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 The Message
What I'm Tryin' To Do
Welcome to the new website. Return as often as you'd like, as we'll keep it updated with news, photos, appearance dates, free and unreleased music, and new writing in the Journal section. Make it a home for yourself as well--for your own photos, comments on my songs, or a note about a live show. I hope you learn about each other while you’re here, checkin’ out my music.
A critic somewhere once described what I’m doing musically as sounding like “Jackson and James Brown(e) were brothers.” While I’m not sure if I belong in their exalted company, it’s an accurate assessment--I am trying to combine a narrative lyrical approach with the rhythmic elements of soul and funk. But labels are often worthless when it comes to music, where literally everything you see and hear, from a cicada’s buzz to a young child’s yell to a song on the radio, influences what you may write or sing next. Since I’m as much a singer as I am a songwriter, I’m always trying to write melodies that are fresh and interesting to sing.
I'm a bit of a traditionalist as it applies to making music: the ideas of order and harmony have to be developed, and then each melodic motif should respond to or rub against other ideas. The order part is almost done for us before we start: The diatonic scale is mathematical language in eights. However, songs are far more emotional than they are mathematical. This whole thing is Emotional Alchemy, really--new recordings of mine always come from what I've been listening to and where I’ve been, combined with the practical parts of this job--money, time, heart, experience and purpose.
I think I’m always trying to make soul music--with its own point of view, intent on real connection, free from the traps of age, fashion, era, whatever. Even though the classic elements of soul--strings & horns, signature bass lines, a tight pocket, gospel vocals in call and response--are not always present in each and every song, it's still soul music.
A friend recently asked me how I’d define the word, soul. I’m still trying to answer, every day. But later I wrote him back, saying that it’s a quality we definitely admire when we see or feel it on others, I know that much. It's a spirit that comes from really living.
Soul is about scar tissue. Soul is, for better or worse, about suffering. It's knowing the absurdity of love and still loving. It's faith when cynicism is easier. It's hangin’ in there when you've had it. It's not about unconditional love, but it is about letting a person's character be your main source for judgment. Soul is, as Al Green says, "fearing no evil." Maybe that describes it best. It's a quality of heart, especially after you know all there is to fear. Solomon Burke said he dreams of writing a soul song that would do no less than save the world if everyone sang it.
I write songs about what we choose and what we lose on this journey—how easy it is to get lost, and how difficult it is to transcend. But getting lost is a part of the process; you get lost in the music, and find yourself along the way. If pressed to describe a dominant theme, I think my songs concern themselves with what it takes to make up a full life--what we owe each other as it compares to what we owe ourselves, followed by our debt to Nature or God to develop our gifts. I’m often asking what modern life demands of us, and how those demands change us.
Although I don’t write many songs about the corrosion of optimism, I am interested in the inevitable loss of illusions and, more importantly, the "now-what?" that comes after the Fall. "What you gonna do now? How you gonna live after your world falls apart? After cancer? After 9/11? After we’ve lost all our money? What’s going on? Can you maintain any romantic ideals at all today?"
The romantic aspects in my music come from trying to find what's heroic when faced with this unrelenting reality. The things to hide from are permanent and obvious--fear, professional disappointment, the drift of time, the death of people we love. Yet reasons for optimism are everywhere, too.
When I first heard certain Motown artists or The Beatles as a young kid, it completely turned my head around about new ways to think, dress, and live. Think about it. We've now taken that music--our music--into what they call middle age without any loss of passion, excitement or interest. We’re only now able to prove, just like sculptors and painters and pilots and accountants and corporate executives, that you get better at songwriting and performing as you go through life.
Could I have written these songs at 25? No way; there was nothing in my well but raw feeling--no experience, just potential. I hadn't seen fire and rain. I now feel like I've come to understand the nature of whatever creative gifts I was given, as they've been chiseled out with thousands of man-hours and lots of blood, sweat and tears.
The styles I’m working in, Rock and Soul, are both a very human, rolling ball of glue kind of art. They pick up everything in their path, and roll backward and forward, collecting fingerprints, signs, emotions and echoes…of angels, ancestors, shaman, showmen, the dark, the light, everything.
Music at its best should compel those that hear it toward some kind of physical change: learn more, have more compassion, become interested in its shared ideals, open up, dance your ass off, have some fun. I’ve seen this in action--the individual waking up to the community and a community alive an aware enough to welcome him or her to it.
I'm also interested in making music I'm not hearing elsewhere, or music that extends the traditions I believe in and love. But mostly I want to extend a hand or a thought to other people--to say "How's it been for you?" to as many of you as I can reach through my songs.
There's truth in the all of us; there's genius in the all of us; there's kindness in the all of us. It's in this sense that I want to reach my audience--as a collection of friends who have identified with a lyric, riff or melody in any one of my songs. And if you aspire to that, then I think you’ve gotta try and tackle the big, obvious themes: Love, Sex, Grace, Aging, Death, Work, Family, Equality, Joy...the human condition.
There's this other aspect to what I do: I'm a cancer survivor. Despite all of the horrors that come with cancer, I tried to keep my heart and ears and eyes open. I was aware I was going through something valuable to the human spirit if I could survive it. Not every songwriter gets the chance to comment on life and death from the front. As a result, I now try to make joyous sounding survival music, because if you can’t celebrate surviving cancer, however temporary, then what’s the point of being excited about living?
If I’m not around to tell them myself, do I want my kids having a vague notion that I was a person that coveted fame without respect? No, I want the documents to be here, either in songs or essays or interviews, that tell them what I thought and felt about when and where I lived and whom I lived with. I want them to know what I loved or longed for--how important a sense of humor is, and how important it is to learn to laugh at yourself.
Everyone has their moment of unchanging reality, where they see who they are and what their life is really worth. One of the abiding principles of recovering cancer patients is learning to accept that other people will never know, understand or care in a way you'd expect them too. Life goes on. Be happy you were born each morning; make some music; stir it up. Looking into the abyss is no way to make a living.
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