I remember how it started

I was thinking about my relationship to music and how it has shifted through the years. I sang a lot as a kid, like most kids did. I also was exceptionally gifted in drawing. My mother will tell you stories of me drawing all over EVERYTHING.

When I was eight years old, my family moved and thus began a very dark period in my life (for which I have recently completed two years of therapy). In that time, I closed inward, but my creative expression flourished in visual arts. I stopped talking and singing, but took refuge in my imagination and solace in the drawings I did.

In middle school, I ended up in choir, which is a shock to me, given how much I wanted to fade into the background and never be noticed. I guess part of me DID want to get noticed. When I got to high school, I didn't like the band/choral teacher, so I ditched music and took an art class. I wasn't particularly exceptional in that, except that I could reproduce almost anything with pretty good accuracy.

In college (I went away my first two years to Long Beach State) I took private voice lessons from a classical singer who had toured Europe. I told her I couldn't afford lessons, so she told me to bring her a salad (she had classes all day with no break) and that would be fine. She saw in me something exceptional, had me sing for the head of the Music department. I was terrified. His only comment was that I needed to be more expressive. My teacher gave me the single best piece of advice: your voice will change when you hit 30. You have all the time in the world to sing.

I tried to pursue music in college, then art, and my parents said no. I couldn't afford it on my own, so I ended up getting my degree in Computer Science. Although I did take several theater classes, and ended up doing several shows around the Bay Area.

Looking back now, its clear now that the creative force that moves through me would not take no for an answer. It still wont!

I think about music I listened to, throughout the years, and in the beginning most of it was popular, whether with the general populous or with my crowd. Two albums changed my relationship to music profoundly: Spirit Chaser (Dead Can Dance) and Passion (Peter Gabriel: music for The Last Tempation of Christ). In that music, I found a communion of soul, a connection to something beyond this world. I didn't realize it then, but I found meditation and spirituality. I will always remember this line "We make a road for the spirit to pass over" and see how it applied to an individual life, then to the creation of life (in my son) and then in the creation of music.

I started dating Darcy in 1995, and a little over a year into that, began another dark period in my life. Turning inward again. A trip to Burning Man brought me out of my shell creatively, and drove me to pursue more creative path in my work, leading me to the Internet, and to design.

Then about 7 years or so ago, I read the Artist's Way. About unblocking your creativity. When I picked it up, I assumed that I would get back into visual arts. I had never considered music. Then it hit me, and with outside encouragement, I was writing songs, lyrics called up from the very depths I had been trying to cover up.

Music has meant so many things to me over the years: solace, inspiration, movement, laughter, sadness, anger, relief, communion, escape, communication. I cannot imagine anything else having so varied an impact.