A while back I heard a friend of mine flirting with a girl that I knew he was into. I could only overhear the conversation but he was going on and on about how he won't dance and he especially won't dance at a wedding because it’s awkward. He was a bit bigger of a guy and he even mentioned that as a factor for his awkwardness. I knew immediately that he had lost that girl's attention.

My friend Alia Arram died when I was seventeen. She died in a car accident. A mutual friend and her were in the car together. She just gotten the car for her sixteenth birthday. He was driving it out to show her a good fishing spot and flipped it on a gravel road. He walked away. She died on impact. I went to her house that night. One of her brothers had to be sedated. Her other brother said, “I’m glad she at least got the yard mowed today”. Their family was from Israel.

Why use such and outdated old format. Why go out of your way to collect it? Friends have asked me all these questions over the years.

To me life is about freedom first and foremost, and money can make you a slave. Personal Debt is slavery.

I am writing this blog post after taking a break from working on a chapter of this book I am writing my first novel. I’m fairly certain it will be terrible but maybe my third and forth ones will show some promise. Later I am also suppose to work on music for the next record, I have artists literally waiting on me to put down vocals but I just can’t make it right. Today seems particularly difficult to get in to the groove of things. Stephen King writes two thousand words a day and says some days the words flow easy and other days not so much.

In my mind I have a distinct recollection of falling in love with the bass guitar. When I was a kid my parents would take me to the mall every few weeks and I would spend my time in this music store marveling at all the electric guitars.

Nothing brings people together like food. Obviously we need it for basic survival but I would propose there is more too it than that. It could be the desire to connect, or maybe its that it lights up the pleasure centers in our brain. It's a craft that you can get good at and get a tasty treat at the end of.

My favorite books from 2019

Care more than everyone else about your art. For example, if you write a song honor that completely. You need to be the one to work on every detail. Treat it as something special and hone it. If you don’t care deeply about what you are creating no one else will. Do everything as best as you can. Treat the project like it will be your last one ever and give it your all. Life is too short not too.

What the heck does that even mean. Who knows what truth is anyway. Its tough in a world of industry created bullshit, fake pop stars, and mass media propaganda. Who can we trust? I don’t know. But I personally find myself gravitating to honest lyrics. However every time I find an artist that seems authentic, you find another major label creation. You have to dig and dig, investigate and move backward to find who inspired who. Maybe there is no truth? Maybe truth is in the eye of the beholder?

What are the things you really want to do in life? I often ask myself if money was no object at all, what would I eliminate? For me I would eliminate the following.

Its so easy to get caught up in the latest and greatest shiny object. I LOVE new toys, Maschine, Push, new guitar pedals. It’s all so cool and fantastic

Doesn’t that blow your mind? One of the greatest living directors had writers block basically and could not come up with an idea for Kanye. It sure makes me feel better. If the amazing David Lynch can’t always hit it out of the park then maybe I should not be so hard on myself. Maybe everyone has a miss or can’t come up with an idea. Lynch was going to direct the video for “Blood on the leaves” one of my favorite Kanye songs. That would have been AMAZING.

You need to stay organized and professional to be taken seriously. Of course you can keep things fun and light when dealing with your clients, and be yourself of course. As long as you can deliver and provide top notch service, most clients are more than happy to joke around and have a great time dealing with you. I get a lot of questions about how I bid, and bill ETC so this is a super basic list of programs and services I use to make my income.

I spend weeks of my life pouring over gear manuals, thinking about this plugin vs that plugin. Or pro tools vs cubase, push vs maschine. We live in such an amazing technological age it’s just ridiculous how many tools we have.

Why make anything? Why create at all? Is it to scratch your own itch or for some other reason like approval? How do you make something unique and still appeal to an audience? Its tough for sure, sometimes you just have to follow your own vision and make something you like, and if you do it enough it will attract others. Somes you find everything you make simply too abstract for anyone else to be interested in. The only thing to do ever is just to keep making stuff. Make terrible things, make brilliant things but put in the work and keep going.

Life is messy. Always. I get so distracted some days it seems and I can’t even think straight. Bills, politics, friends etc its easy to get caught up in life that you don’t live on your terms. That drama between friends, that new program, whatever it may be its only a distraction. The ONLY thing I can do is ignore things for a time. Not saying to let your relationships or life suffer, but if you get distracted by the immediate challenges of life you will never get anything done. You need space, you need focus or you won’t get anything thing created.

Or I assume he does, doesn’t everyone from England? HA! Brian hurts my brain. His music is simplistic and complicated, it is unnerving and calming at the same time. Don’t ask me how that is possible. I have listened to his album “Small Craft On A Milk Sea” about a hundred times and I still can’t break it down and understand it.