press releases - Lemming Shepherds, Lost European

by Kim Kabar, Staff Writer

       Through their music and their words, Roy Lund’s and Rick Costello’s message is clear: Individualism is key to finding success. It is a lesson the South Bay residents hope to teach children through their new CD-ROM digital storybook, “The Lemming Shepherds,” available through the duo’s music company, Exzel Music in Lomita.
       Geared toward children ages 10 and up, “The Lemming Shepherds” is a colorful tale about two Norwegian rodents named Arthur and Jewel. The lemmings refuse to yield to peer pressure as they desperately search for answers about themselves and the deadly migration ritual members of their colony perform every seven years.
      “This is a story about friendship and overcoming incredible odds,” said Lund, 46, who has been a singer since 13 and co-wrote the music for the 40-page book’s accompany soundtrack, “Symphony for the Census.”
       Similar to their real-life rodent counterparts, Arthur and Jewel are unusual creatures because of an odd ritual performed during their tribes’ periodic migrations. Possibly to decrease their population, every several years lemmings follow each other en masse off the edge of a steep, rocky cliff -- plummeting to their deaths into the sea below. Albeit a grim subject for a children’s book, Costello, who co-wrote the book with friend K.K. Roberts, a freelance writer in Northern California, said the tale is actually one of hope and survival.
       “We hope children will learn that they don’t need to succumb to peer pressure,” said 41-year-old Costello of Torrance, who has been playing guitar for 30 years. He now lives in Phoenix.
        In the book, Arthur and Jewel are confused and disturbed by the seemingly irrational behavior of their lemming colony. The pair sense that the colony’s erratic behavior is leading them toward a dismal fate. A twist of their own fates, though, takes Arthur and Jewel along a fast-paced journey of self-discovery as they frantically attempt to save their friends and themselves.
        Colorfully illustrated by Dave Shelton, a former cartoon editor at National Lampoon magazine, the digital storybook can be played in Macintosh and IBM-compatible computers. The CD-ROM allows readers to listen to the soundtrack, which features 19 songs including new age, jazz and alternative rock music, while they read the story and look at the illustrations. Currently available only through Exzel Music, the digital soundtrack is slated for mass release in the fall through a national mail-order catalog.
        Both aerospace engineers and accomplished musicians, Costello and Lund invested four years and more than $100,000 in the writing and production of their book and soundtrack. In many ways, the pairs’ struggles to complete “The Lemming Shepherds” were similar to the tribulations faced by Arthur and Jewel, Lund said.
       “We had to overcome many obstacles to realize our dream,” Lund said. “Everything we had, including our life savings, went into this project.”
       When they were not working contractual engineering jobs for various aerospace companies, including Northrop Grumman in Hawthorne, Lund and Costello were writing and arranging music, editing and revising the book and developing marketing strategies.
       About a year into the project, the pair had depleted their savings. They were forced to put the digital storybook on hold while they got their finances back on track.
      “I worked tons of overtime for one year,” Costello said. “I was literally living out of my suitcase, going from one engineering job to another.”
       But it was also during that year that Costello wrote more than half of the soundtracks’ songs.
       “I would come back to my hotel room and start writing,” Costello said.
Together with music producer Gary Strausbaugh, Costello and Lund completed the project in December 1996.
       “Just like Arthur and Jewel, we also learned a valuable lesson,” Lund said. “This project taught us to never give up -- the struggle is worth it.”

by Betty Webb Tribune Writer In the wake of the mass suicide of the “Higher Source” cult in California’s San Diego County, one Valley writer’s book takes on new meaning. The Lemming Shepherds, by Rick Costello of Mesa and K.K. Roberts, is a cautionary tale about a group of furry little animals who begin to band together whenever they hear a strange “call.” Unknown to them, that “call” is actually a drill – and the ultimate purpose of the drill is mass suicide. “Lemmings, a real species of rodent which live in Norway, are known to commit mass suicide every few years, and because of that, they’ve always fascinated me,” says Rick Costello, one of the founders of Exzel Music, a Mesa-based company which has just published The Lemming Shepherds with its matching enhanced CD.	“The lemmings in the book act just like the people who join cults and blindly follow ‘gurus’ like Jim Jones – who, by the way, used to conduct regular Kool-Aid drinking drills. By creating two lemming characters who refuse to follow the herd, I wanted to show that thinking for yourself is the best antidote to that kind of poison.” In Costello’s brightly-illustrated book, a young lemming named Arthur is disturbed by the antics of his glassy-eyed, conformist friends.

He fears that their follow-the-leader-at-any-cost philosophy might have serious consequences, so he and another lemming individualist, Jewel, decide to investigate the “call.” What the two discover horrifies them. “The lemmings are a metaphor for the human race,” Costello explains. “Whenever we stop thinking for ourselves, we start down a collision course with disaster. But people get involved with groups and peer pressure takes over. They lose all common sense. They begin to say and do stupid, destructive things they wouldn’t dream of doing if they were by themselves. “You can see this in the big cities when kids join gangs, and you can see this in the cults where some of the most intelligent people can do the dumbest things. So dumb that they can actually wind up killing themselves when some wacko leader tells them a cock and bull story.” The plot of The Lemming Shepherds is strong enough to stand alone, but Costello, who also records with a Mesa band named Lost European, tends to think musically as well as literally. As the idea of two young lemmings struggling against the mass suicide of their friends developed in his head, he began hearing music.	Thus, the idea of a book with its own soundtrack was born. Costello turned to Tempe’s Gary Strausbaugh, the producer who had helped so much with Lost European’s last project, The Job Shopper Album. Strausbaugh, who has produced Richie Havens, Paul Anka and others, was intrigued. “The book and the music developed together as we went along,” Strausbaugh says. “There was so much texture to the story that we were able to go a lot of different places in the music. The anti-cult, anti-suicide message naturally geared the material towards younger people, but we’ve got everything in there – rock, jazz, funk – even Irish jigs! The Lemming Shepherds turned out to be one of the most creative projects I’ve ever been involved with.” Although the book was begun a year before the “Higher Source” suicides, Costello is not surprised in the least by the book’s timeliness. “It sounds strange to have to say this, but we’ve reached the point where we have to start educating people how to think for themselves. Too many of us seem to have lost that skill.”
TO TOP