For Your Consideration:
"Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album"
The Album
"Watercolor Sky" is the new age event of 2024. A intersection of great music and great performances.
"Watercolor Sky" features 2X Emmy® Award Winning composer and recording artist Michael Whalen along with five Grammy® Award winners: Mark Isham on trumpet and flugelhorn, Michael Manring on bass, Will Ackerman on guitar, Nancy Rumbel on English Horn and Oboe, and Charlie Bisharat on violin. Michael Whalen gave each of these amazing artists space to express their authentic musical “voice” on this project. Michael held down duties on piano, electronics and percussion. Whalen commented that "composing, recording and mixing this album was one of the best experiences of my career".
“Watercolor Sky" was inspired by the seasons Michael witnessed from his home on the island of Broad Channel located in the middle of Jamaica Bay, Queens. About 80% of the island is a Federal wildlife preserve—a gorgeous natural oasis located inside the five boroughs of New York City - one of the biggest cities on Earth. The contrasts are amazing.
Musical inspiration comes from Michael's lifelong love of the bands Oregon and Shadowfax along with Mark Isham’s early recordings and Michael Manring’s seminal Windham Hill album “Unusual Weather.” Along with Whalen's own work for Windham Hill in the 1990s, he did his best to capture the spirit and musical soul of “Windham Hill” in 2024 for this project...
The Artist
Two-time Emmy® award-winning composer and music supervisor, Michael Whalen, is a veteran of 900 TV and film scores, thousands of commercials and numerous TV themes, video games and corporate identity pieces. Literally billions of people have heard Michael's television/theme work for clients as diverse as: HBO, Netflix, Oprah Winfrey/Harpo, "Good Morning America",, BBC, NHK and Warner/Discovery. Advertisements for: Apple, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Reebok, Advil, Ford and thousands of others.
Michael is an internationally renown recording artist and producer who has 45 solo and soundtrack recordings to his credit. His song "I Have Loved you for a Thousand Lifetimes" has over 38 million streams on Spotify alone with more than a billion streams for his expansive catalog since 2015. He has recorded with Universal Music (Narada), Sony Entertainment (Windham Hill), Warner Music (Atlantic Records) and 9 other independent labels. Most recently, Michael has a distribution deal with Six Degrees Records (Virgin/UMG).
