When I was younger, I didn’t worry about time passing, and not so much about the hurry to accomplish. It was a long long time ago now that my hope for music as a professional enterprise entered me as “a dream for someday”. These days, I dream real life conversations about producing music and the ideas that were inspired by God for me, but still the income … . When I was first learning about “advanced music theory” from a French bass player / composer who was talking as a “district leader” for the SGI-USA, I knew that what God was asking me was going to confuse if it wasn’t organized well and presented in an understandable progression. “What’s that got to do with God” & “that’s not Christian” were playing in the background even as I struggled to grasp what God was saying to me. And then there was Country music … [ the kind Taylor Swift recently abandoned because she never played it ].
When I first hit the dance floor of the Grizzly Rose in Denver – and it’s been so long now that I couldn’t tell you the band that was playing that first night, but I could tell you I’ve seen Martina McBride, Kenny Chesney, Don Williams, Mark Chesnutt and plenty of others play there – I was hooked at “the big time level”. When I was first in this music dream, I only knew ‘rock & roll’ + a little classical; it was a district member in the SGI-USA who opened the Country music vein. There is an energy created by music that rolls in a way that people can dance or listen, catch the wave or sit in it. When I first started to play the instrument seriously, I could get nowhere near that rolling sound. It intimidated me. Beyond the mess of trying to “stay on top of the instrument” – which really means processing all the fingerings & positions & progressions while and just a moment before they are being played [in order to be in the right position to lead as a voice on the instrument (or follow as a fill to a whole unit voice)] – there was a spirit world that was full of jealousies about people who could “do that”. The spirit world wants to make the guitar something other than what it is, a stringed instrument for communication. Some want to make it drugs, some want to make it sex, some want to make it a representation of the wealth they deny they could ever have [ causing their jealousies ], but it is just another instrument in the making of music, which is a language that can connect to God, when it rolls.
Time passes, and we start to remember the emotions we felt when this song or that was “big”, and we get a little older and we long for the time and we long for the intimacy of relationship that youth promises but age doesn’t necessarily deliver. Being able to get on board that train as an instrumentalist is the goal. Doesn’t everyone pray to reach the goal … [?]
