Changing Your Ways

 

If you’re a musician or artist for long enough various things will overlap with your music. What happened to me was that I studied jazz and classical then started exploring other areas: spirituality, psychology, and philosophy. Many of the electives I had taken in college were taking place at the same time as the music classes. For example, I’d have a harmony class in the morning and a philosophy class in the afternoon. So there was a slippage between the two and began to affect my lyric writing around 1990. 

There was a piece that I wrote called Path of Salvation, partly inspired by the book Communion by Whitley Streiber which came out around 1989. I had not been interested in UFOs although I knew people who were interested in them, and I had drawn parallels between ufology and spirituality because I think they’re related in some ways. That was the first new influence that changed my approach to music. There were other things that happened along the way but fell by the wayside, and consequently I started getting more into instrumental music, yet was still affected by that sea change, and became my ambient music phase, which I think has a spirituality to it. Playing instruments is also very spiritual for me because it gets you out of the ruminating mind to some extent. Just being inside the music is a form of spirituality.

3/28/2021

[3/28/2026: AI music is another side turning, but not a desire path, although it is a shortcut and could become a rut seeking a new path, but as in the above image, you might as well capitulate. After an artist passes the age of 60, you have to start thinking about how you’re going to continue on with the things that you’ve been doing. As a musician, I have to think about whether I’m going to continue writing pop songs, and how will I produce them? Take someone like Paul McCartney, who has diversified his creativity: he’s done orchestral pieces, paintings, photographs, but he hasn’t continued on with them, whereas I have. I took up photography in 2001 and I’ve been doing it ever since. I’ve always composed music in standard notation, and I’m still doing that, so I think I could continue on with all these things. This is why I like the Songday series. It gives me something I could produce every day, even if it’s two or four bars of music].