The Music that Changed My Life is Varied

Here is the list of Music that changed my life.

• Silent Night – My father said to me, ”If you know the chords you can play anything.” This is when I started my self study of chords and how music worked.
• Moses – Music and Lyrics by Ken Medema. Heard in a concert at church. This blind musician’s performance showed me that music can be spiritual, masculine, tell stories and transform people inside.
• Could It Be Magic – Barry Manilow.  Concert at Western Kentucky University. His showmanship, musicality and ability to connect to the audience moved me and inspired me to take a closer look at music.
• I Write the Songs – Barry Manilow.  One of the first songs I tried to actually play the piano and sing at the same time.
• Hanon –  Exercises for piano, given to me by my piano teacher. This showed me that to play the piano you had to repeat and repeat and repeat music, to develop the coordination and the muscular memory to perform music.
• Carry on my Wayward Son – Kansas.  On a saturday morning my friend came to pick me up in his sky blue Ford Pinto station wagon and he had a Kansas 8 track playing in the stereo. The music to this album caught my attention and never let me go.
• Magnum Opus – Kansas.  When I finally purchased the Leftoverture album I realized the polyphonic nature of the music and was drawn to the complexity of this music. Progressive rock to me was moving in the direction of classical music, which it did not make it all the way.
• Point of Know Return – Kansas Concert in Nashville. Attending this concert pretty much locked it for me. The sheer power of this group, the intensity and a dedication to music, music and music without all of the fuss of talk…well…everyone watched and listened and folks were just blown away by the performance. Wow. What a performance!
• Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor. My desire to become a keyboard player and singer led me to take organ lessons at church. I was given several pieces to play, but the one I wanted to play was the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor. It is quite a challenge for a new organist, and I didn’t really know how the chord progressions worked, but I knew the only way to perform it was to memorize it, so I came up with my own analysis. I spent hours alone sitting in the darkness in that vast space, repeating and repeating the measures and fingerings to get it right.
• Faust –  Opera from Charles Gounod. I had done Carmen a couple of years earlier at WKU, but this time I was the lead in the opera. It took me a year to study this opera and learn the story, which is based on Goethe’s Faust, a very serious subject for a young guy like myself. Looking into the future of my long life, considering how I would feel as an old man looking back at my life, identifying with the questions it asked, took me to a serious place.

Somehow I related to very serious and deep subjects with my music. It seems I was meant to do it the hard way. Fun…was really not a part of my music making…it was more about gut wrenching, soul searching truths.

Music is more than a career, a way of life. It is the sound of the spirit coming to us in a frequency that our ears can hear, resonating with our very being.

When I feel lost I always find my way back home when I spend time with music. It is more valuable to me than anything…which brings me to a song that really says it all….The Wall by Kansas….enjoy

The Wall, standing there, the symbol and the sum of all that is me. Towering and blocking out the light and blinding me…I want to see!