Paul Lesinski, Spring 2026
It’s not an understatement to say that music saved my life in high school. I went from being a lost, overwhelmed, socially inept freshman to a relatively confident, happy graduate with lifelong friends and a vision for what I wanted to do with the rest of my life and who I wanted to do it with. Namely, I wanted to “make it” in music and the high school level success I and my friends Tom Gutierrez (bass, vocals) and Kevin Brown (drums) in our band Osiris (remember: high school) had experienced was enough of a taste of the possibilities. Note that Van Halen started in high school playing the same kind of teenaged parties we played. The Beatles knew each other in their early teens. Were we Van Halen or The Beatles? No. But if others could chase their musical dreams with their childhood friends, why couldn’t I?
Well, one main reason was that the others had to be willing to also chase that dream. Tom and Kevin were my “chosen two” but for some reason they had some kind of affinity for financial security, permanent addresses and steady sustenance. So I had to find other guys to eat corn chip sandwiches in the back of the van with, and that was my 90s band The Strangers, after I graduated college in 1990.
Still, I could not set aside the magic that happened when me, Tom and Kevin played so we got together as much as we could while pursuing our respective college degrees. We would jam during Christmas and Spring breaks when our calendars aligned, to crank out old Osiris tunes, our favorite hard and prog rock covers, and yes, even to write music.
In fact in 1988 and 1989 we wrote a six-song mini-opera called The Dream of Kings. I hear all of our musical influences in this thing: Rush, Yes, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, but with our own unique spin given we’d played together almost four years by this time. Conceptually, the suite was post-apocalypse. World War Three has come down like a hammer – remember the 80s was peak “cold war” between the U.S. and Soviets with both sides having nukes armed and ready. Well, WW3 comes down, predictably (to us) with minimal survivors who still believe they were right, when something happens (I am not giving it away – listen to the music) that draws everyone back together. Or does it? You can come to your own conclusions.
We called the band “Dark’s Ensemble.” Like a Sgt Pepper who was into the occult.
Due to college commitments, playing live was not really a thing for Dark’s Ensemble (although we did at least one gig, at the Village Pub at Santa Clara University). But then something happened that in retrospect was incredibly special and leads us to why I am even writing this today, in 2026.
Tom had a pal named Brett who was in the music program at San Jose State. Brett had access to a 16-track recording studio on campus and a need for a musical project to record for his major. Tom volunteered Dark’s Ensemble and dates and details were arranged. Now, did Tom inform Brett that we’d be arriving with the intention of recording a 25-minute 6-song rock opera? No. No, he did not. With Brett probably thinking “three-song-demo,” we rolled in with a six-song album-side length rock opera. Poor kid.
Needless to say, trying to crack out a 25 minute rock opera – including getting a decent mix – was challenging in the short period of time that we had at San Jose State. We walked out with a very rough mix on a cassette and of course the 16 track reel to reel tape which sat in Tom’s parents’ garage in San Jose for literally decades until I asked him “Hey, whatever happened to that tape?” He found it and mailed it to me in 2005 and I had the tracks converted to digital which required a company to bake the tape in an oven in order to adhere the outer surface to the tape then enabling the same company to play the tape once or twice to get the tracks off digitally.
I was very excited at the prospect of giving The Dream of Kings a proper mix, but sadly in the mid 2000’s I found most of it unusable due to a persistent “warble” across the recording with the exception of the bass and drums. I also was not in any way shape or form technologically or professionally savvy enough to know how to fix any of this. So, the digital tracks sat in their digital purgatory on various hard drives for the next 20 years. I would open them every few years with the intention of doing something with them and quickly close the files thinking a variation of, “Aw man I can’t use these,” and “I don’t have time to figure this out.”
Fast forward to early 2025. I had recorded and released four CDs in the previous ten years, recorded in home studios with friends using a digital audio workstation (DAW) called Digital Performer. Throughout, I was getting better at working with digital files, although skills like adjusting audio frequencies (bass, midrange, treble) with precision to separate instruments in a mix and compensate for possible subpar recordings was still ever so slightly out of reach.
However on a long drive I started to listen to YouTubes posted by a guy named Rick Beato, who came to fame in audio and musical circles for doing tutorials on just the skill gaps I needed filled. I thought to myself, you know what would be a great experiment to see if I could apply some of this new information? Those Dream of Kings tracks.
Opening the tracks back up and doing some very paint by the numbers audio tweaking, things started sounding better! Especially the drums. The aforementioned warble of some of the instruments remained unfixable – at least to my weak skill set – but with a solid foundation of drums and Tom’s bass, which also sounded very usable, I became inspired to keep going.
It was a 35-year-old project just waiting to happen.
I called Tom and enthusiastically informed him I thought I might be able to resurrect The Dream of Kings but we’d need to re-do some of the original parts due the “warble.” This included re-doing all of the vocals, which to be fair were not great, as Tom and I sing better today than we sang in 1989. Sorry, not sorry.
However, we agreed then and there to NOT succumb to the temptation of re-writing any of The Dream of Kings, especially lyrically. We wanted to deliver this thing as if we’d mixed it properly in 1989. We stuck to this ethos about 90 percent of the time but did add a couple of musical parts and re-wrote a line or two, either to eliminate what would be an ‘eternal cringe’ or chase a musical idea that might have been too good to set aside.
The end result is: all of the original drums and bass, with many but not all of the other instruments either doubled or replaced. This was particularly challenging in one section as the tape misbehaved to the degree that an entire song pulls every so slightly out of tune, to the point that when laying down guitars in 2025 I had to tune to the tape (not a guitar tuner) in some cases only recording about 30 seconds until having to tune every so slightly again to match the warbling tape. It worked but it was a PITA.
I used as much original recording as I could. The “jazz trio” drums/bass/keyboard solo section in Capitol Hill is exactly as recorded, as try as I might, I could not get a 2025 guitar to align with the intonation. Probably better that way.
Vocally, Tom brought in some amazing ideas for how to re-do some of the narrated sections, including delivering a very “Morgan Freeman” style voiceover backed by what he called the “hobo choir” in the background. For me, when singing these songs in 2025, lyrics like “No, wake me up, I can’t believe, it’s a dream” remain sadly poignant if not more so 35 years after the ‘end’ of the cold war.
Sharing early mixes with Kevin and Tom was so much fun as they were as excited as I was to hear this thing start to sound really good. We enthusiastically continued to chip away until it was in our minds, ready for you.
I am so grateful to have been able to bring this to life. This is PEAK Kevin Brown on drums and the world needs to hear it. This is PEAK Tom/Paul collaboration and I am proud to share it. And, unfortunately anyone who doesn’t know the 35-year back story just might think this was written with today’s happenings in mind. It wasn’t, but I am glad to get it out while it might resonate.
So set aside 25 minutes, put on some headphones, turn up the volume and enjoy this thing end-to-end. It’s time…