It's early sometimes when I rise and after meditation I love being able to pick up my guitar. It's led me on such a wonderful fantastical adventure so far and it's something that only improves with age. One time I was sitting in the Great Divide Music store in Aspen. I used to work there for a brief moment and Jimmy Ibbotson came walking in from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. He played a song and I think I played a song for him and he replied that, "songs are like wine as they only get better with age." I think that is the beautiful part of music. It is something that does improve with each day. I personally love the John Denver song "This Old Guitar" as the song does really explain what a guitar is like for the songwriter: It is a friend. I've been in some crazy places with my guitar or the guitars I've owned. One time I sat out on a boardwalk in Australia. I hauled it around to late night gigs in Tokyo as well. The feeling is always new when I pick up the instrument. It might be at a campsite in the early morning when the sun just is rising or maybe it's high in the mountains in some far away hut where I have on numerous occasions hauled the instrument up on my back. Somehow multiple plane rides and dusty single tracks on foot has not rendered the guitar broken in someway. Instead the trips have added flavor to the new music that can be created.
You can tell when there has been laughter in a room or there is a feeling after a room empties out where just moments before music was played. Similarly, there is a feeling of calm after a meditation gets out. It's in the room, although all the people are gone. In that same way I think a guitar changes and soaks in the musical melodies of every experience it's been through. When I pick one of my guitars up I can feel it in the strings. I can also feel it when I pick up the guitar of another songwriter. I really do believe the personality of a musician does imprint itself into the strings of any fine instrument.
It does create a very unique path following the route that a songwriter takes. Everyday they rise and strive to share their art with the world. They soak up their experiences both good and bad and turn them into an expression of beauty. Right now I have been delving into the practice of Vipassana, which focuses itself on maintaining a quality of equanimity when going into silence. Songwriters do this as well as they turn life's story into exactly that. It's a story at the end of the day no matter how sweet the squeeze or sour the lemon. Both come and both flow.
Here's some of my music and what I'm doing lately and here's some of my current bandmate's music. Her name is Victoria and we met recently and are good friends. We're playing under the band name Mountain Valley now, although we are both single artists from the start of things.
I encourage everyone reading this to pick up some instrument and start writing. I promise you won't have any regrets and it is a very sweet way to start off any morning. Good luck creating!
Are you looking for inspiration or a lesson or two? I do teach a little and would love to help out! Please go to the website to contact me or my email will do. We also are available for house concerts and such so please do inquire!
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About the Creator
Sound And The Messenger
Hello and welcome. Creativity shows itself in a myriad of different ways for me. I intend to get out of my comfort zone on this page, be vulnerable and create. Follow me @soundandthemessenger
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Full Moon
It's another hot day on the coast of Fukushima and it's late summer. I'm in a car and driving deep into a jungle that I thought I could not drive into. Mark has told me about a music festival that happens in the summer in the mountains of Fukushima. I don't know what to expect. An already skinny paved road gradually grows more thin threatening to disappear under the foliage and we turn left onto an old dusty dirt road that creeps its way further into the jungle. Mark and I have been meeting and rehearsing on and off for a couple months now and he has invited me and so I am there with him. He has been introducing me to the music scene in Japan and for that I feel very grateful. The dirt road winds up the mountainside and then curves around sharp turns for the next 45 minutes and then I hear music. I don't expect to hear music but I hear music. It seems to be coming from the leaves of the trees. In fact it could be doing so, but I know it's not. At that moment, I am reminded by my mothers story of how she had told me about a friend who had been hiking in the Swiss Alps. They had been in the middle of nowhere and had rounded a bend to see a green field with a helicopter landed and with the band "Yes" practicing in the middle of the field. I felt I was in a similar experience. Soon the trees opened up to a thousand people camped in the middle of a field with numerous stages set up in the background. There were artists selling their wares and different DJs lighting up dancing in different spots. Our car found a place among the bodies and undergrowth and we filed out of the van. Mark would be playing his own DJ set later that evening and I heard that I would be able to play some music as well.
By Sound And The Messenger7 years ago in Beat
Victim or Survivor
TW: Mention of self harm and suicide attempts I'll preface this article with I have never listened to any other songs by Citizen Soldier. I had never heard of them until I found out from an Icon for Hire stream where they told fans about an "upcoming collab," being with Citizen Soldier. As soon as I saw that it was on Spotify, I listened to it over and over... And over because of the lyrics.
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