One of his early credits as a session musician was his synthesizer performance on Juice Newton's albums Dirty Looks and Old Flame released in 1983 and 1985, respectively.
In 1983, DiCola was a co-nominee for the Best Album of Original Score Written for a Motion Picture or Television Special Grammy for co-writing the soundtrack of the movie Staying Alive, in spite of the poor critical reception of the film.
BotCon 2001 saw the releases of The Protoform Sessions (featuring demos and rarities and including extended commentary from DiCola) and Artistic Transformations: Themes and Variations, containing solo piano renditions of songs from the soundtrack, as well as another complete score on a single disc named Lighting Their Darkest Hour.
The album Falling Off a Clef contains six new tracks (Castle of the Gods suite, Alien March, Fallen Angel, FS#7, A.
[4] In addition to DiCola on keyboards, guitar and vocals, the Storming Heaven lineup included lead vocalist Rick Livingston, Jethro Tull drummer Doane Perry, guitarist Curtis Taylor, and keyboardist Casey Young.
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 favor of individual songs.
Around the same time in 1996, DiCola, Storming Heaven bandmate Doane Perry, and Tower of Power vocalist Ellis Hall formed a soul/progressive-rock trio named Thread and released their one and only self-titled album on CD.
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 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.
[7] In 2012, DiCola recorded the official theme for Chikara's King of Trios professional wrestling event, alongside Kenny Meriedeth.