About This Website
Showcased here are nearly 300 songs with words and music composed by Richard Faylor. All sounds and voices are his except for the female vocals provided by Starlyn Munson, a wonderful talent and dear friend with whom Richard has worked for the past 20 years.

Songs Grouped By Genre
The songs here are divided into 42 categories. Across the top of the Home Page are ten sliding images, each representing a different genre. Press the right and left arrow keys on your keyboard to move between them.

Songs Grouped by Subject Matter
Below the sliding images is a grid of 32 boxed images, each representing different subject matter, such as Love, Longing, Desire, Sex, Politics, etc.

How To Hear The Music
Click on any of the 42 images and you’ll be taken to a Playlist of songs. Once there, click on the Play Button to hear the song and adjust the volume if needed.

How To Read The Lyrics
To the right of the Play Button is a Lyrics Button. Click on it and a lyric sheet will pop up, allowing you to read along with the lyrics as the song plays.

Musical Theater
Although “Musical Theater” is just one of the 42 categories, all the songs here were written with the stage in mind. That’s why the lyrics are generally more lengthy than standard pop songs and why the volume of the vocals is a bit louder in the mix.

A Song Can Tell A Story
All these songs tell a story that hopefully will someday find its way to the stage. It is in the hope of connecting with that segment of the music industry (Broadway) that this website exists. If you happen to know someone able to help the cause, please feel free to contact me using the email address and phone number appearing on the Contact Page.

About Me
I grew up in small-town Idaho, attended college a world away in New York City, spent my 20’s traveling around the world and my 30’s in Japan before returning to America, first to Seattle, then to Boise, Idaho.

Even in childhood, I seemed to draw more wisdom, comfort, and inspiration from music than any other source. But it was only much later in life that I came upon what I like to think of as my calling: writing and recording music.

Music’s Role
Each of us, at any moment, is confronted by a variety of realities we choose to either face or run from. Of mine, I am most loyal to music because all others seem, by comparison, either insufficiently interesting or too powerfully corrupting.

It may be a lost cause, but I like to think that my efforts may yet help even the most modern person fall in love with an old art. I believe meaning and connection can be found anywhere, in any story, on any stage, in any heart.

For common understanding and shared experience, music remains, for me, the most likely and most powerful channel of communication.

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
—Nietzsche

“All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!”
—Thomas Carlyle

“Music is another planet.”
—Alphonse Daudet

“He who sings scares away his woes.”
—Cervantes

“There is a temple in heaven that is opened only through song.”
—Yehudi Menuhin

“Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.”
—Oscar Wilde

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour”
—William Blake

“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”
—Maya Angelou

“Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.”
—Robert Benchley

“Ninety percent of the people in the world end up with the wrong person. And that’s what makes the jukebox spin.”
—Willie Nelson

“I believe that there is something constant in us all, a sense of what is right, a sense of balance, of harmony with ourselves and the world in which we all must live. Yet we also need a sense of hope for something beyond ourselves, which helps to give our lives proportion and direction. Music lives and breathes to tell us just that: who we are and what we face.”
—Yehudi Menuhin

“Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.”
—Disraeli

“Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.”
—Thoreau

“Music is the medicine of the breaking heart.”
—Leigh Hunt

“Music is the shorthand of emotion.”
—Leo Tolstoy

“Music is what life sounds like.”
—Eric Olson

“He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once.”
—Robert Browning

“There is no truer truth obtainable by man than comes of music.”
—Robert Browning

“When words leave off, music begins.”
—Heinrich Heine

“Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.”
—Alphonse de Lamartine

“There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is.”
—William P. Merrill

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”
—Walter Pater

“The experience of writing music is like nothing else. You are completely protected from everything that hurts you. You own the world. You own yourself. You’re the boy in the bubble.”
—Richard Rogers

“Composers do not reveal their true hearts to the living. It is only through their music that they become known and understood, and if their music is a personal idiom, it takes a long time for interpreters to penetrate the very core of their meaning.”
—Yehudi Menuhin

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
—Aldous Huxley

“In the very beginning the first utterings of creation sounded in the language of waters, in the voice of the wind.”
—Rabindranath Tagore

All art aspires to the condition of music—the most transient and intangible of the arts.”
–Walter Pater

“The pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides!”
—Artur Schnabel

“To imply the missing note that is in between.”
—Thelonious Monk

“What is too silly to be said may be sung, but what is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing or too mysterious—these things can also be sung and only be sung.”
—Kenneth Clark

“Everything was natural sounds. Among these natural sounds were many that are lost forever. I will try to recall some of them. The resounding “boom” of midday. This was the sound of the cannon at the Kudan Ushi-ga-fuchi army barracks, which fired a blank each day precisely at noon. The fire alarm bell. The sound of the fire-watchman’s wooden clappers. The sound of his voice and the drumbeats when he informed the neighborhood of the location of a fire. The tofu seller’s bugle. The whistle of the tobacco-pipe repairman. The sound of the lock on the hard-candy vendor’s chest of drawers. The tinkle of the wind-chime seller’s drum. The fire-truck bell. The big drum for the lion dance. The monkey trainer’s drum. The drum for temple services. The freshwater-clam vendor. The natto fermented bean seller. The hot-red-pepper vendor. The goldfish vendor. The man who sold bamboo clothesline poles. The seedling vendor. The nighttime noodle vendor. The oden (dumplings and broth) vendor. The baked sweet potato vendor. The scissors grinder. The tinker. The morning glory seller. The fishmonger. The sardine vendor. The boiled bean seller. The insect vendor: ‘Magotaro bugs!’ The humming of kite strings. The click of battledore and shuttlecock. Songs you sing while bouncing a ball. Children’s songs.”
—Akira Kurasawa

“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
—Victor Hugo

“Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes

“You are the music while the music lasts.”
—T.S. Eliot