However, as I’ve been improving in the craft, I’ve watched the noble art of the craft plummet into the depths of despair.  Perhaps I’m being a bit dramatic here, but often, when I’m reading or hearing many of today’s lyrics, I find myself groaning over the cheesiness of the content and the hollow and paltry result of the lack of craft.

OK, you say, give it to us, Pete.  Do your thing.

So glad you asked…

Rhyming
I come from the world of the theater where rhymes had to rhyme (“shoe” does not rhyme with “blues” nor does “time” rhyme with “fine”) and if your rhymes ‘cheated’, you would be severely reprimanded by the critics.  I studied under the tutelage of Alan Lerner, one of our masters, (Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, Camelot) and he wrote perfect lyrics that rhymed, scanned to perfection and are still today treasures of the American Songbook (If Ever I Would Leave You, The Heather On The Hill, I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face, and on and on).  He would work, not hours, but weeks on one song lyric and, when presented, it would be a flawless piece of masterwork.

He turned me on to the one and only professional’s rhyming dictionary – the only one I’ve ever used and still highly recommend – The Clement Wood Rhyming Dictionary.  None others come close.  I keep one in each room of my apartment and hardly ever leave home without it.  With it, the world of rhymes is literally at your fingertips and every possibility is represented within its pages.  Short of the Bible, it’s my favorite book.

Rap music today has simply slaughtered the craft of rhyming.  I am in no way against Rap music.  It is a completely legitimate style of music representing the urban culture of today, but in it, most rappers rhyme with no regard to craft using any word in the vicinity of the vowel sound.  For instance not only can ‘street’ rhyme with ‘beep’, but it can also rhyme with ‘ease’ or even with ‘help’ because ‘help’ has an ‘e’ in it.

To my ear that’s a point off – any of those kind of false rhymes.  Ultimately they disappoint the listener’s ear and prove unsatisfactory.  The trouble is that we now have a couple of generations so used to bad or cheated rhymes that they don’t even know what to listen for in the first place.  And so it strikes me that the powerful tonality of rhyming is in jeopardy of being lost for generations.  The result of this ignorance of style is that bad rhyming has now spread into pop music and even the theater where it is unfortunately now accepted and used often without criticism.

Call me ancient and stuffy, but it’s said that the decline of a civilization is often first seen in the decline of its language.  Look around you, America, it’s like happnin’, you like know what I mean?

I’m a total hard-ass with my students when it comes to perfect rhyming.  Cheat once and you get a point off.  Get 5 points off and you have a mediocre song.  Get 10 points off and you better start over and get to work.

Scanning and Jamming
I spoke to a ‘professional’ lyricist the other day and mentioned that in her second verse her lyrics did not scan.  She said back to me, “What’s scan?”  I stood dumbfounded.  This is like saying to a musician, “ You’ve got a mistake in the third measure” and them saying back to you, “What’s a measure?”

The most powerful tool in popular music is repetition.  It’s how we learn a song and it’s why good songs are ‘sticky’ or considered to be memorable melodies – because they scan – each time you hear the hook it’s the same notes in the same rhythms scanning (repeating) perfectly.  Each time you hear the verse, the melody is exactly the same even though the words are different. Change a word or jam two words into the line where there should only be one, jam two or three syllables in where there should only be one and you lose the scan, you lose the repetition of the melody and confuse the ear of the listener.

So much of the music I hear today is ruined by lazy lyricists jamming words into melodies and fouling up the repetitions so that the listener’s ear is confused and the otherwise good melodies are ruined.  In perfect scanning the repeated melodies are perfectly repeated even though the words change keeping the integrity of the music.  Even the accents of the words – 1^st syllable/2^nd syllable, etc are honored in the repetition.  So much of what I hear today is junked up by amateur approaches where scanning is ignored and melodies are slaughtered.

On top of that riffing and licks are also confusing the listener’s ears all in the name of two generations of vocalists trying to be as brilliant as Mariah Carey.  I like Mariah Carey, but she singlehandedly destroyed melody for a couple of generations as vocal wannabe copiers trying to sing like her and forcing a twist and turn onto every note – a severe defect that I call being “lick happy” — turned melodies into a series of riffs.  Oh, get me my soapbox.  I’m feelin’ a rant comin’ on!

Enough.  I hope you get the point.  Bottom line: Proper scanning is crucial to repetition.  Repetition is crucial to commercial music.  Without each, music is just not memorable and becomes lost in the wash of mediocrity taking over our industry.

Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Lerner, Lennon & McCartney, Billy Joel, Michael Jackson, Alan & Marilyn Bergman, Lorenz Hart, Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter – all followed the great traditions of true rhyming and perfect scanning.  It’s why their songs are still sung, played and remembered today.  These are the masters.  Don’t let their discoveries and work slide away in the dissolving of our language into mediocrity.

John Lennon's Original - "Imagine"

Disneyfied Retreads
And then there’s the content…  How many more “I want you, I need you, I love you” songs must we wade through?  Don’t we, as a people, have anything better to think and sing about?  When’s the last time you heard a great song with a new fresh lyric that wasn’t a retread of teenage discovery?  Certainly love is a most powerful subject to write about, but can’t we yet find something new and interesting to write about that has a new twist, a new insight?

Every time a new animated film comes out I groan at the feeble attempts of the omnipresent love song in the score.  They all sound as if they were written by a room full of people trying to write a hit instead of a one talented pro coming up with an original idea.

R&B music, long the bastion of solid lyrical writing especially in the Motown era, has now sunk to pandering the teenage mind consumed with sexual encounter.  I listen to some of these blatant sexual references and wonder if any of the writers of today ever listened to “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” or “Baby It’s Cold Outside” or “My Funny Valentine” or even “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”.  Here were songs that smoldered in their sensuality without clobbering you over the head with blatancy.

Art evokes.  Commercialism steamrolls.  I’d rather a song tickle my fancy than slap my face.  I prefer discovering a rich dramatic moment rather than being deafened by the obvious.  Give me a song that stimulates my brain and softens my heart and I’ll carry that song with me in the back of my mind for the rest of my life.  After all, isn’t that why we write ‘em?

Summary
Every age has its mediocrity.  “Flat-Foot Floosey With A Floy Floy” had its moment in the sun in the 30s but not many of us go around singing it today.  But decades are not remembered for their mediocrity.  They are remembered for their ground-breaking flashes of brilliance.  What will this music generation sing to their kids?  “I Want Your Sex”?

My generation sings John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, Seals and Croft’s “Summer Breeze” and Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and The Beatles’ “Let It Be”.  I could go on… and I will – Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish” and Earth, Wind and Fire’s “September”, Billy Joel’s…

Even More Inspiration

• Wonderful
• Even Now
• Gabriel, Come Blow Your Horn
• My Body
• You Must Remember This!
• Love Is The Reason For Living

Keep it short.

No one has time anymore.

So keep it short.

Not sure I can…

Just not my style.

Never took to writing music for commercials.

60 seconds?

30 seconds??

No time to stretch my wings.

Yeah, I’m probably a bit long winded.

But I love to tell a good story.

Weave a good yarn.

I tend to put the problem on the other guy’s shoulders – the reader, the listener – the world.  Not my fault if they can’t hang in there.  Can’t slow down enough to consider something a little deeper.  Things are just going faster.  It’s a throw-away society.  No time to stop and think, to pause and pray, to sit back and dream, to lie down and do nothing.  We’re all trying to get somewhere when really we’re already there – only we just don’t know it.  Baba Ram Dass said, “Be here now.”  Eckart Tolle wrote The Power Of Now.  A best-seller.  Who had time to read it?  It appears that many did, so where are they and what are they doing about it?  Can’t we slow down enough to just sit and read?  Just sit and listen?  Does music have to get relegated to the background?  Someone said to me the other day, “I listened to your album while making dinner the other evening…”  I was crushed.  I hoped they liked the tunes…  Now I’m supposed to break this paragraph up into several for my blog post so that people will be more inclined to read it.  Long paragraphs will scare you away.  Did you know that?  Are you afraid?

There.

Fear gone?

Feeling better.

Want to read on?

OK, perhaps tomorrow…

Even More Inspiration

• Tempo
• The Organized Artist
• The Atheist
• Send A Signal
• Chanting/Enchanting
• Gabriel, Come Blow Your Horn

For a little more than five years when I was in my late 20s and early 30s I was composer-in-residence at the NY Shakespeare Festival (The Public Theater) working with producer Joseph Papp in what was, at the time, the most creative theatrical hot spot in the country.  Joe Papp and his plays and musicals had an amazing run of success during the 70s that we haven’t seen the likes of from a theatrical producer since.

It was at The Public where I learned my craft having the opportunity to work on some 40 shows in those 5+ years working as composer for Joe.  Besides many other theaters in The Public complex, the NYSF also produced two Shakespeare plays per summer at the outdoor Delacorte Theater in Central Park.  I created incidental music for a number of these productions and I remember one particular production of Shakespeare’s Comedy Of Errors where I was backstage standing in the wings one night.

An older actor was on stage in a scene with one other actor one night when the older actor simply stopped in the middle of one line and kind of slumped over, still standing, into a frozen position.  The long pause brought us all to quick alert.  His fellow actor fed him his cue again to no response.  The stage manager in the wings downstage of me also fed him his lines in a stage whisper several times to no avail.  The audience began to buzz and we all quickly realized that there was something very wrong with the older actor.

Truth is, he had had a small stroke.

The stage manager, taking charge, simply walked out on stage calmly, and taking the arm of the older actor, led him slowly off stage.  Then the stage manager went back on stage and announced to the audience that we would take a short intermission and resume the play after 15 minutes.  The audience, still abuzz, did as they were told to do peacefully.

Backstage it was anything but peaceful.  Rather, it was a pretty wild scene as the older actor was addressed and cared for, an ambulance was called and his understudy was frantically preparing to go on in the older actor’s place.

The costume mistresses scurried about preparing the understudy’s costume changes, I got in his face discussing his musical cues and the stage manager ran through a litany of reminders for the young, inexperienced understudy.

As it was very early in the run, the understudies for each role had only had up to that point one two-hour rehearsal — far too little for a three and a half hour Shakespeare production, and we soon discovered that the understudy had not totally committed his lines to memory.

On top of that, the understudy was also one of the townspeople in the play so his role had to be covered by the swingman and that had to be organized as well – all in the announced 15 minutes.

It was quickly decided that the understudy should carry the book – that is, hold the script from the play while acting his part on stage.  This, of course, would kill the reality of the play, but there seemed no other choice and we hoped that the audience would simply understand the predicament and put up with the solution.

The understudy was a cute, funny little unknown fellow with the unlikely name of Danny Devito.  Yes, that Danny Devito – pre-stardom and yet undiscovered.

No one knew that frantic night backstage that a star was about to be born.

The announcement that we were about to resume brought the audience back to their seats and the announcement that the role once performed by the older gentleman would now be played by Danny Devito brought the dreaded groan of disappointment from the audience.

And then this tiny little man, script in hand, nervously walked out on stage and resumed the scene where we had left off.  I watched nervously from the wings.

The role was never a particularly funny one as played by the older actor.  Danny read his first line nervously and somehow caught the humor of it and the audience tittered at this little fellow.  That titter seemed to give Danny courage to go on and by the end of the scene he magically held the audience in the palm of his hand and had them roaring in the aisles.

It was an amazing transformation and afterwards, talking to several people who were in the audience that night, I discovered that they did not even remember that he held the book throughout.  They just remembered Danny and how funny and charming and adorable he was.

In the bows afterwards, Danny got the grandest of standing ovations from the audience and also the entire cast.  It was as sweet a memory as I have in life to see this little guy triumph over such adversity the way he had.

The next day the NY papers were full of the incident and Danny finished the production that summer doing the role.

The actor’s nightmare puts the actor on-stage in a role where he does not know his lines and often does not even know the name of the play he or she is in.  All actors have this nightmare from time to time.  One always wakes gratefully from it in a sweat.

The composer’s nightmare is similar.  For me, I stand in the wings watching my own musical, but the songs are not mine, don’t really fit the play and are not performed well.  I can’t figure out what has gone wrong and finally I too wake gratefully in a sweat.

The opposite experiences are the joys of my life.  To stand in the wings and watch the magic of my own hit show night after night, to hear the laughter, to feel the confident throb of the music and hear the audience cheer in response, to feel my songs touch the hearts of hundreds or even thousands is, of course, pure pleasure.  It is a gratification that runs deep and that I’ll probably never get enough of.

Two particular shows provided that gratification night after night for literally hundreds and hundreds of performances.  The first was another NY Shakespeare Festival production done at The Public Theater of a rock opera that I wrote back in the 70s.  The Wedding Of Iphigenia was an assignment given to me by Joe Papp to help me learn my theater craft and work with a master.  The master was Euripedes, one of the greatest of the Greek playwrights, and the two classic works of his that I drew my opera from were Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Taurus.

We performed the show both at The Public Theater in NYC and The Old Vic (their experimental theater, The Young Vic) in London under the leadership of Sir Lawrence Olivier.  The opera simply worked form the beginning and melted the paint from the walls every time it was performed over the course of a couple of years.

When we first cast the show, I knew the show would have a Greek chorus of women to support the young maiden lead, Iphigenia.  In casting we had so many wondrous young women try out that we could not decide who should play Iphigenia so we hired them all with the stipulation that we would decide in the course of rehearsals and the others would be in the chorus.

At the end of each day, the director, producer Joe Papp, and I would discuss the choices.  Every day we changed our mind to a different girl.  Two weeks went by and they were all so good and so original that we were dumbfounded at our own inability to decide.  The girls were, of course, getting restless and impatient to have a decision and our inability to decide was beginning to create negative vibes in the company.

Finally Joe Papp had a most original and courageous idea.  They should all play Iphigenia.  At first we laughed at the idea, but then, as we discussed it thoroughly, we got first intrigued and then excited about the possibilities.

The idea worked like gangbusters.  It unified the women and brought an amazing style and power to the play and to the music.  It was so different from anything audiences had ever seen – the leading role of a Greek tragedy being played by 12 women at the same time — but we laid it out well and the music took you to powerful places of drama and passion.  It also helped that the music, rock music, was very new to the theater and so created an ambiance of “anything goes” in the theater.

I watched these ten women tear this opera up night after night as they ripped through every conceivable passion provided by Euripedes’ masterwork.  Trish Hawkins, Nell Carter, Margaret Dorn, Marta Heflin, Linda Lawley, Leata Galloway, Pamela Pentony, Marion Ramsey, Julianne Marshall, Andrea Marcovicci, Bonnie Guidry, Sharon Redd and even Patti LuPone all played this one little girl together and sang their way to standing ovations night after night.

I got to watch it from the wings.  It was a time I shall never forget.  A number would start and I knew each night that it would scrape the moon and each night it did.  It was a great feeling.

Years later I had a very similar experience with The Jenny Burton Experience.  Jenny, and a choir of nine of the top studio singers in NYC, played to sold-out audiences every Thursday night at a NY club called “Don’t Tell Mama”.  The act won, in that time, every conceivable music award given and drew thousands of people – many of which came back time after time.

Here again I got to watch from the wings great performers sing my music in magical ways.  The choir, led by vocal arranger, Margaret Dorn, was a superb blend of R&B and Gospel voices and could raise the roof at the drop of a hat, but it was Jenny herself who grabbed us all by the socks each night and carried us.  She was a radiant performer at the height of her art, able to both touch the center of your heart with a ballad and dazzle your mind with an up song and set your feet a’dancin’.

And she was, on top of it all, funny.  She developed into a tremendous ad libber and could run with an improvised moment away from the written show and then get back and keep the audience in stitches.  She was the consummate performer and the group backed her up beautifully.

She also had the so important ability to recreate the performance every night.  One night during a terrible snowstorm they performed the show for the 6 people who trudged through the blizzard and showed up and the show was as good as it had ever been.  I was one of those six.  I sat that night in the audience at a table just to make the room look fuller.  At the end of the show I was also one of the six who stood up and cheered.  There were more people on stage that night than in the audience.

Standing in the wings for the hundreds of performances throughout those seven years is also one of the most cherished times of my life.  The opportunity to be so close to such talent and to actually be a part of it, even though I hid behind the curtain, brought me the joyous satisfactions of a lifetime.

Stay tuned for Part 4 – the last if this series – yet to come.

Even More Inspiration

• Gabriel, Come Blow Your Horn
• WFM Listening Room — Series II Opener
• By The Numbers?
• Kickstarter.com Campaign – I
• My Body
• Light At The End Of The Tunnel

There, I had the opportunity to watch both my own work and the work of some pretty fabulous performers over the years.  There, from the back of the house.  The greatest of stars figuratively pull those in the back of the house on to the stage – their magnetism or charisma is so great that you feel that you’ve got the best seat in the house no matter where you stand.

But occasionally, when someone gave a performance that was so electrifying as to just bowl me over, I have snuck around backstage, where as a composer or director I was always permitted, and watched, up close and personal, from the wings.

Very early in my career, just out of college, I spent two summers working as a chorus boy of the St. Louis Municipal Opera, probably the largest summer stock theater in the country.  For one one-week run they brought in Nureyev and Fontaine, at the time, the two most popular ballet dancers in the world.  I, with two years of ballet under my belt and at least knowing first position from second position, was asked to be an extra in their famous productions of Swan Lake and Romeo and Juliet.

One of my claims to fame was that I was actually pinched on the butt by none other than Rudolph Nureyev on stage.  Seems I got too wrapped up in my role as dice player far up-stage and did not see Mr. Nureyev behind me trying to make an entrance.  Rather than push me out of the way, he simply reached down and gave the surprised young extra a sweet pinch.

But already I stray from my point…

At the end of each performance I would rush around after the company bows and stand enchanted in an isolated spot in the wings and watch Nureyev and Fontaine take their bows.  It was there that I learned the purpose of bows and got a terrific lesson from the masters on just how to perform ‘the bow’.

First of all their grace was magnificent.  On top of that, their bows were choreographed – two great ballet dancers still dancing long after the performance was over.  But what I most remember was their love for the audience.  Not only did they absolutely adore the applause, but they let it lift them to new character.  They simply knew how to take the applause with humility and great appreciation and love.  And the more they loved the applause, the more the audience applauded.  And the more the audience applauded, the more Nureyev and Fontaine loved it and loved back.

They created a circle of love with the audience and nurtured it and let it grow and grow until all were exhausted and completely fulfilled.

They were the masters of the bows and I got to watch them sweat and preen and joy and love from about 10 feet away.  It was better than Swan Lake.

Early in my career as a composer on Broadway I scored and wrote songs for Richard Wesley’s play with music, The Mighty Gents.  In this production there was a young, unheard of actor playing the role of a totally down-and-out street junkie.  His name was Morgan Freeman and he was so riveting in this role, that in his big scene each night, I would rush from my place at the sound booth in the back of the house to another isolated wing off-stage and watch him do his ten-minute monologue.  I completely fell in love with this young actor then and have loved his work ever since.

In the performance he so climbed inside the character of this wasted man that each night I relived the power of his performance over and over.  I laughed, I cried, I stared in amazement as he went through just about every human emotion possible.  It was my first up-close experience with a great actor and I couldn’t get enough of it.

For this role, this young previously unheard of actor got his first national recognition as he was nominated for the Tony Award as Best Supporting Actor that year.

I also had the same type of experience this time with a whole company of actors who worked together as a great ensemble in Joseph Papp’s Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ at Lincoln Center with Meryl Streep, John Lithgow, Mandy Patinkin, Michael Tucker and Mary Beth Hurt and directed by A.J. Antoon.   I had the privilege of writing the music for this production and, once again, found myself, in certain scenes, standing in the wings, spellbound, as these young actors tore up the stage with their natural sense of comic timing and stage know-how.

I wrote a song for the production called Ever Of Thee I’m Fondly Dreaming which would be sung each night by all the above mentioned people (all extremely musical actors) as Meryl both sang and played the piano on stage.  I would stand in the wings and sing along adding my voice to the moment though not my stage presence.  It was always a sweet moment and often John Lithgow would give me a wink from the stage to the wings as the audience burst into applause at the end of the number.

These moments of learning the artistry of performance up close and personal shall always be indelibly printed in my memory.  They are the perks of my experience far beyond the money made or the awards given.  They are the reminders of why I keep trying – trying to get a grasp on greatness – trying to see deeply into the moments of perfection and understand better how they came to be.

If you’re enjoying these memories as much as I am, stick around for Part 2…  coming in my next post.

Even More Inspiration

• Gabriel, Come Blow Your Horn
• Chanting/Enchanting
• The Decline of Lyrical Craftsmanship – Part 1
• I Stood In The Wings… Part 3
• My Body
• Light At The End Of The Tunnel

And it’s a good song.  I know it is, because it’s been running around in my mind for several weeks now.  I wake up singing it and wonder for a moment where it came from and then realize, “Oh yeah, that’s that song!”

The client keeps coming in when I’m finished with my latest iteration and she sits and listens and nods her head as I play it for her and then when it’s through we nod and agree that we’re not there yet.

In the original session, her pianist and writing partner came in and recorded the piano and she the scratch vocal.  They were kind of ornery with each other when usually they’re a happy team.  I stayed pretty quiet as he kind of ran roughshod over her as they worked and he laid down the piano part and she sang the scratch vocal.  It was not an inspired session.  At one point I remember exclaiming kind of in fun, “Boy, you two are like an old married couple.”  The session was more about their momentary troubles than the song itself and the song was basically a love song!

As he got more and more depressed and actually meaner to her, she became nervous and hurt, embarrassed and withdrew into an uncustomary quiet.  But we were getting the work done.  He’s a fine pianist and though he was not particularly inspired that day, his playing was solid and mistake free.

When the session was over I was relieved to move on in life.  I began, several days later to orchestrate the song using his piano track and her scratch vocal as a base and it all seemed to go downhill from there.

It has seemed that no matter what I tried with this good solid song, I could not seem to capture the spirit of the love relationship in the song.  I’m sure, by now, you’re all thinking, “Well, no wonder, Pete.  There was no love in the song’s performance.”  True, but there is a lot of love in the song’s writing.  The song comes with huge armloads of love generated by the lyric, melody and harmonies contained therein.

I woke up yet again this morning.  The song was on my mind.  I lay there in my half sleep as it drifted through my mind, free from its troubled past, centered in its character and intent and simply expressing its original concept of one loving another.  Then I got it!

The recording I was working with was too fast!  The tempo was simply going faster than it really wanted to go.   I knew this because the tempo in my head this morning was about 10 BPM (beats per minute) slower than the track I’ve been working with.

The intent was rushed on the recording because the performers were not centered, the pianist really wanted to finish and go home and the singer’s mind simply wasn’t focused on the love of the song, but rather the awkwardness of their present relationship.  At the time the song was new to me, so I was more focused on the technical – watching the meters, getting the piano recorded correctly and laying down the vocal with no distortion.  The rest of my mind was struggling with their troubles and my concentration was divided.  Besides, they wrote the song!  They ought to have a good feel for the right tempo.

But they didn’t.  That morning in the studio, they weren’t centered in love, they were both in a hurry to get through and out of each other’s presence and so the real “doing” of the moment produced a rushed, unfeeling track and confused vocal performance.

Art reflected life.

Going too fast.

How many times do we say that to ourselves?  “Slow down, Pete, you’re going too fast.”

It all got me to thinking…

I’ve been working on a life.  It hasn’t been working.  I’ve tried several different approaches – and nothing I’ve done has seemed to bring this life to its realization supporting the meaning, content and intent of the life.

And it’s a good life.  I know it is, because it’s been running around in my mind for many years now.  I wake up singing it every morning and wonder for a moment where it came from and then realize, “Oh yeah, that’s my life!” 

In the original concept, the life was laid out ahead of me in a pretty clear plan and the basic construct of this plan worked well, but as I’ve gotten more and more into it, it’s taken on a much bigger picture – probably bigger than I could handle.  And things have started to go south for me. 

So many projects, so much to do, so split in my daily activities and so often behind the ol’ eight ball.  It (the life) was exciting and the accomplishment was demonstrable, but the happiness was only found in the song writing, the music making.  The rest was far too pushed, far too rushed trying to get a massive list of things finished so I could keep up with the massive list accumulating every day, every hour, every minute.

I woke up yet again this morning.  The life was on my mind.  I lay there in my half sleep as it drifted through my mind, free from its troubled past, centered in its character and intent and simply expressing its original concept of one loving another.  Then I got it!

The life I was leading was too fast!  The tempo was simply going faster than I really wanted to go.

The intent was rushed in this life because the performer was not centered, the doer really wanted to just finish and go home and simply wasn’t focused on the love of the life, but rather the awkwardness of the rushing from one moment to the next.

I’m going to slow it down now and get back in the groove.  This life is a love song and that love has to be reflected and can only be reflected if first I am centered and in the moment, not in a hurry, not caught up in the madness of the scramble, but rather in the true rhythm of the moment. 

I’m going to find a new tempo.

Life reflecting art.

Even More Inspiration

• Even Now
• Chanting/Enchanting
• Valentine Thoughts
• The Decline of Lyrical Craftsmanship – Part 1
• Attention Span
• Spiritual Scientist

Back then, LPs were large enough – approximately 12”x12” – so that the cardboard cover they came in could have all kinds of information about the music and the artist.  I remember to this day literally paragraphs of my Ellington At Newport (Jazz Festival) that I played and read until the grooves wore out.

Back then they even gave a Grammy for “Best Liner Notes” each year.

Then the medium began to shrink – first to the size of a CD and now to nothing more than a digital download of the cover and the names of the songs if you’re lucky.  Lost along the way were other pictures besides the cover, lyrics and especially my beloved liner notes.

Several years back when I started producing CDs regularly I tried to keep the time-honored traditions by releasing CDs with 8 to 24 page booklet inserts.  Inspirational music depends a lot on its lyrical content and I always felt it necessary to include those lyrics and especially give credit to all the musicians, singers, designers, etc. who worked to complete the project.  But the cost of the booklet became prohibitive.

Today a 4 panel booklet CD will cost $1.14 per unit from the manufacturer if I buy at least 1000.  Take that booklet to 18-24 pages and the cost soars to over $3.00 per unit.  There go the profits.

So Watchfire Music and a few other artists turned to the Digi-Book.  What is a Digi-Book?  “A Digi-Book is an electronic version of an album’s liner notes and vital information.  This downloadable digital booklet contains photos, lyrics, and notes written by the artists and producers of the album as well as all sorts of information pertinent to the experience.”

Better yet, go look for yourself!  WFM’s latest is a gorgeous journey of nearly 40 full screen pages of pictures, lyrics, quotes, artist insights and credit material with bios that is visually stunning and completely informative regarding the experience of making the CD and other vital information.

Designed by WFM’s leading designer, Sara Gray, who also did Julia Wade’s Every Day gem of a booklet, this digital package looks fabulous on your computer screen and can actually be printed as well.  If you print, we suggest using Glossy Photo Paper for a beautiful treasured keepsake of the album experience.

But you don’t have to print it to enjoy it.  Backlit from your computer screen, it’s a colorful experience that is sure to delight anyone who is into the music on the album.

Best of all, it’s FREE!  You can download it and send it to a friend in just a click or two.

We even created a new section of the site just for Digi-Books!  Just go to the far right of the Nav Bar and click on Digi-Books.

I’m not going to write much more about it because that would be redundant to the experience, so take a moment or two right now to follow this link and experience it for yourself.

Oh yes, while you’re at it, Buy The Goin’ Home CD!  The whole package is worth far more than the price of admission.  That’s a promise.

We did a soft release last Thanksgiving Day and already, in one week, Goin’ Home is our best selling CD of the year.  I can’t tell you how excited we all are here at WFM at the promise that this CD and Digi-Book holds for the coming months.  We thank so many of you, literally hundreds of people who have already been so supportive of this project.

The package is finished. It’s available now.  We promised it for Christmas and delivered.  It’s a wondrous Christmas gift idea and with WFM’s Send To A Friend capability, it’s the easiest of shopping ventures – all from your easy chair in front of your computer.  Give the gift of music and a perspicacious look at the road to eternal life.

Don’t forget the Digi-Book!

Even More Inspiration

• Even Now
• Kickstarter.com Campaign – I
• WFM Listening Room — Series II Opener
• The Changing Scene
• Gabriel, Come Blow Your Horn
• My Body

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:

I don’t believe in Heaven
As a place up in the sky
A place where all the angels sit
As the clouds go passin by

I don’t believe in Heaven
Dressed in white and gold
A city in a world upstairs
Where all of our wings unfold
And a God sits upon his throne

I see it more as a state of mind
Since my body gets left behind
I see it more
As an open door
To a life of another kind

I don’t believe in Heaven
As a place this side of Hell
A place where all the good folks go
A place where the spirits dwell
An’ ol’ Peter a-rings dem bells

I see it more as a holy space
A place to pause
A spiritual base
I see it more as an open door
To a kind of a quiet grace

And when all is said and done
I think that Heaven
Like earth
Is what we make it
It’s a moment in the sun
It’s a cleansing time
In a state of grace
It’s a place where laughter reigns

Oh it’s Heaven
Heaven
It’s Heaven
Oh it’s Heaven

So this CD and eventual concert tour explores the eventuality that we all face at one time or another.

But it’s also an experience about music and great songs, and uplifting and joyful singing.  It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s rich in its depth and it definitely rocks the house.

Goin’ Home is written as a Gospel Cantata.  A cantata is simply short for “a musical composition for voices and orchestra based on a spiritual text.”

It’s performed by a mostly African American cast of top New York Session singers – great friends that I’ve worked with many years now.  In future posts I’ll tell you much more about this amazingly talented group of artists.

“So what is Kickstarter.com” you must ask.

Kickstarter is the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.

A new form of commerce and patronage. This is not about investment or lending. Project creators keep 100% ownership and control over their work. Instead, they offer products and experiences that are unique to each project.

All or nothing funding. On Kickstarter, a project must reach its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands. Why? It protects everyone involved. Creators aren’t expected to develop their project without necessary funds, and it allows anyone to test concepts without risk.

We’re giving ourselves 30 days to raise the necessary $9500 of funding.  Those 30 days started October 3, 2011 and will end November 2, 2011.  I urge you to participate in this drive to not only support Inspirational music, but also Watchfire Music, the CD’s record company and on-line place of purchase.  Most of all, I ask you to support the uplifting idea behind the project.  Its purpose is to open our eyes to the timelessness of our future.

Your contribution, whether large or small, is critically important to the success of this endeavor.  Every dollar counts.  If each person on our mailing list just gave one dollar, we’d get there and beyond.

We’d love you to be a part of this very special event.

To learn much more about this endeavor please go to http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/174116135/peter-link-goin-home-cd-and-concert-tour

Even More Inspiration

• Even Now
• My Body
• WFM Listening Room — Series II Opener
• What Is A Cantata?
• Gabriel, Come Blow Your Horn
• Light At The End Of The Tunnel

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.

It’s possible that I taught him a few things along the way.  He would probably tell you that today in his humble, sometimes self-deprecating manner, but what I really remember from the association is all that he taught me.

‘Woody’, as we lovingly called him, was always a flurry of energy.  In normal life that energy would spill out in a myriad of ways sometimes verging on a kind of scattered turmoil; however, when he would sit down at the piano or with his beloved Polymoog Synthesizer, he would turn into a concentrated force of magical wonder as his music poured forth out of his mind and fingers.  He would transform before our very eyes into the boy genius that we all knew him to be.

He taught me how to arrange for a rhythm section.  He taught me synthesis programming.  He taught me how to rehearse a band and get the most out of my musicians and he taught me how to write for musicians and challenge them and trust them.  Did he know at the time that he was teaching?  Probably not.  I learned by osmosis, by watching the kid do his magical thing.

As we both evolved as musicians we began to drift in and out of each other’s lives more and more as I got into the Industrial market and Woody went off to work as a side man with the likes of Lou Reed, Edgar Winter, David Clayton-Thomas of “Blood Sweat & Tears” and also with Marilyn McCoo, Eartha Kitt and Della Reese.

For a couple of decades then we hardly saw each other.  He made the root of his living doing radio and television commercials with a jingle house here in NYC and that was a world that I never really ventured into, so our lives didn’t really touch.

But I always knew we were intertwined through the music that we had shared and especially the understandings of music that he had taught me.

Over the past year, “forces” have seemed to be bringing us back together.  A phone call here, a possible gig here and there that fell through or got postponed, but nothing really concrete.  Just enough to get him back into the back of my mind.

Then one day I received an email from him with a single song MP3.  He, still in his humble fashion, suggested that this piece of music might interest me since I was doing this ‘Inspirational thing’.  It was cut #2, Winds Of Change from his album called The Far Reaching Sound.  I sat mesmerized listening to this beautiful work from my old friend who had obviously grown even more as a musician over the decades.

I immediately wrote him back and said, “Send me the whole CD immediately!”

He did, of course, and Watchfire Music has now added Alan and The Far Reaching Sound to our roster of great music.

Woody’s  CD explores the merging of music with the Nichiren-Buddhist mantra  “Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo”.  In his own description, “the mantra is sung in a similar fashion to traditional chanting.  These songs present an aspect of the chanting experience while also taking the listener on exotic musical journeys.”

His description, for me, is totally accurate.  The CD has found a continuous home in my computer for the last few weeks now and gets played nearly every day filling our home with its most special music and beautiful chant.

Many of you, our loyal customers, are Christian-based people.  Here I ask each of you to keep an open mind and an open heart to the truths of existence.  Give this music a listen.  Don’t let ‘religion’ be constrictive.  Expand your thought and stay open to truth in all forms – in language, style and music.  We can all get inspired in a myriad of ways.  Here’s one of them.  Check it out.  It certainly works for me.

Chanting.  Try it.  It’s enchanting.

Even More Inspiration

• Even Now
• Spiritual Scientist
• Gabriel, Come Blow Your Horn
• Light At The End Of The Tunnel
• The Decline of Lyrical Craftsmanship – Part 1
• I Stood In The Wings… Part 4