and Crofts. There are a number of distinctive Tex-Mex guitar flourishes and solos, the most moving figuring in the slow and soulful end of THE WAY. There's some high-energy, upbeat 60s pop a la Beach Boys or Rascals. And SOULSINGER is delightfully reminiscent of the rich, exotic mid-60's sound created when West Coast pop was making the transition to psychedelia. .
While Badeaux's songs are definitely about the guy who never gets the girl, they're likewise about the guy who chooses to contemplate his loss, rather than give in to the cheap satisfaction of whining about it. The singer steadfastly refuses to conform to the pointless and ultimately useless conventions of consumerist adulthood and insists on holding on to what's best in childhood. To do so may be less fearsome a prospect than direct confrontation of the situations that make the adult world so stressful and frantic these days. But taking the nonconformist stands the singer takes does require a subtle kind of courage, and his experience thus provides the perfect subject matter for this subtle, upbeat and always gentle music.
