Important Music.

In the winter of 1996 I was living with a girlfriend in an apartment in Ypsilanti, Michigan. I had been let go from a job, my girlfriend was cheating on me but keeping quiet about it because she wanted me to give her my car, and I had almost no friends at all. Two years previously, in similar circumstances I came very close to killing myself out of abject depression. To stave off the chances of this happening I went on a regimen where every week I got three books, a biography, a self-help book and a novel. The greatest help to me in this time were the writings of Alan Watts who taught me about meditation, and a new way to look at the world.
Each morning I would drink some tea, sit in a chair and meditate while listening to Let It Be, by The Beatles. Then I would go for a walk. Three months later, while sitting in a park, I had the enlightenment experience. The last song I remember hearing before this was Across The Universe. That experience has transformed my life, and entirely for the better.


Sometime in the year 2000, I think, in a backyard barbecue on SE 49th street in Portland, OR my friend Dade asked if I wanted to be a band he was starting. The reason for him asking me was at the barbecue I was banging on a hand drum while he played guitar and sang. My musical ability at the time ranked very close to non-existent and so I initially said no. He said to think about it, and a couple of days later I called him and said I would like to try it, but if I was holding the band back he should tell me and I would quit. Some time later we played an open mic night at the Snake and Weasel, (by the way, another friend of mine that I met years later turned out to be the Weasel, Portland has things like that happen all of the time) and the first song that we played was Crazy, by Seal. I was sitting at the front of the stage, on the right, nervously pounding on a huge djembe drum. The song seemed to go OK, we stopped, there was the slightest of pauses (which is a precise, crystalline moment in my memory), and then yelling and clapping and cheering. What a feeling. I didn't sleep for hours and hours that night, loving every minute of it. I'm in a band today, trying to help a couple of people to get to that point where they get their first round of applause. I will always play music now, because of that moment.


The third album that I ever had (the first two being Queen's Greatest Hits and Difficult To Cure, by Rainbow) was a copied tape from a friend of my mother, who's name I can't recall. It was Dire Straits' Brothers In Arms, and I have been a fan of Dire Straits ever since.
In 1994 a girlfriend of over four years duration (from when I was nineteen!) who had lived with me for a couple of years realized that she needed to move on and not spend her entire life with one person. Looking back on it now it all makes sense, and she didn't try to break my heart, and I was good to her and her new guy. There were only decent people involved, but I have a memory that still brings tears to my eye to this day just thinking about it. I was at a party at my friend Josh's apartment, full of engineers. It was later on in the evening, she and her new boyfriend were there and people had been remarkably good. Then someone put on Romeo and Juliet, by Dire Straits on the stereo and my heart shattered. Tears rolled down my face. She came and hugged me, and I collapsed in shuddering sobs. Just broken, broken as a person.

On the album Making Movies there are two songs that follow directly one after the other, Tunnel of Love and then Romeo and Juliet. They are essentially a single song, in two movements, Tunnel of Love telling about the youthful flowering of love, and Romeo and Juliet about the death of love and the ashes left. So, please try to listen to one immediately after the other. It says more clearly how I feel about love than anything I can write.