Wearing an old brown shoe … [painted]

It seems to me the more I talk, even briefly, with musicians that it isn't that I am not meeting musicians, it's that I'm not meeting musicians who have the same interests in the music that I have. This has been the case for a very long – too long – time. It isn't that I don't respect the music that they're making, because I do, and I enjoy some of it fully; but there is a seeking core inside the construction that has to be part of the creative construction conversation if the musicians are going to be on the same page – and some of that conversation could (and does in some cases) come from playing together. Still, there is a deeper level of communion with God (the Creator) which cannot be assumed. The need to talk about why you would use this structure or that structure, or if the choices are musical or random, is an important part of opening the same “story” inside the construction of the music. The construction gets reflected back in the form of response; and if you come from a different perspective about the nature of the response, then you are probably going to start diverging off into varying interpretations of what is happening.

I've heard many musicians talk about their path forward to the place where they are when I meet them. I'm not lacking for people who are sure that they know what they are doing. I'm also not lacking for people who don't care about what is inside the music; generally they are “doing what is right in their own eyes”. What I have lacked is the connection to individuals who want to offer input and insight to open the doors and open the mind to the experience of the music.

It is the experiencing of the music that is the hardest subject to approach. We generally do not talk about how the music is reflected back to us as musicians – from the light into the creative process. Learning how to be a part of the interaction of the light is the key ingredient in keeping the music alive and the musician in the moment of the spirit of youthfulness which lights the creative fires. As we become more accomplished as musicians, we tend to get stuck on the same professional chains and routine like processes that other professionals in a craft do, but we are in a creative field, and there is no real excuse for not opening up our youthful spirit as long as we have energy to do so. Part of that is accomplished by recognizing that when we are stuck, we are being put into a position where we need to listen and consider the opportunity for input. This is one of the most wonderful aspects of music as the framework for “cycles” – and of course sound is measured in cyclical sound waves [of energy].

When we come together as musicians, we have the opportunity to create a framework, a foundation point in the construction of the living relationship with the music as a vehicle of God's voice and love in our world. What we poor out of our souls is what we love. We hope people will connect. When we gather with other musicians, in our best incarnations, we try to hear each other as we play, making the experience interactive – whether by a set design for the listener audience or as a free form design for the band, with the audience allowed to jump in to hear what we are talking about [with God].

Getting to the point where we begin to talk about the production of music as an extension of the conversation of the living God just might be more than most of the people I've met really want to talk about; it is something I wonder about as I “say nothing at all” while I listen to their stories ….

When I Write, I Listen [two cranes in between spotlight 29]

One of the great tension points in the creative art of “making it in the music business” comes when we fall out of the circuit of our choices, where we lead ourselves and pad our life view with friends, associates, and people who have similar views, and into “the real world”, where there are scarcities associated with choices and people who might not share the same world view start fighting for the spotlight or the microphone – something Taylor Swift found out about …(twice?). 

There is a spiritual battle in America still; it is not a race card battle, it is not even so much an “I know better” or “I am better” battle.  It is a space and resources struggle that has been going on for centuries, but was basically brought to America with the settlements.  God built the USA land like the master architect.  We don’t really have to argue about if there is God, because you either hear and obey the first commandment or you don’t. 

The U.S. is blessed with the continental divide; the divide is both a symbolic divider between “the American ‘Mid-West’” [“the East”] & the natural American West [“the West”] & a physical divide.  While we can as natives of the American West see clearly what desert life is, we also can have a particularly rewarding experience of God, reality, dependent on Earth, dependent upon water, will, & the determination to survive.

What was natural to many of the Native American tribes of the upper Ohio and Great Lakes region was pushed into the American West by the ideas that were foreign to America from God.  Natives & “Christians” moved West from the peaceful tribes.  It was a similar experience on “the trail of tears”, but not from precisely the same Earth roots.  Even this subject starts “the argument” in some circles.  That argument started way back East – maybe even at “the triumphal entry”.

And then there was “that summer” ….  We choose to speak a common language with respect and understanding, or not.  America has a special place in the world that is coming to the crossroads.  Those intersections have come about because of both American productivity and ingenuity, and the arrival of the opening hand of this time’s “ceremony in the air”.  Technology has come to us with the understanding of both the arts and the sciences, which are fused in music, and created in the constant scope by God, the giver and creator. 

Easterners and Westerners have a different experience of what God can do.  We get into our circuits and we think we have a great idea, and then we run into the reality of costs, either in human terms or in spiritual terms or in terms of expectations to which we cling.  The Puritan remnant elements – the hard Eastern Christians – act like the Pharisees, sometimes justly pointing out our lack of humility and how we don’t glorify God & serve our neighbors; the non believers & “the liberals” gather together and tell us what they think we should do.  “Hollywood” is waiting for a decision; ratings hang in the balance.  What do we choose?

Musically, the best music of the past half century has grown out of the struggle to express the personal battle between believers, non-believers, implementers [the “Conservatives” who would liberally apply their circuit rules to all of us] & improvisers [those who sit in the “liberal arts”].  It was the rise of the singer songwriter that changed where we conversed.  The singer-songwriter who connects to our personal experience most will generally get the “best ratings”.  Gradually, even as early as the 1960’s, there was a divide in American music that was directly parallel to East/West cultural expectations and experiences, regardless of personal beliefs.  That divide sunk into the politics of the nation, as “commercial art” usually does. 

The issues can be blown out to the macro level or they can be brought back into the personal level.  When a lyric (or musical phrasing) connects with a greater audience’s experience, we tend to find the territory of “hit music” – it reaches far into broad based culture, beyond or about politics.  We document God’s story in this way, because that story is “about” our life under God.

Hidden in the science of the technology that we use for recording is the map that we’re supposed to use to communicate that we are indeed a united people.  Culturally, we have our battles for the microphone & the spotlight, but it is God who is asking us “are you ready[?]”.  If we don’t teach that communication, and practice it as writers [“singer/songwriters”] we never open the whole field of the underlying “theory” which God gave us.  Music theory, particularly “western music theory” hasn’t changed since before the dark ages [or longer], but we pretend it doesn’t mean anything, or we don’t learn that the macro connection we feel as artists [either as producers or consumers and end users] or the micro is our chance to take part in the whole culture creation of value. When we understand how to apply creation of value through our communication, then we open the door to abundance.

It is my experience that God told us an incredible story, and that we tend to ignore that story because we build into our expectations a level of pride that attaches our personal expectations to not only our point of view of what value is, but also as our projection of what others “should do” and who they “should be”.  If I as a Christian challenge other Christians to open the Lotus Sutra, consider the Mahayana line of Buddhism through T’ien Tai & Nichiren Daishonin, I might be cut out of the music in “Music City” [there’s enough evidence to show that is the truth]; if I as a Buddhist suggest to other people who “practice” to consider the implications of Christ, Jesus’ death on the Cross, and how that might impact their enlightenment in life, well, I might find myself exiled to a “small fishing island” ….

As musicians, as artists, we are blessed to be the individuals who represent the greatest connection to the culture that is our human identity; we can choose to glorify our higher intelligence, or we can lose it to the sands of time.  There are many days I wonder what we’re going to choose, the living “nowhere man” or “the fool on the hill”, but then I take a step back & consider, “living classical”, maybe they are one and the same in the story, the nowhere man living in the woods [of the emotion of desire] & the fool [in his mind].  When we make music that fuses these stories, we transcend and start the dialog. 

There is so much to talk about before we read the golden version of 1984 in the land of milk and honey, where Walter Mondale [“the Russians”] are going to raise our your taxes – as the Police {policeman on the street} told us [while touring Ukraine*?].

 

*United Kingdom Russian Applications Inside Network Extensions – “Nam-Myo-Renge-Kyo” [Happy Easter?] Suggested listening [not from the Russian Album] from Band on The Run:: “1985” … .

  

The Bridge [out of nowhere]

Sorry it’s been so long since I most recently posted here; it’s difficult being in a “life recovery program” and squeezing in all that needs to be done.  When I moved to Nashville from Los Angeles nearly five years ago now, I did so knowing that I was going into uncharted territory for me.  I was diving into an area of “music production” that was unfamiliar to me so far in my life.  It was a challenge for me, from me, to find out if God had fulfilled the meaning of “Music City USA” that had been revealed to me through the years of preparation in California, Colorado, Florida, and other places as well. 

I wasn’t a natural musician; I learned to be as natural as God allowed me.  What I mean by that is that I was never good at memorizing songs or reading music as a child, and my practice time – which existed – was mostly made up of toying around with what different sounds sounded like together.  When I moved to Florida in the mid-1990’s – ostensibly to teach Golf at a Golf School – I started on a new journey.  Music was put center as my communications link with the Creator, and I left Florida, cut out of the Golf business [a month into a “six month trial”], with a search for answers to questions that had been brewing inside me since the early 1980’s when I had started conversing with my musician friends in Los Angeles.  Those friends were introduced to me mainly through the practice of Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism in the Soka Gakkai International–USA; I also had a nomadic music curiosity around the then L.A. “pop music” scene.  Then, I was driven into “country music”; by the 1990’s I was entirely country, with passing “pop” awareness.  That centeredness had led me to studying “what is this business”?  I found the road in through computers and the rise of digital equipment.  When I started to link the concepts between personal & network computing and broadcasting & recording, I started to understand a calling.  Part of the lesson I learned in the golf business was that if you really want to TEACH, you need to be able to SHOW.  I went to work, hard, to become a “natural musician”.

I studied as much music theory as I could get my hands upon – in books – and which I could comprehend – in mind.  Music is not a mechanical thing of the mind, it is best as an expression of feeling, but it is a feeling that has rules that allow the freedom of the expression.  It was through the grasping at how we communicate our understanding of God through music and artistic recording and expression that I came to have a mission to understand “where is this business now”?

The “business” side of Los Angeles entertainment is full of all kinds of lessons.  There are really good people, some who are highly competitive and will show you nicely why you aren’t prepared for ‘the business’; and there are egomaniacs and not so good people who just want you out of the way.  Either way, generally, those in the business don’t want new competition.  They go out of their way to “crucify’, in a worldly, fleshly, sense those who would be their next competitor.  In most ways I suppose, this is no different than other competitive businesses where people are competing to feed a family.  The “secrets” of Hollywood are available to be learned, but it is generally a controlled learning process.

Nashville has long been a center of the Christian based publishing industry, but what that industry is has remained somewhat a mystery, just something which occurred and was accepted rather than something that was quantified and qualified.  If “Music City USA” had a difference from Los Angeles in terms of “advantages in the recording industry”, it was that the musicians had a reputation for coming through the publishing arms of the nations Christian thought machines.  If we are a Christian based nation, and art is supposed to represent the leading edges of thought, then it is important to understand the context of Nashville as “Music City USA”, and to incorporate it into the art produced.

While I’ve battled some health issues that slowed me during the past three years, I’ve also been blessed with a learning environment in Nashville.  What I’ve been able to learn is that God is always at work, but that God’s people don’t necessarily understand what God is doing, particularly when it comes to art, communications, and music.  Artistically, we push envelopes and we get into heated areas of debate that expose the size of the egos involved and the desire to be first, to put “me first” “I” first, and the more “Christian” you become by studying, the easier it is to see, as a witness of people who think they are relating to God or being instructed by God.

Over the years, I’ve developed from the perspective that it is best to start from  ideas of “what would you do that is different” ( and/or generally beyond)  what is already being done.  I was fortunate that I learned “tricks” of the golf business which taught me how to listen for God in the simple things that are right before our eyes, the “latent meaning” inside the construction of the art and the science of the task.  When computers and musical arts converged for me, the whole picture production came into view.    It’s simple, and complex. 

The hardest part of trying to “produce” this conceptual framework as a working production model has come from the abundance of people who are certain that they know what they are doing is “it” or that they know what it is that I would do.  I can’t say how many musicians I’ve listened to, some who are considered ‘top line professionals’, who really are not producing music even close to the line of the theory that God had in mind when he showed it to me … .  I’ve heard too many people who plug in their electric instruments without giving a second thought to why you would do that; I’ve heard too many songwriters who know the form of the genre format they want to work, but who are actually displaying that they are lucky not good, because there is no substance to the music they make within the theory that is God’s instruction book for music creation.  Yes, they hit some relevant points, but they fade because they are using a formula which is designed to be expanded as a “startup” point not an endpoint.  Sometimes I wonder if they’re even listening to themselves.  Sometimes, they get the formula right and the music is not bad, but ask where is it going, what’s next, and you’ll get a blank stare.  “That’s all there is”!

I realize that it is best to let those musicians go there own way.  I realize that the way that I’ve learned the approach is not the path that others have used.  Still, I can’t help but wish that somewhere – and soon – I’ll connect with even one other musician who wants to write with a God centered program for production of relevant contemporary and longer lived, at least in aim, music.  How egomaniacal is that?  Well, … .  The discussion is grounded in the reality of many of those temporary hits that aren’t actually as good when they’ve been played a few thousand times or when they are played back from the “new perspective series” in a week, a month, a year, or a decade or two. 

Part of humbly seeking the right dialogue includes letting the people who are sure God isn’t opening a door – here – think about the bridge they are crossing … . 

After all, “… he’s a real nowhere man …”!