Boundless Gratitude
I sing ballads -- originals, traditional songs and covers -- usually to the accompaniment of a solo acoustic guitar. I’ve been called a griot, a troubadour and a balladeer. I call myself a musical storyteller and am often complimented on my musical arrangements. But I don’t do arrangements. Neither did Billie Holiday. “If you find a tune and it has something to do with you… you just feel it,” she wrote in Lady Sings the Blues. “And when you sing it, other people can feel something too.”
I worked full-time for more than 20 years as a science and technology journalist, but I’m not a true tech believer anymore. During the last decade or so, despite dogged opposition on my part, I underwent a slow but thorough conversion from the linear thinking of scientists and journalists to the nonlinear thinking of storytellers and musicians. Eight or nine years ago, when I first got serious about making music for public consumption, I received a lot of positive feedback from people who called my music “political.” That bugged me, however, because I was trying to share a heart connection not a head trip.
But at the time I was writing a lot of message songs. The messages were socially uplifting and delivered in a clever and entertaining style, kind of like articles on the editorial page of a hip newspaper or sermons in a modern house of worship. But the stories weren’t great. They didn’t unfold magically, like great novels, to carry listeners off on life-changing musical adventures. So even though I was getting good feedback, the music wasn’t fully satisfying to me, and somehow it seemed that the more I worked on it, the less satisfying it got, in spite of positive feedback that I continued to receive.
I lucked out, however, because over time audiences seemed to be appreciating my voice, over and above the messages in my songs. And what is a voice after all, but the sound of a heart? Of course that meant that well-crafted lyrics and a pleasing voice were no longer enough. Perhaps they never were. The music had to be heartfelt as well. And that’s what I do, or more precisely, what I practice. Finding, growing and nurturing great stories and delivering them in deeply heartfelt music have become my life work. That quest is also what differentiates my particular brand of musical storytelling.
Even though I’ve found it much easier to make a heartfelt sound than to record it, you can hear what I’m talking about by comparing my “Acoustic Nectar” CD, released in 2008, to anything I recorded previously. My current live engagements include co-hosting a singer-songwriter open mic at the Frank Bette Center for the Arts in Alameda, CA, and a poetry and music open mic at the Berkeley Art Center in Berkeley, CA. So come on out and hear me play sometime. If you feel the heart connection, then I’m your man. If not, you’ll still hear great stories and heartfelt music. You win either way.