Conspirator
Joe Kelly
Comics writer and filmmaker. The melody of my “Softly Questioning” became the main theme of his film Poughkeepsie.
Joe Kelly (born 1971) is an American comic book writer known for Deadpool, Uncanny X-Men, Action Comics, JLA, The Amazing Spider-Man and the graphic novel I Kill Giants; as a co-founder of Man of Action he is one of the creators of Ben 10. He holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he teaches writing for animation and for comics.
Poughkeepsie, his second short film, was funded on Kickstarter in November and December 2015, shot in Nassau County, and premiered at the Long Island Film Festival on July 15, 2018. It is a 32-minute drama about George Dawes, a man with late-stage Alzheimer’s who finds he can go back into his memories.
The creditSarth Calhoun wrote the main melody of Joe Kelly’s short film Poughkeepsie (2018): the theme of “Softly Questioning,” from Reflections, Vol. 1, 2015.
Poughkeepsie
The main melody of “Softly Questioning,” the third track of Reflections, Vol. 1, is the main melody of Poughkeepsie. I recorded the piece in one take with Lou Petto on drums and released it in November 2015, the month the film’s Kickstarter closed; the film was finished in 2018. I wrote about the connection when I revisited the record in November 2020, and I returned to the piece as “Softly Questioning (Reprise)” in May 2025.
My thoughts
The profile is from public sources, linked where they appear. What we made is the record on this site and the sources cited above.