For a decade, Kim Rich and Dick Thompson have been completing several songs each year. The songs have been sung by a wide variety of performers, and have been quite popular with both singer and audience. They see Art Song Innovations as their opportunity to hopefully reach a larger audience. They feel that their collections are a valuable addition to the contemporary song repertoire, and deserve to be heard. The songs that they write are entirely original and different than the average run of contemporary art song. They defy easy categories, being neither classical nor jazz nor cabaret, but having elements of all three.

Despite living in separate states (New Jersey, New York, and—on occasion—Reality), the collaboration between Dick Thompson and Kim Rich has resulted in songs and choral pieces that cover a wide range of subjects. Songs of love and loss. Songs of heroes and heroines. Mezzo blues and other hues. And then there’s the song about the Werewolf Waitress...

Where, you may ask, does Ms. Rich get her ideas? Just in case you did, the answer is: (a) out of the blue, (b) out of thin air, (c) out of her hat, and (d) from a lifetime of wandering, wool­gathering, and unregenerate daydreaming. A graduate of Westminster Choir College and a founding member of the Florilegium Chamber Choir in Manhattan, Kim Rich has spent far too many (and yet never enough) years celebrating the magical combination of words and music, of sound and sense, of alliteration and onomatopoeia... (Oops. Poetry again — Quick, Dick! Let’s set it to music!)