I look at my life and think, “Hey, this is great.  Let the good times roll.”  And then sometimes I have these dreams where I’m back in college and I’m in my early twenties and, though I’m always a little lost, I’m young again.  I wake up startled to find that a whole lotta years have passed and the years seem to be moving even faster to some nebulous end.

I remember my dad saying that his weeks had become like days, his months like weeks and his years like months.  That was always a bit bizarre to me then, but I’m beginning to understand it now.  Time is, after all, just a perception.  Even Einstein said and proved that time isn’t real.

So if it’s not real then how do we make it up to our advantage?  “How do we slow it down and enjoy the now-ness of life more?” is probably the real question.

And there in the question probably lies the answer.  As always, Be Here Now.  The wise ones say that there is no time – only now.  I believe that, even understand it at times.  I try to live the concept, but don’t very often succeed.  Life just gets going too fast and I get caught up in the whirlwind of it all and then the time really rushes on.

When I went across the world doing the Siyahamba project, time did seem to slow down considerably.  Why?  I think because I was doing things differently every day, differently than my everyday life.  There were new people, places and experiences that forced me to focus more, challenged me to focus more on the moment at hand and by its very nature forced me to live more in the now.

Our normal daily lives tend to be somewhat repetitive – we get up, we eat, we go to work, we eat, etc.  Doing this every day, our days and then weeks seem to begin to blur together and time does seem to speed up.  Is it really doing this?  Is the clock on the wall ticking faster?  We say ‘no’, but time is just perception and if our perception of it speeds up, then who’s to say the seconds aren’t ticking off faster?

We go to sleep at night and when we sleep well, it seems like just 5 minutes went by.  Does time speed up in our unconscious state?  Not necessarily for those who are awake.  So time is relative to the mental state of the individual.

This means that I control my perception of time in my mind.  I am in charge, not time.  My ability to stay in the moment, to live each moment fully, giving no focus to the regret of the past or the fear of the future is my salvation in this time conundrum.

My 2.5 to 3 hours of time spent each day writing this blog is a case in point.  I do it from about 4:30 AM to 7:30 each morning.  The phone don’t ring, the world is mostly asleep and I am left to visit with my imagination, memories and new thoughts.  I get lost from time, I’m unaware until I’m finished.  Then I’m aware.

When I’m in the studio deeply into the music sometimes, 6 hours can go by like a moment or two.  I come out of my reverie back to consciousness (or perhaps back from real consciousness) usually because some bodily function demands it.  I’m startled to see the clock and how much time has passed by.

So in these cases time speeds up when I’m concentrated and in the now-ness of creativity.  It does not slow down.  This is the opposite of what I was saying earlier in case you’re not paying attention.  Is that goofy or what?  When I’m involved in the moment, time slows down; when I’m super involved, time speeds up and almost disappears.

So much for time.  If it’s so relative and so much a result of our perception and so changeable, then why do we give it such a place of honor or importance in our lives?  This can only be our mortal mistake — something that we were taught to do by a world that misapprehends the truth.

On the other hand, we need to be on time.  Half the talent in NYC I won’t work with because they don’t know how to be on time.  People who are late drive me crazy and I won’t deal with them and cannot trust them.  To be timely is a plus; to be late is a fault.

So we can’t throw our clocks away.  We must live in this world of time and yet, at the same time, live outside of it, without it.  It would be great to just throw the clocks away and live.  Sleep when we were tired, eat when we were hungry, work when we were motivated.  Would life then become more timeless?  Certainly so.

But that’s just not going to happen for the better part of humanity.  We are stuck to the ticking clock counting down the seconds of our lives.  Scarey when you think about it.  Like I said, I like it here.  I wanna stay!  Yet mortal law gets up in your face sometimes and screams, ”You only have so much time!”

Have I written myself into a corner here?  No, I don’t think so.  Though I don’t, as usual, have all the answers, I do have one summation from this morning’s line of thought.

Time is only important when it needs to be important.  Otherwise, give it no importance.  It’s perceptual, so if it’s bothering you, change your perception.  Get on with it.  Don’t regret the time; don’t fear the time.  If we do, we’re just simply in error – simply making a mistake.

So in answer to the original question, “Who knows where the time goes?”

Who cares?

Even More Inspiration

• WFM Listening Room – Series II Finale
• The Road To Inspiration — Peter Link and Julia Wade
• The Ira Awards Part 4
• Experiments of the Sub-conscious Mind / A Five Part Series — Part 2 – Dreams
• Experiments of the Sub-conscious Mind / A Five Part Series — Part 1 – Sleep
• Much Ado About Nothing

I’ve spent the weekend trying to answer the stacks of mail.  I’ve got several days to go.  In fact, I’d better get back to the task before me right now.

In the meantime I’m…

Grateful
Music and Lyrics by Peter Link

I wake up every morning
And I am grateful
I’m alive
And every time I count my blessings
I realize that I am here with You

And when each night
I turn the light down
And thank You for my life
Sometimes it is the only way
I know how to pray
I’m grateful for this day

And when I don’t remember
To give it up and thank You lord
I lose a little life perspective
And drift around
Till sense has been restored

And when the slings and arrows
Of great misfortune come my way
I try to stop and count my blessings
And just be grateful
Grateful every day

For a heart that beats
For the breath that rises
For a child that sleeps
In his mother’s arms
For the love of life
Grateful for the way my life has turned
Thankful for the little things I’ve learned
Grateful for the wisdom of the wise

I wake up every morning
And I am grateful
I’m alive
And every time I count my blessings
I realize that I am here with you

And when the slings and arrows
Of great misfortune come my way
I try to stop and count my blessings
And just be grateful
Grateful every day

Even More Inspiration

• The Road To Inspiration — Peter Link and Julia Wade
• Kickstarter.com Campaign – I
• WFM Listening Room – Series II Finale
• WFM Listening Room Series II – 3
• Progress Afoot
• Life At Its Best

Norm

Many people worked together to make this project become the success that it is, but one man was its leader – and very few know about his work because he took no credit.  He is the Producer of the Annual Meeting for the Church and the Executive Producer and visionary of the Siyahamba Project.

I have known Norm Bleichman for over 4 decades now and am blessed to call him my good friend.  We were roommates in college and shared many of the same interests in music, sports and show biz in general.  We also had a popular college campus radio show back then called The Blinkman Show where Norm and I with a cast of total morons would perform send-ups of Superman and Batman comics complete with musical underscoring.

We laughed a lot.  We discovered the Beatles together.  We MC’d many of the campus shows as a stand-up comedy act – he the funny guy, me the straight man.  I say with complete sincerity that Norm Bleichman is the funniest guy I’ve ever known.  He has kept me laughing throughout a lifetime and that’s a lot to say for a friend.

After college he went off to fight for our country in the Viet Nam war while I became a draft dodger.  After the war, he came home to work at his dad’s plastic factory while I came to NYC and started a successful show biz career.  I’ve always said that one of the best things I’ve ever done was to help convince Norm that he could be funny on a national scale and get him to finally quit plastics and go to work as a successful comedy writer in Hollywood.  Doing this, he kept millions of people laughing for many years.

For the past couple of decades he has worked at a myriad of jobs for the Christian Science Mother Church, it’s worldwide headquarters in Boston.

Over the years we’ve gone back to our college and re-lived our college days doing our stand-up act at reunions and celebrations.  We made ‘em laugh and joyed in our pro abilities to knock our old friends dead.  I, of course, stood by deadpanned while Norm kept ‘em laughing with his special wit and cornball antics.

Comedy, for me, has degraded lately into how dumb can I be and how much like a toilet can I be.  I could get up on my soapbox and discuss the loss of wit in comedy today, but I won’t bore you with that.  Suffice it to say that Norm’s sense of humor, which is astute, is always about wit, the intelligent and obtuse, and the offbeat, but sensitive special sense of funny.

Occasionally I’ve been asked to write comedy.  Whenever that happens, I always just try to channel Norm and think the way he thinks.  Between Norm and Neil Simon, I’ve learned a lot about what makes funny.  It’s a gift – to make people laugh.

One story I’ve always enjoyed telling:  I shall preface it for you youngins with this fact: “Fanny” was a 1961 film drama that was adapted from the 1954 Broadway musical “Fanny” and starred Leslie Caron, Horst Buchholz, Maurice Chevalier, and Charles Boyer.  It received multiple Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor in a Leading Role.

Norm and I, in high school, sang in Jack Eyerly’s chorus together.  One tense night as we all stood on stage perched on our chorus risers waiting for the curtain to go up at the beginning of a performance, the curtain kept getting held, for god knows what, for a ridiculous amount of time.  The longer we waited, the more Mr. Eyerly fumed.  The more Jack fumed the more nervous the 60 of us got.  As the tensions mounted on stage and the joy of the performers was threatened, suddenly Norm stepped out of the front row of the choir and walked over to the piano.  He turned and faced the choir.  “I shall now play the love theme from Fanny” he announced.  At that, he sat down hard on the piano keys.

Of course the high school choir broke into gales of laughter, the tensions completely evaporated in Norm’s A flat augmented added 6th, 9th and 13th demented butt chord, the curtain opened, and the show began.

Even Jack Eyerly laughed.

That was Norm.  They say that great comedy is in the timing and he’s always had it.  It’s a big part of a good laugh.  Norm is a deep appreciator of the technical side of comedy.  As a pro he has studied it and considered it deeply.  He works at his craft still every day making those around him laugh and, while they’re at it, see the brighter side of life.  When we’re together he makes me think funny and we’re constantly trying to make each other laugh with our wit.  I’m the amateur; he’s the pro, but when I can get a laugh out of Norm, it makes my day.

And so when he first called me to discuss the Siyahamba project, I jumped at the chance of working with him once again.  This was not to be a comedy, but an intensely inspirational event.  But working with him, he kept us all laughing.  The experience was always joyful.  He’s a well-organized, totally pro producer and the work reflects his leadership.  He also was the videographer on several of the segments and directed the video portion of the project.

Ultimately, he was the visionary.  He pointed the way and the rest of us followed.  He inspired all of us with his gentle loving touch, his specificity of organization and his solid sense of humor.  It was a great experience in the making.  And along the way we had more than a few laughs.

That laughter, Norm’s touch, is reflected thoroughly in the project.  The joy that one feels in watching it is the same joy we all felt in making it.  It pours through the music and the images and the spirit of the people.  It is about unity.  It could not have come together without Norm’s leadership.

Even More Inspiration

• Grateful
• Kickstarter.com Campaign – I
• Light At The End Of The Tunnel
• Even Now
• Hitting The Wall
• Gettin’ It Done

We drove slowly through the streets of Masiphumelele, a South African township, ever so slowly and carefully. Its residents filled the narrow streets, men hanging out in bunches on the street corners, women bustling to and fro seeming to be doing all the work, and children, as usual, playing their fast and furious street games excitedly and joyfully.

The poverty was everywhere like I knew it would be. The homes were, in fact, nothing more than corrugated cardboard lean-tos with occasional tin roofs, if they were lucky.  The electricity, I could see, was hand connected to each “home” by a naked wire that ran up to a main cable stretched overhead.

Many homes had no front doors to speak of and so I could just look right into the semi-privacy of darkened living rooms. An occasional out-of-place pink stucco house would bless a street, but more often a ruin or two, too dilapidated for anybody to live in, sat empty and rotting.

(Watch the video we made… Siyahamba Project on YouTube)

Initially known as Site 5, the township was renamed Masiphumelele by its residents, which is a Xhosa word meaning “We will succeed”. In 1990, about 8000 residents lived in the area, mostly in shacks, but by 2005, it had grown to 26,000 people.

I needed to see this place. It was an experience I had to have. I was both fascinated and deeply saddened to see our brothers and sisters living in these conditions.

Two total anomalies: Every home seemed to glow with the blue light of a television and every person over the age of 14 seemed to be carrying a cell phone. I was told that these were the status of success.

In this village there is an arts center for the children run by a wonderful man named Chris April. They say when this man walks down the streets of Masiphumelele, he is just a kid magnet. In each block the kids drop whatever they’re doing and run to meet him shouting his name and walking the block with him, behind him, around him.

Every Sunday he piles about 40 of the kids into two beat-up old 9 passenger vans and drives them to the Sunday School where today I am recording them singing their hymn, Siyahamba, in their native language, Zulu. When they arrive it’s like the little clown car at the circus where the clowns just keep getting out one by one until you wonder where they are all coming from. I expect to see a manhole under the car when it drives away to park.

They had rehearsed their song for weeks with Chris and had brought their drums to play. I met Chris then, a man of around 50 years with a twinkle the size of the Milky Way and a shock of white hair on top and chin. He could have been a trim Kris Kringle.  He governed his kids with an air of disciplined seriousness that totally meant business – clearly the patriarch of this family.

After church the children joined the adults in the main church edifice for the recording.  We put the kids in the first 4 or 5 rows with the adults filling in behind. We tried to mix the white and black, but the black clearly out-numbered the white.

I was the Man From America that they had heard about over and over – the man from America who was coming all the way across the world just to record them. They stared unabashedly at me as if I were some god come down from a cloud. When I put my headphones on in front of them, there was a soft “oooh” of deep respect and awe.  I was so “awesome” that they could not look me in the eye even for a second.  As I spoke my opening comments to the gathering, 40 kids watched the floor.

I explained that we would start slowly and go over the melodies of the hymn so that anybody who didn’t know it to begin with could catch up. I played the full track so that they could hear the other churches singing their parts. That only seemed to make them more nervous, hearing the reality of what they were about to do, what they were about to be a part of.  I said that when we got to the African section, they could sing along if they knew the song and I would conduct them in with a 1, 2, 3.

I played the track and when we got to their section they all joined in softly. I knew immediately that they clearly knew the song and resolved to ease them out of their shyness by rehearsing the song several times, concentrating on the adults.

After this first playing I congratulated them for learning the song so well and began to address the adults.  In the 3rd row, Chris raised his hand somewhat impatiently. I called on him.  He stood up and sternly addressed the children.

“I stand here deeply ashamed of you today,” he said. “This man has come all the way from America to hear you sing and record you and for what? Why did we rehearse for those three weeks to have you sing like this? Where is your spirit? We are Africans! Do you not realize this? Today you shame me. Now this time through please sing like we rehearsed and do not forget. We are Africans!” Then he sat down and turned my rehearsal back over to me.

Well there went my plan for easing them into it. So I stuttered, “Well… OK… Let’s uh… Why don’t we just take it from the top and uh… try it again, this time with a little more energy. Let’s just work on the African section of the song now.”

I started the track. Chris stood them up with a wave of his hand. When we got to my “1, 2, 3” they opened their little mouths and blew the roof off of the church. They were African. They were Africa. The sound of their voices singing in their native language of Zulu immediately filled my eyes with tears. It was a sound of ancient joy coming from the mouths and hearts of the children of Africa.

As we finished the chorus I said “Well let’s just start recording right now.” And so we did.

I was told later by several of the adult church members that though the church had long been a mix of black and white, that after the service there was always an awkwardness among the black and white adults – nothing that you could quite put your finger on, just the result of years and generations of inequality. There had previously been little socializing between races beyond warm and polite small talk.

Those barriers were broken down through the singing of this song. The black men were turning to the white men after each take and helping them with their pronunciation of the Zulu, encouraging them with their words, laughing together at their mistakes, working together to one purpose.

Afterward, as a little food was served, they all mingled and talked excitedly about what they had done together, how they had worked together, how they had so impressed the American with the beauty of their voices. The church had never been closer. This hymn about walking ‘in the light of God’ and being ‘in one accord’ had unified a church and dispelled a historic South African problem simply through the act of singing together.  The children, with the help of Chris, had led the way. “And a little child shall lead them.”

That day, I was also told, three of the black men filled out membership applications to the church.

As I packed away my equipment for the last time in the now empty church, I stopped and looked around at this hallowed little space. Today it had been filled with song. Now it was empty. But now it was different. Now it was a place of unification. That day, those children, that proud African named Chris, shall remain in my memory forever.

Today we had made music together, and today we had all walked together in the light of God.

**If you’d like to watch the production of the Siyahamba Project on YouTube, please click on the link.

For more inspirational music and news, please visit us at Watchfire Music.

Even More Inspiration

• Siyahamba-1st Installment
• Africa
• Gettin’ It Done
• Looking Back on 2010
• The Ira Awards Part 1
• Who Knows Where The Time Goes

Letter To Norm Bleichman, Executive Producer written from Sao Paulo, Brazil
April 26, 2009

Hey Norm,

Well that was one of the most beautiful and touching days of my life. What special people the church people are! Well, God certainly pulled out all the stops on these folks. Just beautiful. I curse the language barrier, but somehow we all cut through it.

(Watch the video we made… Siyahamba Project on YouTube)

Flavio Colombini, our Brazilian videographer, has been a total pro throughout the entire experience – always on time, always helpful and always concerned about the project and my welfare. He found me this terrific girl – Daniella Volker – who has followed me around, driven me to and fro and been my personal guide for the weekend. She was my translator today at the session and just did a great job. I was able to keep ‘em laughing even through an interpreter. A good team.

We finished the church service and took about 20 minutes to set up and then got right to it. Daniella’s mom made a large banner that stretched across the front of the church behind the podium which said, “Nos Cantamos Na Luz Do Senhor”. (We are singing in the light of God.) Our lyrics for the day. Note the change.

The translation done in Boston did not scan well because “Deus” (instead of Senhor) is pronounced as a 1 syllable word in Portuguese, not two. And we need a 2 syllable word here to fit the melody. Several people and I met last night and discussed it. I made sure that Senhor was not any less reverent a term for God than Deus.  They’re interchangeable, and the line sings infinitely better.  They were all so helpful.

The church was packed and the constantly powerful emotion of the day was how touched and proud they all were to be a part of this. One little man in the back of the church, after I had played them the track with the rest of the churches singing on it, raised his hand with tears in his eyes. “You mean we were picked to sing last before the finale?” he asked through Daniella, my interpreter. I explained that this was, in fact, so. The entire room of people buzzed with excitement and pride. “Why?” they asked. Once again I explained how we were going to many places around the world and doing this to show the unity of the church and also that the hymn worked very well with a bossa nova feel and besides, I just love Brazilian music.

Once again they buzzed all in Portuguese, beamed with pride and some openly had tears in their eyes.  They were all so excited once they heard about how they fit into the project.  We had all ages, Sunday School children, teens and adults 20-90. They are a truly joyful people and that spirit filled the church all afternoon.

They are not all the best singers in the world. They have a few monotones and some of the kids never really found the key. They speak and sing with a kind of dark, rich nasal quality. But the spirit was there, the Portuguese language is one of the most musical languages in the world and the recording went beautifully. It was a bit noisy outside the church, so we had to shut the windows on the street side and it got very hot as the afternoon went on. As we did take after take, everybody was sweatin’ and workin’ and just givin’ their Brazillian all.  Just beautiful people.

It’s definitely the “real sound” that we talked about, of real people singing in church, of congregations and not necessarily polished church choirs. It’ll be fine. It’s church.  Sometimes one of the little kids comes through with unabashed gusto, loud and all off key and it’s actually sweet, it’s real — like I said, it’s church.

Afterward, they served a great lunch out on the patio and everyone stayed till 4:00.  A happy family.  For the last 45 minutes they asked me if I would talk to a few of the church music committee about New Music In The Church. I said I would and then the entire church went in and sat with me and asked question after question. They were all so interested in progressing and growing.

I made sure they understood that I did not work at the world headquarters, that I was just a free lance working for the church – that I was just a normal guy. It was a fascinating discussion that I’ll tell you more about when I see you.

So another good day on the Siyahamba Project. 5 cities down/1 to go. So glad you’re coming to Cape Town. Flavio is going to back up all his video, give me the video master and I’ll upload it onto the ftp site before I get on the plane to South Africa.

Got all the release forms all signed. The only thing we didn’t do was read and film the release statement. Seemed a bit bogus to read it in English to a non-English speaking audience. We’re covered with the forms.

So all is well. It’ll be nice to have a couple of days off here and spend some real time with these great people. Then on to Cape Town…

See you there, my friend.

Pete

**If you’d like to watch the production of the Siyahamba Project on YouTube, please click on the link.

Even More Inspiration

• Siyahamba – Cape Town Installment 3
• Siyahamba-1st Installment
• Even Now
• Gettin’ It Done
• Looking Back on 2010
• The Ira Awards Part 1

I’ve worked on a thousand musical projects in my lifetime. Some didn’t turn out so well – the result of myriad reasons. Most, gratefully, went well and we achieved what we set out to do. I’m always grateful for the high quality of professionals that I’ve had the opportunity to work with. They always make success possible.

Occasionally the outcome actually surpasses the dream. Yesterday I had such an experience.

Several months ago I was asked to produce a fascinating event for the annual meeting of a major international church. The concept, developed by executive producer, Norm Bleichman and me, was to go around the world and record various churches singing the beautiful South African hymn, “Siyahamba”.

(Watch the video we made… Siyahamba Project on YouTube)

Each location would sing a different verse or chorus and each would be sung to a track recorded in the style of music related to the culture.  The music would then be assembled with video and performed at the church’s annual meeting with the “whole world” singing together in one grand finale.

Siyahamb’ ekukhanyen kwenkhos

Translated from the original Zulu, it means, “We are marching in the light of God.”

Some of you may have seen the wonderful video that raced around the internet based on the song, “Stand By Me”. If you saw this, you’ll understand the concept and the possibilities for high inspiration. If you haven’t seen it, check this out.  It was the inspiration for the Siyahamba Project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnRpMYaUZZw

We put about half of the project together and performed a pilot for the board of directors of the church a couple of months ago and it went flawlessly – so flawlessly that at the end of the presentation there was such a deep sense of peace and promise that everyone just sat quietly for a long and sustained minute or two contemplating prayerfully what they had just seen.  By the end of day we had a “go” on the project.

In the studio I then produced and orchestrated an 8 minute pre-recorded track of the song which moved through the various styles of music – folk, small church Fender Rhodes piano arrangement, large church 4 manual pipe organ arrangement, African instrumentation and Bossa Nova. It would end with full symphonic orchestra as the moment moved back into the original church for the grand finale with 2000 attendees singing.

We decided to kick it off and end the entire piece with Julia Wade, the mega-church soloist, opening and closing and setting the theme singing in Zulu.  She would also conduct the 2000 attendees.

Laying the whole piece out in the studio was a massive undertaking. Keys and key changes had to be decided for 6 different congregations including children.  I decided to stay with one constant tempo throughout in order to maintain the groove of the song and build the musical tension rising to the climax. It turned out to be a good choice. I also had to write transitions between each style of music making things work seamlessly and imagining the time it would take to move from place to place through the video.

Usually the video is finished and then the composer scores his music against the video, but in this case, because the video would not be shot until we went around the world, I had to imagine the moments and the timings and then the video would be laid in against the music. So in this project, the music was to be the master, not the picture.

We also had to develop a portable recording studio that I could carry with me in two hands. For budgetary reasons it was decided that I would attempt this by myself without an assistant and that I would need to both teach and conduct the church congregations and be the recording engineer and producer of the sessions at the same time. This is normally about a 4-person job. I decided, with the help of the good Lord and technical consultant, Noel Flatt, I would try to do this all myself. So I set off with Mac laptop, 2 excellent AKG 414 mics, mic pre-amp, headphones and cables all in two shoulder bags.

We decided to try to record the congregations with live speakers playing the tracks and rented the speakers at each location. Normally, this is not the way to record. For isolation purposes, one always uses headphones, but how could we possibly carry 200-300 sets of headphones for the congregations? This was probably the most difficult technical challenge of the project, because we had to keep the musical track coming from the speakers down to the lowest of levels so that each congregation would barely hear the track to sing with and we could keep the speaker sound out of the mics in order to isolate the voices.  In the end result, it worked, but was extremely tricky in each location under constantly changing room acoustics.

Over the next couple of months I journeyed around the world recording six various churches – a Sunday school in Boston, a storefront church in San Juan Capistrano, California, a college youth organization in the Midwest, a church and African Township youth organization in Cape Town, South Africa, and a church in Sao Paulo, Brazil in South America. Besides each church’s designated verse or chorus I had them all also sing the finale  choruses so that all voices would sing together at the annual meeting in Boston.

While we were recording each church we also either hired a local videographer whom we trusted or my fellow producer, Norm Bleichman came along and shot the sessions himself. Norm handled the coordination of this huge effort meticulously along with editor, Morgan Anderson, and that took a tremendous load off my already overloaded shoulders.

When the recording was done I brought the entire project back into my studio in NYC and dumped it all in my computers from the laptop. I have never done a piece of music with more than 60 tracks and I have produced some huge projects with full orchestra and chorus. Siyahamba was 190 tracks and required 3 Mac computers totally maxed out to mix the project.

I then spent 3 weeks meticulously cleaning and balancing voices, choosing takes, editing and re-balancing the voices with the original music tracks. I went back and forth to Boston from New York several times just to hear my mixes in this huge 3 domed church.

What I heard in the studio was just not what I heard in the church – the reverb in the church playing havoc with my mixes. The bottom, the bass, the bass drum and timpani became mush in the domed rooms and I had to re-think the mixes over and over again also trying to imagine what the presence of 2000 people in the room would do to the sound and adjust for that as well.  In the end, we got it right.

In the end this 8-minute piece simply worked beyond expectation. I, along with my buddy Norm and many others, had poured 4 months into this unforgettable project, traveled around the world to 3 different continents, and met thousands of wonderful people who shared the same love and commitment for their church that unified us all. Then, for one incredible 8 minute stretch, we all sang together and loved one another.

Julia kicked it all off flawlessly setting the theme and then taking us into the journey. Our musical trip around the world elicited constant joy, appreciation for our fellow man, laughter and quite a few tears as we journeyed from place to place. Then it came time for the 2000 to sing. In an explosion of energy the entire congregation jumped to its feet and joined the world in song. The moment was one I shall never forget.

As I stood in the back of the church directing Tim Malone, the sound man, and the voices rose up together, I leaned back against the wall of the church and thought, “It worked.”

During the final singing of the finale I walked down one of the aisles and turned back and faced the congregation and watched the tears stream and the people hug and the voices unite. They blew the roof off that old church. And then Julia closed it down in quiet reverence to a silent prayer.

In that silent prayer, I stood and thanked God for this moment, for the gift of this idea, for the loving input of so many people. I thanked God that our dreams were realized. And I thanked God for the unifying spirit of people, the oneness of mankind, the love of these people for their church, for the goodness of all involved.

Technically, through the care and hard work of hundreds, we were flawless.  How could it be otherwise with such an endeavor? Spiritually we went beyond the dream, beyond the imagination. The unifying effort of all took us there.

**If you’d like to watch the production of the Siyahamba Project on YouTube, please click on the link.

Even More Inspiration

• Wonderful
• Even Now
• Nothing
• WFM Listening Room – Series II – Event 4
• You Must Remember This!
• Love Is The Reason For Living