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LOST AND FOUND (THE SECRET AMERICAN SONGBOOBOOK), an evening of two song-cycles by composer PHIL KLINE – Zippo Songs & Fear and Loathing – had its first successful touring season in 2007/08 with engagements that included the Kimmel Center, Connecticut College, and Flynn Theater for the Performing Arts. Mining texts found in speeches, interviews and graffiti for the unique poetry of the American vernacular, Kline’s quasi-theatrical songs are by turns intense, dark, dizzying, confrontational and funny, but always with an ear for musical beauty. He places his voices in the multi-level sound world of an electro-acoustic chamber ensemble, mixing classical and rock instruments with electronics played by an elite group of New York’s new music specialists. Linked to current events by a prelude suite of Three Rumsfeld Songs, Zippo Songs sets texts that American GIs engraved on their Zippo lighters in Vietnam. Alex Ross of The New Yorker called it “One of the most brutally frank song cycles ever penned.” Fear and Loathing is a series of meditations on The American Dream as it appeared, crashed and burned in the 1960s and 70s. At the core of the new cycle are the psychedelic revelations of the famously seditious Hunter S. Thompson, ravings which reveal the man behind them as a true patriot, hopeless romantic and the most prescient of loose cannons, his heartbreak still fresh and true today. Fear and Loathing features vocalists Theo Bleckmann and Wilbur Pauley. Phil’s work has been actively commissioned, as well as praised by critics, with his 2004 CD Zippos Songs appearing on several “Best of ” lists that year including The New York Times, Gramophone, Time Out New York, and Newsday, among others. Most recently David Patrick Stearns of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that “Kline has graduated from "experimental" to "original" - he's one of America's most important compositional voices.”