why i make music #1

12Oct08

I recently had to fill out an online “interview” for a music distribution site that included a question to the affect of, “When did you know music is what you wanted to do with your life?” I rattled on a little about stage acting and singing as a teenager and how I realized I felt more alive then and more myself than I had remembered feeling before. Well, that’s perhaps only the half of it. 

Why music? Because, like so many before me, now, and will be in the future have said and known, it is a universal language of humanity, of human-ness, of love. Even the most hard-core, seemingly negative pieces of music are still born of the creative core that we all have in common. Music is the language that fills the gap between you and me, that reaches across borders of the international and inter-relational kins. It also fills the gap between who I am and who I think I might be, for better of for worse.

I make music and sing because it was something I was given to give  - not just to others, but to myself. I make music and sing because there are flowers and stardust and sweet slumbering doves in my chest that would die if I didn’t. I make music and sing because it is my unique language of love and my one true caster of wishes for myself and the world. I don’t often write sweet, positive messages of peace and happiness, but I do write about the truths I hold and have held, if only to let them go in the writing. These truths, however personal, are shared by you, I know it. I make music and sing because it unleashes a whole world of elemental experience that resonates inside the echo chambers of this soul… and hopefully that one – if only to say, “See, we are both human and loving with longing and hope,” like smiling at a stranger in a crowd. Those smiles are small doses of hope that instill faith in what we have. The world as I see it could use a little more of that every chance it gets. Peace starts right here.

I am blessed by so much music. My hope is that something I write and offer touches even just one heart outside of mine in a powerful way. Just one, and I’ll have honored all of the path I have walked and songs I’ve been given to sing.

That’s why.

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Filed under: music   |  1 Comment
Tags: boulder, denver, jazz, music, pop, songwriting, soul, writing