I never met Tupper Saussy in person but today I’m mourning him as if he were a blood relative. He died on March 16 2007 at the age of 70.

His music has been an integral part of my life since I was 17 years old when I first heard “Morning Girl” on the radio. It had a bouncy beat, an inventive melody, enigmatic lyrics and it all ends up in a cacphony of atonal strings that gradually wind their way down to a major chord at the end, outlasted finally by an organ that just refuses to quit. There was never a Top 40 song like it (it made it to #17 on the charts, just for the record) and I was hooked immediately. I learned that “Morning Girl” was on an album called “The Moth Confesses” by a group I’d never heard of — Neon Philharmonic. I bought it immediately and played it for everybody I knew. And every one of them hated it; for decades, I never met another human who loved that album as much as I did. In fact, most people who even knew it existed regarded it with a mild contempt. In a way, that’s easy to understand. “The Moth Confesses” is unique. And a lot of people don’t like what they can’t categorize. Tupper’s songs bravely wander through a disparate variety of styles, ranging from middle-of-the-road pop to avant garde surrealism and back again, without ever breaking stride. His music exists outside of most musical trends, though it incorporates elements of many, from pop to jazz to classical and beyond.

Although my favorite song on “The Moth Confesses” remains “Morning Girl,” the one I admire the most — and the one which, I think, best illustrates Tupper’s greatness, is “The Last Time I Saw Jacqueline.” It begins with a solo Spanish guitar, followed by a fluttering of strings. Then it settles for a moment into a lounge-style Bossa Nova beat as the lyrics set up the story of a woman who has squandered her life and is sinking into insanity. When it comes to the line “whispering to ghosts in the room,” the instruments stop for a sudden atonal wail of women’s voices — and then, back to the beat. The song gains in intensity with the strings growing more insistent, the women’s voices becoming more operatic and the lyrics ever more elusive. As the second verse begins, the vocal is accompanied by a violin obligato that — typical of Tupper — begins much sooner in the phrase than almost any other composer would put it, so that by the time it becomes prominent, it seems to have come out of nowhere, yet you realize that it has been building for several measures. And just to tie in this song with the major themes of “The Moth Confesses,” “Jacqueline” even climaxes with a subtle quote from “Morning Girl.”

It turned out, of course, that Neon Philarmonic wasn’t a group at all. It was just Tupper, the songwriter and arranger, and the late Don Gant, the singer. Everyone else on the album was a studio musician. Which is the only way he could have done it, of course — what kind of band, short of a full orchestra, could accomodate Tupper’s buffet of styles?

Neon Philharmonic released a second album in 1971. I never even knew about it and wouldn’t hear until over thirty years later. It’s fascinating, if not altogether successful, but I believe its first song, “Are You Old Enough to Remember Dresden?”, exemplifies Tupper’s brilliance as an arranger. Every single verse of that song has a slightly different setting and it sounds as if Tupper could have kept going forever without repeating himself.

But even though I didn’t learn of the second album for years, I never stopped listening to “The Moth Confesses” — and I never found anyone else who liked it. Until…

On a very happy day about three years ago, I received an email from two voices from my past, Joel Rice and Allen Roberson. We had been boyhood friends in South Carolina and hadn’t seen each other since we were about nine years old. But through the miracle of the internet, they tracked me down and we immediately started our friendships again as if forty years hadn’t intervened. We talked often, emailed even oftener and visited when we could (and still do). In one email, Joel, who like me, had tried to make it as a singer/songwriter, mentioned “my friend Tupper Saussy.” I nearly went ape. It turned out that not only had Joel known Tupper when they were both working in Nashville in the 70s but that Joel had Tupper’s email address. And so now I had it. I wrote a note to Tupper who immediately responded. I steered him toward my web site as a kind of introduction and he responded with, “We ought to do something together.” Now that was an email I wish I could have forwarded to 17 year-old me.

A few months ago he sent me the link to the video of his most recent song, “I Think I See.” The attached note read, in part, “Greetings from your pantheon” which proved to me that he had looked over my web site in some depth.

The sad truth is that while we continued to correspond pretty frequently, we never did actually meet in person, although we kept talking about it. When he played his shows in Nashville last year, it broke my heart that I couldn’t afford, either in time or money, to fly there to see him. But he insisted that he was working on setting up a Los Angeles show, so I figured I’d just be patient.

Now, of course, that will never happen. As the line says in “Jacqueline,” it tears a boy’s heart away.

So now I will never meet Tupper. But we will always have “The Moth Confesses” and it will  remain, I guess, Joel’s and my private reserve. But that’s okay. It makes us feel like members of a very exclusive club. And it makes us mourn Tupper as if we had actually known him as well as we wish we had.

Sleep well, Tupper. I love your music and I’m eternally thankful that I at least had the opportunity to tell you so.

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I urge you to visit Tupper’s web site: www.tuppersaussy.com. There you will find articles, links to his paintings and books, a recent NPR broadcast about him and, most important of all, his new downloadable CD “The Chocolate Orchid Piano Bar.” It’s pretty wonderful — just Tupper and his piano playing songs that make us regret even more keenly how very little of his music he ever got around to recording. This is his last gift to us and it’s deeply to be cherished. And while you’re at it, go to YouTube and search for “I Think I See,” a video that Tupper made only about a year ago. The song’s a pippin, and my only regret about it is that it doesn’t benefit from the full aspect of Tupper’s arranging and instrumental genius. But why quibble? It’s terrific.