My lifelong quest has been to wake up, and help others wake up. Wake up from the illusion of reality that society creates and perpetuates. The illusion that we are separate from each other. The illusion that we are separate from the Oneness. My thirst for meaning and deep inner fulfillment has driven all aspects of my life.
As a singer/songwriter/saxophonist, my lyrics and melodies have been the musical score of my quest. I have also ventured through improvisation to experience music beyond my comprehension.
Outside of music, I help individuals, teams, and organizations become more conscious of their thoughts and actions, and learn how to communicate to create beautiful harmony.
The Process
Have you ever had a passion that stayed with you over the years, that was left unmet?
Have you ever had to choose between your dreams and making a living?
These songs came through me over the years. I would catch their seed. I would immediately hear the whole song in full production in my head. I would sing them into a recorder and develop the lyrics. Then they sat. On paper and in my soul.
I would try to develop bands to perform them and co-create others, but they wouldn’t last long due to egos and circumstance. I tried recording many of them myself on a 4-Track, but as a singer/saxophonist, I needed chords underneath my melodies.
I actually had 2 passions: music and helping people grow. At 22, I came to a crossroads. Which path do I follow? When I weighed both dreams – including how they would support me to be financially independent – I chose the latter.
So for decades, I would catch songs flowing through my consciousness, tease out the lyrics and subtleties of the music, and they would sit. I yearned to record in professional sound studios with master studio musicians and sound engineers. But that cost tens of thousands of dollars. The songs sat.
And then COVID hit. At the time, I had a business where I led transformational leadership trainings around the world. All business came to an abrupt halt. I was living in Florida at the time. I knew a talented musician – Taylor Diaz – in California. I asked him if he wanted to do some studio work from his home. We used Zoom so that I could explain each song in detail (the rhythms, the riffs, the dynamics of the music) and we used Google Drive to exchange music files. Eventually I had the backing tracks!
I then recorded all of the vocals, sax tracks, and harmonium in my own house. Thus started the monolithic journey of editing. Hundreds and hundreds of hours went into editing and mixing the tracks to match the full production that had been in my head for years. A true labor of love. When I felt finally complete, I hired a sound engineer to digitally master the tracks. Music complete!!
I had learned how to edit videos when I was making some leadership videos for my business. I got video of me singing some of the songs at Kehena Beach on the Big Island of Hawaii, where I live. Because I was on a low budget, we did 5 videos with only 1 take for each song, and half of the footage was unusable due to people walking in front of the camera. But it was enough! I hired an artist to create some background art for a few of the videos. And thus followed hundreds of hours producing and editing the videos.
Story to be continued…