Vince DiCola - Other Works

Other Works

Other than his solo work, DiCola has worked with various musical groups.

In 1985, he worked with Weird Al Yankovic on Yankovic's homage to Devo, Dare to be Stupid.

In 1991-1992, he worked with the 5-piece rock band Storming Heaven in the mid 1990s releasing the 1996 album titled Life In Paradise. In addition to DiCola on keyboard, guitar and vocals, the Storming Heaven lineup included lead vocalist Rick Livingston, Jethro Tull drummer Doane Perry, guitarist Curtis Taylor, and keyboardist Casey Young. Life In Paradise was written during 1991.

The band was originally formed in January 1991. They spent the first half of the year creating the start of a musical suite entitled "Jessie's Journey", an idea that later was abandoned in favour of just individual songs. "It was supposed to be an entire album based on a kind of science fiction theme. Those first four songs ("Cross the Line", "Red Knight", "The Passage" & "Dream House") they're sort of like the opening four songs of a suite."

Around the same time in 1996, DiCola, Storming Heaven bandmate Perry, and Tower of Power vocalist Ellis Hall formed a soul/rock trio named Thread and released a self-titled album.

In 1999, he recorded experimental and largely improvisational instrumental tracks under the name of The Firing Squad. These recordings remain unreleased.

In 2001, he worked again with Perry and released In-VINCE-ible!, a collection of diverse works from various past projects, with ex-members of Santana and Chicago assisting as session musicians, and featuring several special guests including Steve Walsh of Kansas and his Storming Heaven bandmates.

DiCola appeared as keyboardist on the first Hughes Turner Project album, HTP in 2003.

He and Perry once again formed a trio, this time with bassist Paul Ill and called DPI, to release a 3-track EP called Found Objects in 2006. Previously the trio had worked with vocalist Vincent Kendall and guitarist Reeves Gabrels in releasing a 42-minute suite called Pity The Rich based on recordings made at the same time. The jam-session style recordings for these releases were originally intended to be part of a new DiCola solo instrumental release, but while editing the tracks in his home studio DiCola felt they had the feel of a project for a band and chose to expand his original plan to include the other performers.

In 2007, "Paulie's Robot" from Rocky IV, was used in the episode of Family Guy: "Moving Out(Brian's Song)".

In 2008, he was featured on the Gran Turismo 5 Prologue Original Soundtrack and was responsible for arranging the series theme, "Moon Over the Castle" (with the guitarist Doug Bossi) as well as another piece titled "Truth". Both titles were written by the Japanese Band T-Square with which Vince worked on the album Truth 21c (2001, with Takeshi Itoh, as T-Square Plus).

He described his work on the Gran Turismo's soundtrack's project in an interview with Music4Games, noting that he collaborated with T-Square and Doug Bossi on the project, and looks forward to becoming involved with game music in the future.

In 2009, he composed the song ”BOUND & GAGGED” as a submission for the upcoming Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. The track featured DiCola on keyboards and drums, Kenny Meriedeth on guitars, and Rick Livingstone on vocals but was not selected by Michael Bay for the Transformers II soundtrack.

In 2011 he began composing music for the video game Saturday Morning RPG from Mighty Rabbit Studios. The game is expected to release on the iTunes App Store in March 2012.

In 2012, DiCola recorded the official theme for Chikara's King of Trios professional wrestling event, alongside Kenny Meriedeth.