Sparks from the Fire

Money may not make the world go around, but it does help gather people together sometimes to give it a little push.  In this day and age of the music industry blues, sometimes that little push is needed.  In the case of Inspirational music the time is now.

Consequently we have begun a 30 day Kickstarter.com campaign to raise money to complete and promote a CD project that I’ve been working on now for over a year and a half.

It’s the making of new CD called “Goin’ Home” and a subsequent National Tour around this CD.  It involves an inspiring blend of great tradition and cutting-edge new music and deals with a very important aspect of each of our lives.

It deals with the experience at the end of our lives that we each face eventually that I like to call “transition”.

In the words of Jenny Burton, one of the project’s stars, “It’s a subject that, at first, we walk away from, but will walk towards one day, so why not walk towards it informed and without fear.”

I, personally, would like to go through that experience, when it comes, fully aware and alert, expectant joyful, and filled with spiritual curiosity.  When it comes to that transition, we Americans tend to look the other way and pretend that it doesn’t exist.  I don’t want to be like that.

What better way to prepare than to write about it.

So Goin’ Home is about Heaven and beyond.  I’ve thought from childhood that the much of the world’s perception of Heaven, though certainly idyllic, was really rather like a fairy tale or a Santa Claus story.  In a song entitled Heaven on the CD I write the following: (more…)

Alan Smallwood

In an earlier marriage my wife at the time chanted the Nichiren-Buddhist mantra “Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo”.  She was going through a particularly rough stretch in her life and she would go off and chant in our guest bedroom every day for a couple of hours.  She would always emerge from these sessions a different person – calm, centered, and quietly joyful.

I supported this practice at first because I saw that it worked wonders for her and over the couple of years that she chanted, I grew to love the sound of her voice pealing through the house, its mellifluous vibrations casting its positive spell over both our lives and probably even helping our plants to grow and be happy as well.

I think it was the thing I missed about her most when we parted.

Several years afterwards I began to work with a young musician named Alan Smallwood who came into my life at just the perfect time and brought to me in musical terms exactly what I seemed to be missing in my life.

As a musician, I had no real formal training.  Most of what I knew came from playing in bands, singing in folk groups and conducting student choirs.  I did study drums for several years with a fine teacher as a kid, but that was about it.

So there were many holes in my understanding and knowledge of this amazing world of music and consequently there were many holes in my music.  Alan Smallwood, several years younger than I, filled these holes with his genius, his fascination with the then developing new technology of synthesis and became my musical director and arranger/orchestrator for many of the musical projects that I created. (more…)

“Ouch, my arm hurts” you might say.  But you’d be wrong.  It’s not your arm that hurts; it’s your brain.  “Whoa, them’s fightin’ words.  It’s my arm.  I oughta know.” you retort.  Sorry, wrong again.  You’ve been duped – duped by a 5000 year-old misunderstanding of the origin and practice of pain.

It’s amazing the lies we’re taught and then live by for all our lives here on Planet Earth.

In a recent and most enlightening article in Sports Illustrated entitled The Truth About Pain: It’s In Your Head by David Epstein the old theories of pain’s beginnings in the injury itself and then traveling through the body’s nerve to the brain are trashed and re-theorized by modern medical science.

Relating to athletes in pain, a number of fascinating stories are told of athletes overcoming pain to complete their events, and these studies show conclusively, one after the other, that pain originates, not in the broken bone or the pulled muscle itself, but rather in the brain and not the injury. (more…)

This morning as I sit and drink my hot chocolate, I watch the sun come up pink on the buildings of a new day – and a city that never sleeps.  What a time for Inspirational music!  If the Missus weren’t still sleeping, I’d go into my studio, throw open the windows and crank up the volume.

Perhaps a song called Faith, perhaps Who Will Heal The World, perhaps Julia’s Upon The Mountain.  I’d play my ‘hood, Hell’s Kitchen, awake and stand on my terrace overlooking Lower Manhattan, the Village, Wall Street and the Statue Of Liberty and holler, “Wake up, New York!  We’re alive!

Last night I looked out on a new building springing up down where the Twin Towers once stood.  It was lit majestically in red, white and blue.  It stands where once, not so long ago, there was nothing but a hole in the ground.  Hope re-kindled.

This morning the sun rises on the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

I wasn’t in NYC ten years ago this morning.  At first I counted it a blessing.  I was in my other home in Colorado sleeping with the Missus when the telephone rang to tell us of the unbelievable news.  We spent the rest of the day, just like the rest of you, glued to our TV and watching the images over and over in disbelief as they burned into our brains for all time. (more…)

It strikes me this morning that we live in a world beset by confusions of principle.  As I mature (I prefer this term to “getting older”) I am more and more aware of evil’s influence in our world and the discord that it brings to our world.  I live in an industry that has been dominated by greed for decades and has consequently failed.  Inspirational music may be one shining light in the ashes of its decline, but sometimes I wonder how such a pure and noble idea such as music can be so riddled with chaos.

Stepping back as I have done over these last 5 years of Watchfire Music and investigating the whys and wherefores of this demise has taught me that it was an industry that needed to fail because it was in many ways corrupt.  Greed was king.  Artists were treated horribly by the people in power and money took precedence over music so much that the industry became a jumble of confusion.

Record stores closed, new innovations like the Internet were paid little attention, an industry where the creative artist stood at both its center and circumference was run by lawyers instead of creative people and even the artists got sucked into this chaos of greed and began to value the almighty dollar more than the almighty song.

Greed, at this moment of thought, strikes me as the reigning terror of not only my world, but the rest of the world’s confusion as well.  This comes as no surprise to anyone, I’m sure.  After all, it is considered one of life’s seven deadly sins.

Everywhere I look around me I see the influences of evil trying to confuse us into buying into its charms, its energies, its seeming power.  In the last two weeks we here in NYC have been ‘attacked’ by 2 natural disasters – first an earthquake, then a hurricane.

Let’s reconsider the term “natural” here.  What’s natural about all these disasters?  Don’t be duped for a moment into believing that it’s just nature taking its natural course.  It’s thought that controls the universe, not nature.  And disaster is not “natural”.

As I watched the hurricane bear down upon us and prepared both mentally and physically for its onslaught, it struck me that a hurricane was nothing but ego raging across our world, shouting, “Pay attention to me!  I am mighty. I am destructive!” and sucking in its energies from all around itself, running around in a vicious circle of self-destruction and, along the way, destroying everything in its path. (more…)

When I was a kid, my brother and I used to lie in bed at night and make up stupid lyrics to popular songs and giggle into the night.  One was:

My body lies over the ocean
My body lies over the sea
My body lies over the ocean
So bring back my body to me

I warned you that they were stupid.

Now today I’m writing lyrics on the same subject – hopefully with a little more content.  Here’s one drawn from a previous blog post on Sparks From The Fire.  The content, as explained in the post, has been capturing my imagination for months now and it finally all poured out in song form this past two weeks.

Both song and orchestration are now finished and will be presented in Julia Wade’s forthcoming CD, Silk Road, due to be released in early 2012.

Not her usual fare?  Perhaps, but watch for some fascinating new directions from this most special vocalist as she branches out and develops this new Classical/Crossover genre.

This song will be a guaranteed eye and ear opener.  Enjoy!

My Body
Music and Lyrics by Peter Link

I am not my body
My body is not me
I mean to live beyond it
In some capacity

I believe I’ve lived before it
Though memory fails
I cannot ignore it
Everything else
Pales in comparison
This wondrous invention
Of flesh and bone technology
Only belongs to me

Ladies choir

Temporarily

(more…)

A number of you have asked whatever happened to my Inspirational music project called Goin’Home. 

 Goin’ Home
A Gospel Cantata
On Heaven and Beyond
Additional Music and Lyrics by
Peter Link

Yes, there is a light, and yes, there is a tunnel.  Turns out it’s an extremely expensive project that has been in the works for nearly two years now.  Time and money have, for too long, been the obstacle.  Now we’re poised to overcome both.

The plan is to get the CD out for Christmas of 2011.  But first we have to finish a song and a half, mix the album, master it, design it, manufacture it and promote it.

Originally, I raised about a 3^rd of the money for the project from two very dear friends and supporters, Watchfire Music put in the another third and then time and money simply ran out before the project came to completion.  There’s a missing third. (more…)

Here’s a song in demand before its time – if that were possible.  If there was ever a time in our nation’s history for a shot of inspiration, it’s now.  Leadership seems to be stuck in a very unfortunate place ruled by ego and greed.  No matter what your political affiliation or taste, you can’t be liking what’s going down out there in Washington, D.C.  It seems like we need some new ideas, some new inspiration perhaps – something beyond the human will.  Here’s where Inspirational music can definitely help.

Last week in her church service (which gets broadcast around the world on the Internet) the Missus performed a new song fresh off the presses.  It has received tremendous feedback, the kind of response that makes all the blood, sweat and tears of this industry totally worth all the effort.  I’ll have to admit that we were not prepared for this response.  Who knew that this national occurrence would come?

Julia Wade (The Missus) chose the song to fit the sermon of that particular Sunday over a month ago, but it turned out to be the right panacea for the moment.  The trouble is, it is a new song that she has been working on for her new forthcoming CD, Silk Road, due to be released this coming Christmas season.  We have no single completed; we have no sheet music to sell – yet.

So we’re going to rush this one out to you ahead of its time.  We’ll release it as a single and its sheet music in the next couple of weeks.  I guess it’s just a song that demanded its own time – not on my schedule or Julia’s, but on its own schedule.   Like a baby who comes early – once it’s born, you simply have to stop all else and deal with it no matter what.

Here are only a few of the comments that we’ve received:

“We had the great good fortune to hear you perform “Even Now” in the Mother Church last Sunday.  We were traveling and just happened to be there in Boston. We both wept, it was SO gorgeous… even my husband cried — who is a Methodist!

Is there a recording of that song available?  My husband is an accomplished guitarist and he loved the guitar music so much too. Of course your singing was a gift!

Thank you so much for sharing your beautiful singing with all of us.  We will never forget how special that was!” –Carolyn (more…)