My home.

When I was young, I told my mom I could see sound... physically. I'm sure it was some skewed childhood epiphany, but it cemented in place an everlasting affinity for musical awareness.

My parents used to put me to sleep with cassette tapes of Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Beethoven regularly. I typically just stared at the ceiling and made shapes out of nighttime shadows. Sometimes during the more raucous moments, I'd be inspired to grab my flashlight and play Airplane. Airplane consisted of standing on my bed, reaching way up and holding the light as close as possible to the ceiling. When the light was as small as possible, I slowly started pulling my hand back and moving it farther and farther away from the ceiling. The expanding circle of light mimicked an onncoming airliner with frightening accuracy to a 5 year old. In order to get the full effect of impending doom, I'd often end up on my back with both my arm and my flashlight far off the side of the bed well below the rest of my body. My eyes would be large and my open mouth was usually making a fairly stupendous noise. A quick test in a dark room will show anyone just how fiercely awesome Airplane actually is. It works under the covers, too. But it's always best when the airplane accompanies 60 trained musicians rattling the sanctity of a concert hall built for that very music.

The following statement is being made only after I convey clearly that I feel all people are perfectly different. I do not and wish never to resort to any kind of gross generalization or categorization when forming an opinion about any one person. With this in mind, I continue.

There are two types of people in this world: those who expose their minds to the Arts to learn about themselves and those who expose themselves to the Arts to learn about the world.

I'm entirely convinced that the nature of conception, composition and performance, the life span of the Creative process, is one of the most important aspects of our life. At least it has been for me. There is, of course, the steadfast spiritual notion that one must embrace directly what he or she imagines in order to satisfy the soul. This is not the notion I'm going to talk about tonight.

I'm going to talk about my experiences with music over the last 15 years.

After being classically trained on clarinet and understanding what sort of attention classical arrangement actually requires, I decided to begin experimenting a bit more with composition. I chose, however, to do so within the realm of contemporary song structure and cadence. In short, fame and fortune readily awaited behind a sturdy mound of youthful enthusiasm.

My first independent adventure in sound was through rhythm. My dad taught me how to keep a standard beat in 4/4 on the dashboard of his old Jeep to the Doobie Brothers cassettes that had gotten him into trouble in college. I have ever since considered rhythm to be far more important than any possible collection of notes. If you can't maintain an audible thought process through rhythm, you're a mental invalid drooling your way through the air... and uncomfortably, at that. Stomp your foot and clap your hands to the beat and you're 90% of the way there. Once the shimmer of a new, sociable talent wears off, once a person begins to track their own progress with their own practice, weaving diddles into songs makes afternoons go by surprisingly quickly.

My parents got me a drum set during the trickier part of my life. I have no recollection of life at home for a couple years because that's... just the way it is. I do, however, remember the drum set. I played it until every playable piece was broken. It lasted about 3 months. When I was done with it, it sounded like, well, it sounded like a disgruntled fourteen year old banging on a broken drum set.

I accidentally joined a band at 15 and was intending to play the drums for our inaugural performance. However, while practicing in the garage and running through the set list we deemed suitable for a sibling's 16 year old party (yeah Edwin McCain), it was discovered that I was the only one able to carry a pitch.

I sang for the next 3 years and played about 50 shows for some pretty fun kids. I spent weeks on end in recording studios in Los Angeles where we worked 20 hour days doing what we loved. We made contacts and contracts with some fancypants folks and created some great music.

After I dealt with some internal creative conflicts, I resigned comfortably and cast my adolescent pen back into the spinning maelstrom of alternative rockstuffs. And good riddance. I hope you had the time of your life.

I stopped singing and started playing a classical guitar not-so-classically. I started listening to what makes music enjoyable rather than looking for enjoyment in music. It was not uncommon for me to charge my knobs-to-eleven sound system with the task of filling my immediate vicinity with Rachmaninoff's various piano concertos. I was happy to be the crazy guy in the apartment upstairs, a veritable Doc Brown playing music at 1.21 jigawatts. As far as I was concerned, I could play a little Tejano followed by some European black metal and as long as I finished with something happy like Louis Armstrong, the folks around me knew there wasn't anything they needed to worry too much about. Whether or not they were happy is probably another story. Jazz has never carried through walls very kindly.

In the last couple years, I've added a number of ambient and chillout dub artists to my collection. Rough and crisp highs on synthesizers mixed with lightly Middle-Eastern influenced melodies win me right over. Add some fluffy, well crafted strings and rolling but not pounding drums and I'll damn near make you breakfast just to hear it.

When I was trading London sessions, I got into Hearts of Space, an atmospheric experiment of sound and color running across hours-long songs. I hope to begin meditating again shortly with the Hearts' assistance.

So I've acquired a bit of a producer's ear over the past few years. Going from writing recreationally to being a performing musician and then to being a recording musician was terrifically exciting. Our producer and engineers didn't hesitate for a moment to let us know we, at 16 and 17, were competing with our multi-platinum idols. Given the texture of my audience, I simply chose to pursue a different style of painting.

When I hear songs now, seldom will I listen to any of the words the first time through. My ears turn into the ears of a dog as I mechanically scan the available spectrum of sound for audible suggestion. I've always considered the cadence and color of a voice to be more important than the words. Anyone who knows what they're doing can sing about a loaf of bread. If the vocabulary, prose and the pitches are correct, you can make Alfred Hitchcock float like a summer breeze. Further into the song, my breath either shifts to follow the artists' thought process or it doesn't. Such is the mindset of those "in the know." Such is the nature of the greatest music we have. In my opinion, the thought of conveying human Inspiration and Pleasure inside of three single minutes of a person's entire lifetime requires an enormous amount of energy. It requires such a clear examination and subsequent presentation of one's thoughts that the artist must be so laden with raw love and emotion that the magnificent seems mundane and the petty seems comfortably perfect.

So do different people hold art, and music in particular, in different regards? I think some people use the words of what they consider to be "wiser" artists (writers, poets, songwriters) to piece together solutions to their own problems. Others choose to devote themselves to creativity in general. These people address quite different priorities and seek personal and emotional growth specifically to uncover a way of life that provides a greater frequency of moving moments, of experiences with love and profundity at their core rather than a life relying on the experiences and summaries of others. I think the real idea at work here, regardless the profession or medium, is the willingness to recognize wisdom, to step on the shoulders of lessons learned whether or not they've taken place in the particular manner implied.

In the most rudimentary sense, one person will have either more or less quantifiable memories than the other person in any one conversation. The scope of human emotion, however, does not vary between individuals. Greatest and worst memories move side by side between friends and strangers alike, regardless the age or particular experiences. Some clearly strange people (myself included), actually do outlandish things to manipulate their bodies and recreate the biological effects of the great moments to which we aspire. But I'm getting off topic. The human emotional spectrum exists only in relation to personal, individual experiences. I generally use this as my justification for flooding the other party in a conversation with emotional information before they even know if they can trust me as a human being.

My experience with the life of the Creative process, with conception, composition and performance, have together shown me the true potential of my words. It led me to a very conscious decision I made a few years ago to speak my mind more often, regardless the emotional effect it has on other people (within reason). I personally feel we don't pick up rocks to make sure what's under them stays hidden. I know I'm also guilty of being pretty quiet. I've always been. Several people who don't know me consider me perfectly flipshit and lost in a dream world of enchantment. Interestingly enough, after doing what I've done, magical enchantment along with an eye on the distant future are all that actually interest me anymore. Women often think I'm implying something sexual. It's terribly off-putting for many people when I say what I think should be said because the last things people expect to come easily in conversation are Trust and Respect. Once those are addressed emotionally, the remaining impact on people's egos leaves them just confused and generally opposed to further conversation. I know it's supposed to be this way and I'm doing what I can to figure out where to go from here, into and through tomorrow as comfortably as possible. But people generally seem like they've wandered unknowingly onto my emotional railroad tracks on the Plain of conversation and can't wait to get off of them.

I still eat my words far too often, but I'm really working on making them more palatable.

So these are the colors of my home. If I didn't have eyes or ears, I'd still be able to hear and see sound at the same time. I'd bang on pots and pans and make everyone else wish they could experience actual, biological enthusiasm again. My imaginary conversations with the artists I feel I know so well are some of the few things that make me laugh anymore. The others are poorly constructed plot possibilities that end up looking like an elephant on a tree limb. Ears are in short supply and as baffling as it sounds, apparently in short demand. Should we be having a conversation any time soon, my favorite conversation is about travel and about people who might have made you laugh at some point in time. Otherwise, I like being generally quiet and watching things come and go with good people.

This is my home.

>> "That Home" and "To Build A Home" on Ma Fleur by Cinematic Orchestra