20 years ago this past week I handed off the keys to a little music shop in Melrose, Massachusetts I had started three years before, very grateful for what it had done for me. It had dug me out and built me up as I built IT up. It served a community that needed it, and through that service I was given by others – and the struggle - what I needed to fill the holes in ME.
And I believed in it even if the people around me thought I was nuts to try it. After all, the year before I’d been homeless in a van, and aimless in my life. I didn’t plan on that, but truth is I hadn’t planned. So now I had a plan. And it’s still there working its magic for others, and it got me started to be here working mine.
www.musicshopmelrose.com
(Bless you, little garden!)
Now I’m certainly not saying make every decision this way – but if you do look around you and realize you want a very different life than they do, and they think you’re crazy… but the numbers add up and everything YOU are adds up to it… there comes a time for you to believe the path you have been called to is right, and this is your moment. And you DO IT.
You go all in. You use everything you are as fuel and their doubts as spark when needed. And you go climb that f’n mountain or you die trying on the way UP. Not down in the valley with the talkers, and not down lower than you should be, telling yourself you can’t do it or you’re not worthy. Something’s going to happen on the way up that mountain, my friend. Something is going to HAPPEN.
What I know from the climb: The fire is put in us, and it doesn’t go out. Feeling unworthy is put ON us – and that can go.
In other news I am so incredibly honored to see a mentor’s album released! It’s a long story and his role in the path of my life is too much to tell here… but I would have Kent Finlay’s face chiseled into the stone on my Mount Rushmore. My good friend, his daughter Jenni, shouldered so much during and after his passing and made the big plays to get this done. Kent spent his life helping other songwriters at the expense of just about everything else in his life, and it was his dying wish in 2015 for this album to get put out. If anything I’ve ever done has been important to you, if I have inspired you in any way, please understand that the small role I played in helping this album’s release is one of the biggest, most important things I have ever done in my whole life. It means more to me than anything of my own.
GO CHECK IT OUT!
Speaking of my music, I finally put some of mine up in its definitive album form. Some has been up before, some hasn’t, but here it is – with more to come. I just want it OUT. I mean that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re given the knack for something, right? If you get the seed planting gift, you’re supposed to grow some gardens. It’s not about fame and I don’t need validity from anyone – it’s about putting back into the pool of music I drew so much inspiration for my whole life from. I can do that. I want it out there to find the ears who’ll enjoy it, be moved by it as a part of the soundtrack to THEIR lives, like I have been by the music of others that has inspired and moved me in mine.
GO TO MY SOUNDCLOUD PAGE
There have been numerous recording sessions over the Birdsong years but much less time for attention to getting it together and getting it out. It’s the other side of the double edged knife that re-prioritizing your music back to hobby status can be… it’s freed from agenda, it can be made in the pure state of art that feels SO pure and right and has no commercial aspiration to it; BUT it sinks down on the priority list to actually spend much in the way of time or resources DOING anything with it or promoting it once you make it. It ranges from soft acoustic folk songs to out-there electric improvisational cosmic instrumental prayer music, and I hope there’s something in what I put out (and what more I will be over the next few weeks) that gives you something good.
ALL THIS and good times working on your basses in the workshop, manifesting THESE songs of wood and wire. It’s all the same to me – words, notes, this style, that style, instruments, life – it’s about manifesting things. It’s about that alchemy where intangible feeling and inspiration becomes something you can hand another and say “Here, it’s for you and I hope it brings something good to your life.
Please check all of this out if it interests you, tip where you are able, and thank you for being with us!
Listening to: Neil Young On The Beach and Zuma; Tom Petty Echo.