Listen to my music on most streaming services, including Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube.

I have released seven albums and two singles on Rain City Records (an independent label that I set up in the 1990s). Use the gallery below to navigate to my YouTube channel and sample my albums and singles.

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About My Music

I write songs in many different genres: blues, folk, rock, humor, acoustic singer/songwriter, and inspirational pop. Some of my songs have a message related to my work in sustainability and systems thinking. But most are just drawn from life.

My songs have been used in schools, television, film, and large conferences. See the “Short Musical Autobiography” below for the story of my musical side-career.

My most-streamed song is a dance-pop tune written for the United Nations, to celebrate the achievement of the global agreement on 17 Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. “We Love the SDGs” has been streamed more than 100,000 times (a lot for me!) and was featured in both UN and EU conferences.

My second most-streamed song is an educational and humor song about the biology of lichens, called “The Strangely Popular Lichen Song.” Written in the mid-1990s, the song did prove to be strangely popular, and it is still used in schools and environmental training courses. (The biology needs a small update. The song is still accurate, but it turns out that lichens are even more complicated than we knew.) You can listen to that song here, on my album “Whole Lotta Shoppin’ Goin’ On”:

One of my personal favorites, written as a gift to my wife on her 40th birthday, is “Midsummer Island,” an atmospheric slice-of-life from Sweden featuring the refrain, “I am surrounded by beauty.” My friend and producer Andreas Bauman has re-mixed this in 14-channel Atmos, but you can listen to the normal stereo version here.

A Short Musical Autobiography

Music has always been part of my life. My parents were professional musicians (among many other things). I grew up singing in the church choir, directed by my mother, who also played the organ. I was sent off to piano lessons, and in high school I competed in talent shows and sang in bands.

At Tulane University in New Orleans in the late 1970s, I performed and toured with the university’s musical group, “The Tulanians”. I also learned to play the guitar and began writing songs. Occasionally I substituted for the lead singer in a local show band called “Jubilation”, and that is where I earned my first paycheck as a musician, performing at conferences and dinners in the fabled Crescent City.

Later, when I was studying philosophy at Oxford University, England, in 1979-80, I learned how to be a real working musician. Two nights a week, I performed at a local pub called “The Monk’s Retreat,” playing guitar and singing covers, doing requests. I needed the extra income to pay for my room and board at my College.

In my 20s, in New York City, I decided to give music and songwriting a real go. I played in both rock bands and folk clubs, all over the city, and I also performed at weddings, hospitals, care facilities — anywhere I could get a gig.

But then the breakthrough came, and I was offered a contract to shoot for the “big time.” I imagined what actual success might mean, and I realized that music was not the career I really wanted. In a classic move, I cut my hair and got a “real job” as the administrator of a small non-profit organisation.

Some years later, I was working as a magazine editor in Seattle, and I found myself writing songs again to deal with the emotions that came up when grappling with global problems like climate change. “Dead Planet Blues” was my first local-radio “hit”, played by college stations in the US Pacific Northwest. That got me started again with songwriting, as a side-line to my career in sustainability.

People kept asking for more songs, and as a keynote speaker at conferences, beginning in the early 1990s, I started adding music to my presentations. For many years, I performed these songs all over the world. You can see an example at the end of my TED talk from 2015, “How to be a more effective agent of change.” Scroll to the end to hear “The Parachuting Cats”.

Along the way I put out albums on the small record label I created (to avoid dealing with the music business). In 2016 and 2017, I put a collection of my songs together into a 75-minute, one-man theatrical show, linking them together with storytelling and PowerPoint slides. I called it “Sustainability! The Musical”, and I performed the show at universities and conferences in Canada, the US, Sweden and Denmark.

In 2018, I entered government as a Department Director in the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (known as Sida), later moving to a CEO role in an international and intergovernmental agency. For obvious reasons, working in government created a pause in my musical career.

Since retiring from public service in 2025, with a new focus on books and writing, I have also reactivated my musical side. New songs, written and shelved over the past ten years, are getting recorded, and a new album is in production (release date not set).

I love music. I am so grateful for all the gifts that it brings, for the connections that music can make between people, between facts and feelings, between ourselves and the world. For me, not making music is just not an option. There is a line in one of my new songs — written as a dialogue between me and death — that puts it succinctly: “I will go down singing.”

Please check out my music. Let me know what you think. And feel.

— Alan