Previous to this month I had only ever written one Christmas song – a song recorded by the Jenny Burton Experience called Christmas In My Soul.  They say, in the music business, that the month of June is the month to write and begin one’s Christmas album, the preparation of such to be around 5-6 months.  Who can write Christmas songs in June?  What a silly notion.

This year the Missus has come up short in her search for the perfect Christmas song for her Christmas Day performance in church.  She had decided to employ a terrific Boston harpist and together with her organist, Bryan Ashley, keep it small and delicate in accordance with the spiritual implications of the morning.  Last year she used a brass quintet plus the church four manual pipe organ and blew the roof off, so this year she wanted to do something completely different.

But no song came to mind to fit the criteria.

While watching her go through her turmoil, I happened to mention one day several weeks ago that perhaps I could write one for her.  This was said in a fit of compassion for her plight while I was in the middle of the mad dash of the final throes of my own CD, Goin’ Home.

Seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, she grabbed at the offer and signed me up.  At first I thought, “Oh no, what have I gotten myself into?”  Where would I ever find the time to do this?

Then she came up with the notion that not only should I write it and arrange it for harp and keyboard, but that we should also record it and sell it for Christmas.  Then she came up with the idea that we should also do the sheet music for it and sell that too and let others use it in their churches for their Christmas services as well.  Then she came up with the idea that as long as we were going to do all that, she may as well use the song for her musical Christmas Presence lecture that she does around the country with lecturer, Chet Manchester.  This only moved the deadline for all this up by about 2 ½ weeks!  “Egads,” thought I.  “What have I done?”

So I did it.  In the next 3 days Julia will record the lead vocal to the orchestrated track, Craig Wagner, the designer, will design all the packaging, I’ll mix the song, the WFM staff will manufacture about a hundred singles to start with and by Thursday we’ll be selling this song that will receive it’s first performance in St. Louis on this coming Sunday.  Whew!

Will we make it?  With God’s help, we shall.

It’s a new world.  Things like this can be accomplished in a matter of weeks, a matter of days now.  The power of computers – the power of Mind.

The writing was fun and accomplished in a matter of 48 hours.  Once that was done, I knew we’d be OK.  The rest was just a matter of getting’ it done.

Julia directed me to the Bible for my text and chose the tried and true – think Handel.

“And his name shall be called Wonderful,
Counsellor,
The Mighty God,
The Everlasting Father,
The Prince of Peace
Yes his name shall be called Wonderful”

But I also wanted to shed some new light on the subject – not just rehash George Fredric.  Julia suggested that I combine the Bible text with some of the text of Mary Baker Eddy and her thoughts on the life of Jesus.  Julia and her big ideas!  Using text (non-lyrics) always makes good songwriting very difficult in that text is not metered and has a way of not particularly sounding very musical much less poetic.  On top of that the text of Mary Baker Eddy cannot be changed by even the alteration of a comma.

However the text she gave me was poetic to a certain extent so I thought I’d give it a go.  I had a great deal more content than I needed to begin with.  Julia can have her long-winded moments, so I had to do some clever editing.  Always easier to cut than to add.  While fooling around with several lyrical directions the line struck me like a lightening bolt — “And his name shall be called Wonderful,”

“What a great idea,” thought I.  Call the song Wonderful!

And so I did.

I was on my way…

Here is the finished lyric.  In another magical musical week you’ll be able to hear, sing, play, perform, buy and listen to the whole thing through the wonderful world of MIDI, LOGIC, the INTERNET and God’s gift of inspiration.

Hot off the presses!

Wonderful

Text by Mary Baker Eddy
Lyrics adapted from the Book of John
Music by Peter Link

The wakeful shepherd beholds
The first faint morning beams,
Ere cometh the full radiance
Of a risen day.

So shone the pale star
To the prophet-shepherds;
Yet it traversed the night, and came
Where, in cradled obscurity, lay
The Bethlehem babe,
And his name shall be called Wonderful,
Wonderful

The people that walked in darkness
Have seen a very great light:
For unto us a child is born,
And a son is given:
And the government shall be upon his shoulder:

And his name shall be called Wonderful,
Counsellor,
The Mighty God,
The Everlasting Father,
The Prince of Peace
Yes his name shall be called Wonderful

Now the Son of man is glorified,
Yes and God is glorified in him.
Verily, he says unto you,
“He that believeth on me,
The works that I do shall he do also;
And greater works than these shall he do;

If ye love me, keep my commandments.
And I will pray the Father,
And he shall give you another Comforter”

The prophet of today
Beholds in the mental horizon
The signs of these times,
The reappearance of the Christianity
Which heals the sick
And destroys error,
And no other sign shall be given.

When a new spiritual idea is borne to earth,
The prophetic Scripture of Isaiah is renewedly fulfilled:
Saying “Unto us a child is born, . . .”
“Unto us a child is born, . . .”

And his name shall be called Wonderful.”
Counsellor,
The Mighty God,
The Everlasting Father,
The Prince of Peace
Yes his name shall be called Wonderful
Wonderful
Yes he is wonderful
Wonderful!

Even More Inspiration

• Even Now
• Love Is The Reason For Living
• The Decline of Lyrical Craftsmanship – Part 1
• Nothing
• You Must Remember This!
• My Body

Dmitri Shostakovich

I spent last evening with the Missus in what has now become my favorite place to be on the planet – Carnegie Hall.  Inspirational music rose to another high point with a visit from the Philadelphia Orchestra to our fair city.  The Missus and I were given gift tickets (better n’ Christmas) and though we sat up in the nose-bleed section, 4^th Tier and no place for vertigo sufferers, I was amazed once again by the acoustics of this wondrous concert hall.

When I first came to NYC back in my early twenties to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, I got a job at night selling orange drink in the tiers of Carnegie Hall and then eventually bar tending in its intermission café.  Though I made decent money in pay and tips, the real payment for me was the fact that for two years I got to see every concert presented in the main hall during that time.

I could fill a book with the stories and memories of those evenings and matinees.  It was certainly a huge and unexpected part of my education as an artist.  I had a place where I would stand in the back of the main floor and knew all the ushers who dubbed that spot, “Pete’s Place”.  In those two years I saw and heard a lifetime of great performances.

Since then I have had the great fortune to visit this hallowed hall many times and often had great seats.  Last night was, in fact, the first time I’ve ever watched a performance from the 4^th Tier.  But I must say I loved it.  There you sit above the orchestra looking down on the body of players and instruments and can watch the bowings of the strings and the bassoonists prepping their reeds and the timpanist tuning his kettle drums and the bass bassoonist endlessly counting bars of rests waiting for her big moment.

And the acoustics are simply magnificent.  No sound in the human hearing spectrum suffers from distance to the stage in either volume or clarity.  The high end of the 9’ Steinway Concert Grand sparkled and danced through my delighted eardrums during Lang Lang’s magical encore of Franz Liszt’s La Campanella.  The double basses and cello section both roared and warmed the walls and the piccolos cut through the distance like a knife.

Gabriel Faure

And the music!  Oh my goodness, the music.  I was not particularly familiar with Gabriel

Fauré’s Pavane in F-sharp Minor, Op. 50, but I am now.  It’s melody still soars through my brain and the way he harmonizes that melody in his orchestration was simply genius originality.

Lang Lang’s glorious performance of Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 19 was like soft hands smoothing silk sheets.  This piano concerto, written when Beethoven was a teenager and in his early twenties is certainly portent for things to come from the master, but was not my particular cup of tea when it came to Beethoven.  It struck me as far too derivative and never really grabbed my ear and imagination except in the beginning of the second movement.  But who am I to complain about Ludwig – the man was a teeny-bopper when he wrote it.  Pretty amazing…

Ludwig Himself

It was the Dmitri Shostakovich Symphony No. 10 in E Minor, Op. 93 that I was really up for, however.  During it, I literally sat on the edge of my seat throughout in rapt amazement of the way he handled his orchestra.  I felt I was in a master class of orchestration as he spun out his themes evoking Russia at the time of Stalin’s death.  In the music was the war and the heartbreak and the devastation and the tonality of the Russian mind all captured in the double basses and cellos.  I would never need to travel back in time to experience that difficult period in history.  I was there last night in his music.

I was swept up by the beauty of his composition throughout the first half of the symphony and then, strangely enough, I found myself getting bored and asking, “Where are we going with all this?”  It seemed like themes would begin to be developed and then rejected as new ideas sprang forth.  I began to lose continuity and the end of the symphony seemed like a list of unrelated ideas tied together with only the sadness of a lost soul.  I was always swept up by the pure orchestration mastery of both the Philly and Dmitri’s sound, but I’ll have to admit that he lost me a bit compositionally.

I found myself thinking, “Well, he’s no Stravinsky” though he was a contemporary of Stravinsky’s.  If I sound critical, well perhaps I am a bit, but nit-picking the masters is legal, I suppose.  It’s a bit like booing the multi-million dollar baseball star at a ball game.

Then later I read the following in my program regarding Shostakovich’s work:

The personal meaning of the Allegretto is encoded in the music. This was one of several pieces from the latter part of Shostakovich’s career in which he spelled out his name musically. D[mitri] SCH[ostakowitsch], as it is spelled in German, corresponds to the pitches D, E-flat, C, and B-natural in German. (Other composers have done similar things since as far back as the Middle Ages, Bach most notably.) Shostakovich’s initials appear at first in the upper woodwinds near the start of the movement. The motto is later taken up by the cellos and basses, which leads to a forte solo horn theme that encrypts Nazirova’s (his girlfriend) name: The pitches are E-A-E-D-A (corresponding to E-L(a)-Mi-R(e)-A). The two motifs are combined at the end of the movement.

I guess I’m just not a fan of this kind of intellectual approach to musical composition.  I deeply believe in emotional story-telling, in the depth of the soul and height of the spirit and clarity of the beauty of the moment.  To write as a puzzle maker puzzles me and in the end, loses me.

I want to be moved, not intellectually challenged.  Who cares how his name is spelled and how that relates to music?  I don’t.

And looking back, that’s what lost me in the performance of his symphony.  I lost his connection to the Russian soul because he was off playing with word puzzles while Stalin was dying and the world was recovering from the most tragic war in its history.  Rather he had stuck to his brilliance and written about that instead of his name’s initials.

My rant for the day…

Did this ruin the evening for me?  Not at all.  I am blessed to live down the street from this magnificent music room.  I am blessed for the opportunity to hear and study this wondrous orchestra.  I am blessed to sit in the nose-bleed section and float off on the wings of the masters and their music.

I am blessed to work in the industry and play a part in the grand scheme of music.

Even More Inspiration

• I Stood In The Wings… Part 3
• I Stood In The Wings… Part 2
• The Changing Scene
• Gabriel, Come Blow Your Horn
• Even Now
• The Logic of Logic II

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

“Thank you Julia and Peter for your loving support.  That new solo is so right for what we’re going through… It was as though you were singing to us!

Thank you.  And thank you, Peter.  Deepfelt message.

And we’ve already heard from family in South Africa who listened and loved the Internet relay.

Your support means so much to us.” -Love, K.

In the meantime, here’s the lyric to tide you over…

Even Now
Music and Lyrics by Peter Link

Even now
The sun will rise
The morning come
The day begin
Even now
When all seems lost
And darkness falls over all
Even now
God’s watching over you
Here in the dawn’s first light

At every turn
In every need
With every breath you take

Even now
With cross to bear
He’s always there
In simple truth
Even now
With heavy heart
His love will lighten your way
Even now
He soothes the salted wound
And eases your troubled mind

At every turn
In every need
With every breath you take

God loves you
Hallelujah
God frees you
Hallelujah

Even now
With broken dreams
And weary soul
He’ll carry you
Even now
When all has failed
And mountains are in your way
Even now
He stands a sentinel
The shepherd of all you do

Your every turn
Your every prayer
And every move you make

Your every turn
Your every need
And every breath you take

God loves you
Remember these words that I sing
God loves you
God frees you
Hallelujah

Even More Inspiration

• Wonderful
• You Must Remember This!
• Love Is The Reason For Living
• My Body
• Nothing
• Spiritual Scientist

Coupled with a hot Mac computer and a few other relatively inexpensive pieces of hardware, this software system has taken the place of the entire recording studio of yore amazingly for the price of $499.

For 25 years I owned a major recording studio here in NYC and operated 3 rooms for various recording spending, over time, a couple of million dollars on equipment to keep up with the times and keep the shop running.

Today all that has changed dramatically.  Today I record symphony orchestras in my son’s converted bedroom in my apartment.  Of course I’ve put some serious money into the acoustics of the room including an isolation booth that fits five, but essentially, I’ve got everything I ever had before and more, for infinitely less.

This is one of the few pluses in our rapidly changing music world.  Technology, especially digital technology, has made a tremendous impact on our lives in music.  And fortunately, I’ve had the wherewithal to keep up with the technology and take advantage of its wonders.

My studio, Link Recording Studios, which used to require 4 Mac computers to run it at full capacity, now runs on one dual quad 3.2 processor with 16 GB of ram running at 64 bit.  For those of you who are somewhat computer challenged, that’s not even the hottest new one on the market today, though it certainly is extremely powerful.

I teach Logic and yet I’m still learning it.  The learning curve is steep in that they give you ten different ways to achieve the same task, but after a while you figure our what your favorite two of those ten ways are and choose your methods accordingly.  Logic is logical.  If you’ve worked on other DAW systems you can swing over to Logic and know your way around it in a matter of hours enough to record.

I recently helped a young composer who was doing a movie score for a film house and had only first bought the program 2 months ago.  Though he still has a lot of holes in his knowledge and understanding of the program, he was making music, and good music using sampled and very realistic orchestra.

Every day when I walk into my studio and hit 5 switches to power things up, I breathe a sigh of gratitude for this wondrous time where I can sit by myself and make the music of my dreams in elegant, comfortable surroundings.  The systems of orchestration, mixing and especially editing are so far advanced from just 15 years ago in a tape machine world as to make those past days ancient and archaic.

I remember days of standing at a tape machine editing ¼” tape with pieces of tape taped to the wall, hanging around my shoulders and organized in little batches on my machine while I hand cut and rearranged with tape and editing block.  God help me if I sneezed.  It would take a week to put it all back together.

Today I take mouse in hand, highlight the section of music in the screen of my choosing and simply drag it where it belongs.  If I don’t like what I hear, I simply hit Re-do and try again.  It’s a better world.

In the old days, when it was time to mix a song we would book 24 hours in the studio to mix one song and then an extra 3-4 hours the next morning in addition.  A 24-hour mix is extremely rough on the ears.  By the end of day both producer and engineer are exhausted and brain dead and not at all trusting as to what they are hearing anymore, so the wiser ones would go home, get some sleep and then come back and finish with fresher ears the next morning.

Today, by the time I get to mix day, the song is already 90% mixed and remembered in my computer’s automation.  Every little move and nuance of what I want to hear is recorded and performed by my computer as set up by me previous to the final day.  The final day comes and I spend anywhere from 2-4 hours finishing up.  It’s a better world.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea.  Occasionally, there are technical breakdowns, and they are no fun, but actually running my own studio where I’m the only engineer means far less problems than ever before when several engineers worked the hardware equipment.  Then, I had a regular maintenance man come in every two weeks to fix that which was broken or in the process of breaking.  Today, I am that maintenance man and I’ve learned to only buy software from companies who have great customer service.  9 times out of 10 I’m able to fix problems with a half hour phone call.

It’s a better world.

With all my complaints about the condition of today’s music world, here’s one aspect that really works and is actually miraculous in its results and costs.

Technology has its upside and downside in today’s world.  I could certainly write another couple of posts on how technology has ruined songwriting and record-making today.  But that’s perhaps for another day.  Today, this morning as I look to a weekend of intensive work in my studio on a new CD project, I’m simply grateful for this wonderland of creation and imagination that supports my every musical thought.

I often wish I could take Johann Sebastian Bach on a 3-hour tour of my studio.  He was, in his day, a true technologist.  He would simply gasp in wonder at what was available to him at his fingertips.

And then he would sit down and get to work.

Even More Inspiration

• Gabriel, Come Blow Your Horn
• Even Now
• WFM Listening Room — Series II Opener
• Spiritual Scientist
• By The Numbers?
• Chanting/Enchanting

As I stood in the back of the room with the Missus and watched and listened and teared-up and danced, I was aware that we had reached, yet again, new heights.  This was an evening to be remembered.  (As if all the others weren’t?)  This was quickly becoming the new standard.

Here were four master musicians (Chieli Minucci, Philip Hamilton, Alan Grubner and Jenny Burton) taking us on rides of wonder, flights of daring, and journeys into the music of their minds revealing places never before visited.  Here was music pouring out of the minds and souls of master musicians – the kind of experiences that make us mere mortals sit in fascination and stand and scream in exhaustion when it’s over.

Standing ovations a-plenty:  In this day of seemingly obligatory standing ovations, no matter what the talent, here was musical number after musical number ending with the audience jumping to their feet in honor of what had just been given.

All the hard work that we have put into this, all the hassles, all the mental mind-games that we have played to pull it all off in the middle of this world music crisis were paid off.

Now I can begin to prepare Series III, starting in July, with the renewed energy of that night, those people, those musicians, that promise.

583 Park Avenue rocked.  The audience got ten times their money’s worth and went home with music coursing through their minds and hearts.  And, after all, ain’t that the point of all this?

A woman came up to me afterwards and wildly exclaimed, “I had forgotten how to listen to music!  I used to do it all the time, but I’ve gotten away from it in these last years and never knew how much I missed it.  Tonight, just sitting here, focused on the wonders of these players and the intensity of Jenny’s commitment just brought me back to myself.  I won’t miss another of these.   Thank you!”

Now if that isn’t a quote to close Series II, I don’t know what is!  She got it.  So did the rest as well.

Jenny Burton’s act was based on the theme of “She’s back”.  That’s the end of that.  It’s now official.  She never went away from us.  She’s the Jenny of old / the Jenny of new.  Still the thrill, but now with a somehow deeper life resolution poured into each moment.  Her new closer, Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes spoke well of it.

All my instincts, they return
And the grand facade, so soon will burn
Without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside

In your eyes
The light the heat
In your eyes
I am complete
In your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
In your eyes
The resolution of all the fruitless searches
In your eyes
I see the light and the heat
In your eyes
Oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light
The heat I see in your eyes

Was she talkin’ to God? Perhaps.  But to me she was simply speaking from the heart to her devoted audience.  She accomplished her mission.  I watched her.  She touched the light.

And Chieli and Friends…  I don’t know where to start.  These guys’ instruments (Chieli – Guitar, Alan – Violin and Philip — Hand Drum and Vocals) are simply extensions of their musical minds – whatever they think comes out in musical mastery.  This is what all the practice comes to.

While you and I were out playing baseball when we were kids, these were the kids who were home alone in their rooms workin’ on their chops, playing those scales – lost in the world of their music.

When I was a kid one of my best friends was a little boy who was a polio victim.  He was a tiny, skinny little kid whose left arm dangled like a limp rope from his shoulder.  He had an imagination at war just like I did.  We could sit in a dark closet and shoot the Germans for hours after school, but he always had to leave at 4:30 to go home because of his weakness.

He went home each day and went up to his room to rest, I suppose, but up there he practiced the saxophone.  He grew up to be David Sanborn, one of the world’s great saxophone players over the last several decades.

Chieli, Philip and Alan are these special kinds of humans — men who have mastered their instruments and are now reaping the rewards of all that practice.

Actually, it is we who reap the rewards.

They’ll all be back – and more.

Stay tuned for Series III – coming this summer.

Even More Inspiration

• WFM Listening Room Series II – 3
• By The Numbers?
• Gabriel, Come Blow Your Horn
• The Logic of Logic II
• It’s A Small World And Gettin’ Smaller n’ Smaller
• Progress Afoot

“Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.  So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.  Therefore is the name of it called Babel.” – Genesis 11

More and more I’m convinced these days that much of the world’s problems lie in language.  If we all spoke the same language, the world would be a better place.  As human beings we all want basically the same things – a full stomach, a roof over our head, love in our life, a chance to succeed and our freedoms of expression.  Most people who have these things are basically happy.  Happy people don’t make war.  There’s nothing to war about.

I’m trying to keep this simple without being simplistic.  But if this were true…

“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.” – Genesis 11

…I think we’d be having a much better time of it.  Consider politics.  How many wars have started throughout history because of a misunderstanding of what was said?  My uneducated guess would have to be somewhere around 90%.

“War is what happens when language fails” – Margaret Atwood

And if we can’t speak the same language to begin with, what have we?

War has got to be the worst mistake of the human race.  As long as there are wars, how can we as a race ever evolve?  It is the lowest of ideas.

Certainly one of the greatest causes of war throughout history has been our differences of religious beliefs.  And yet, in my own study of the world’s religions, I’ve most often found a commonality of belief uniting us all – only separated by the misapprehension of language.  When it gets right down to it, I find that at the center of every religion I’ve ever studied are basic principles that say and reach for the same thing.  The words chosen to represent these universal ideas are often strange to many because they are expressed in unfamiliar terms and so fear of being different creeps in and makes creeps of us all.

Even within the Christian religion there are problems of language that separate us.  How the Bible is interpreted is a constant source of unrest even among Protestant religions.  And those interpretations are almost always based on readings in the English language of texts that are often translations of previous translations handed down over the centuries.  We end up mincing words to a fault when what we should really be doing is agreeing on basic concepts.

If we all spoke the same language, how much easier that would be.

“And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they all have one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” – Genesis 11

Makes sense.  Now all we have to do is work it.  But that’s the hard part, isn’t it?  How do we all speak the same language?

Until we figure this out, let’s try to be patient with one another and learn to recognize when it is actually language that is getting in the way.  Let’s try to see through the language to the truth and not fear others if they don’t sound like us.

It’s a start.

In the meantime, there is one universal language that we all understand and could be much better used to communicate – music.

“Music is the language of the spirit.  It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.” – Kahlil Gibran

“Music is the universal language of mankind” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.” –William Shakespeare

Even More Inspiration

• Spiritual Scientist
• Even Now
• Straight ‘A’s
• How To Handle A Liar
• The Atheist
• Tempo

Well, it turns out that our neighborhood is the world.

One of the great things about NYC is the quality of teaching in the arts.  This is where they come to do it and so this is where the great teachers are as well.  “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” the song goes.  And that’s because, especially in the arts, this city sits atop the flagpole.  The talent here, especially in music, is wondrous and has been so for decades.

But times are changing.  Now Nashville rules the Country Music world, Los Angeles rules the film world and just about any big city in the country has its splendid art houses, concert halls and learning institutions.  The possibilities are expanding as each day goes by.

Even the smaller cities and towns across the country are getting on board as the world grows smaller and smaller.

Now, in this Internet age, that intercommunication is expanding even faster.

Many of you wrote in and expressed your frustration and disappointment at not being close enough to partake in the WFM Learning Lab simply because you lived beyond easy and affordable access to NYC.  However, some of you refused to succumb to limitation and suggested alternate possibilities to get what you so dearly want and need.

One woman is coming for 2 ½ weeks for a 3 hour per day intensive covering 3 different classes.  We’ve established a place to stay at about a fifth the normal NYC hotel price just a block away.  She’ll take classes for 3 hours a day, six days a week and go back to her quiet retreat each day and do homework for six hours.  By the time she leaves those 17 days later, she’ll be a new artist with a whole new set of tools with which to pursue her art.

Another man studies Vocal Performance with me on Skype and on the telephone.  We meet for an hour each week and he’s improving dramatically through these lessons.  At first I wondered how it could be done, but he sends me MP3s of his church solos and we sit and analyze them and discuss the problems.  It hasn’t mattered to each of us one bit that we aren’t in the same room together and hasn’t minimized the work in any way.

We’re now teaching as many classes from a distance as we are locally.

We’re even looking into ways to teach some of the more difficult classes on line now as the world shrinks before us.

So don’t let distance be a limit.  Distance, time and space aren’t real anyway, so let’s look at ways of overcoming the belief in them – especially in our ability to learn new things.

It’s the Information Age.  That means that information has never been more accessible to human kind.  Now it’s available to you, no matter where you might live.

Check it out!

The WFM Learning Lab.

Even More Inspiration

• WFM Learning Lab – Grand Opening!
• Watchfire Music Learning Lab
• Gabriel, Come Blow Your Horn
• The Changing Scene
• By The Numbers?
• Even Now

Why?  Like I said, the problem is complex.  File sharing does not help.  The fact that many now find their music free and accessible on the Internet at any time and immediately also is huge.  Sometimes I think people are just too busy to listen these days and when they can, there are a myriad free ways to do so and access what they’re looking for.

So we’re all looking at alternate ways of doing business.  At Watchfire Music we are shifting more towards being a digital sheet music company and producer of ancillary music events.  Hence the WFM Listening Room and the WFM Learning Lab.

It’s a changing time and we’re having to change with it – whether we like it or not.

These changes have required wholesale changes within the company.  Focus, leadership, staffing, direction and the day-to-day implementation of just about everything we do has come under careful scrutiny as we fight to survive in a world of evolution.

So what it has meant to me, personally, is really a doubling of the basic work ethic at a time when we were already maxed out and maxing out our wondrous staff.  On top of that, less sales equals less staff, so for many of us our work-load has doubled and tripled as staffing has diminished.  Sleep becomes a thing of the past, people are more stressed, more fearful about their jobs, and the management of company morale becomes just one more issue to contend with daily.

Fortunately, we here at WFM do this because we love it and deeply respect the endeavor of inspiring minds and hearts.  Also your daily letters and notes of gratitude and praise are always a great lift.  That’s one of the great things about show business – there’s often applause.  Sometimes the applause is enough.  Sometimes ya’ gotta eat.

So we plow on.  Oh we sell recorded music, but not nearly on the level that we once expected and not nearly as much as we did just 5 years ago.

I don’t believe it’s our product.  We get letters every day from inspired buyers gushing their gratitude for our inspired words and musical notes.  I will tell you that every CD that we sell has inspired yours truly at one time or another and I keep going back to this music for more.  That’s why, as Creative Director of WFM, I picked it up in the first place.  The music is Inspirational.

So we plow on.  I know I already said that, but it’s what we do.  We come into a mountain of work each day and just plow through it.  I’m sure you do too in your endeavors.

I get asked about once a week, “How do you manage to accomplish so much?”  The answer is simple: hard work.  Hard work and a great dose of creative fulfillment.  We all get great joy out of what we do.  We work together well in a happy environment.  We feed our staff great healthy snacks all day long and keep their tummies happy.  We praise them for every little thing they do that adds to the effectiveness of WFM and we all do the grunt work.  There are no prima donnas in this company.  We all work together and get it done.

I just love our staff.  Most of us are spread around the country and work from home.  We communicate on the phone, through Google lists and email and the separation occasionally has its drawbacks, but basically works well.

Most of all, we try to run our business in a non-emotional environment of mutual support.  We work with a lot of artistic people and world belief is that these kinds of people can be highly emotional.  It comes with the territory.  But we try to diffuse that emotion early, stay away from the stress and offer a happy, quiet workplace that is conducive to concentration.

We set goals daily and expect everyone to fulfill those goals and work along side of them to make sure that it happens effectively.  Fortunately we’re still a small company and can do that.  It’s gotta be tougher as you get bigger.  I look forward to that challenge.

In short, we’re getting’ it done. We fall behind.  We catch up.  We work overtime to do so.  Just like the rest of the world.  Every day we turn out something new – something a little different.  We get off on the creativity.  Just yesterday our site manager, Craig Wagner, designed a new and innovative flyer (entitled New! New! New!).  When we first saw it, we all stopped our work and celebrated his creativity in the kitchen, ate some of my toasted, buttered, salted cashews, drank some Pepsi and then went back to work.  A happy family.

We celebrated Craig and his infinite creativity.  He was one of us — even though he was down in South Carolina.  He was Watchfire.

Today we pull off Show #4 of Series II of the WFM Listening Room – Julia Wade and Jimmy Roberts.  We’re inches away from selling out!  Bigger crowds mean more work.  But this will be a show to remember.  Jimmy’s a real pro and Julia’s debuting her new title song from her next CD, Silk Road.  It’ll be a night to remember.

‘Scuse me, I gotta get to work…

Even More Inspiration

• Even Now
• Looking Back on 2010
• Kickstarter.com Campaign – I
• It’s A Small World And Gettin’ Smaller n’ Smaller
• Love Is The Reason For Living
• WFM Listening Room Series II – 2