Decades: The Music Of A Lifetime

Being one's own worst critic can be a good or a bad thing. If your self doubt makes you work harder to express yourself clearly and emotionally then ones criticism is productive. But, if one’s self doubt keeps you paralyzed, then your self criticism is fruitless and unproductive.
There’s a thin line between creative energy and creative stagnation.

I believe we all suffer from both timidity and confidence. I do know that the most aggressive one in a room is rarely the most talented. Sometimes the potential genius is sitting in the corner, observing.

Personally I’ve always been hard on myself but time is the truth sayer. It is with the luxury of time that I’ve come to realize that all the things I hated about myself years ago are the very things I love about myself now. The years have brought me perspective.

I started listening to old recordings of myself again and for the first time I heard the beauty. There were flaws but they weren’t the craggy gouges I first heard, but now, they are the lovely anomalies in my voice. They are the sounds that make me special to listen to. Finally after years of intense self Criticism I became mature enough to listen and appreciate.

It is with this in mind that I decided to go back thirty years and pick thirteen songs—I was born on a 13th—and produce a vinyl record of the different stages of my vocal growth. The neurotic emotional depth was constant and always present in my singing and only now do I know that the voice was constant as well.

This project took a few years to go back thirty and listen to everything I’ve recorded and most songs I recorded many times. But I knew immediately when something was not to my liking. That’s a benefit of being self critical. Discarding those recordings was easy.

What I was left with was a, larger than I thought, pile of recordings that I thought were worthy of being considered for the final thirteen.

It was done! Brian Hurley, my musical director, and I whittled the pile down to the final thirteen. The album called “Decades; the music of a lifetime” will be done in vinyl because vinyl is making a come back AND We are Children of the Vinyl

In the mean time we will make videos of some of the songs and be posting them on this site and the YouTube channel. These videos are all hand made like visual quilts and put together with the same creative love and skill that many a craftsmen through the ages put into making a chair, a pot, or, more aptly, a crazy quilt.