Where Music Lives

Written by Philip · Filed Under: Where Music Lives

Piano in the dark

I sit at my keyboard tonight, feeling the white and black of the keys under the pads of my fingers. I dim the light of the screen in front of me and pause before I hit the record button. Aside from that screen and the small blinking lights of the audio equipment around me, there are no other lights in the room.

The darkness allows something to come out from me that doesn’t show its face in the light of day. In the darkness, somehow, the freshly birthed ideas can take shape, like the tender green curled leaf of a baby fern, so delicate. In the darkness they can grope for purchase in the soil and take root. They have the night to grow and mature before they face the light of morning.

In her landmark work on creativity The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron says that the artist must concern herself solely with the quantity of the work, and turn the quality of it over to the Great Creator. In that she turns creativity into a spiritual practice, and here in the dark, it is exactly that. This is where I face my soul.

My second album is in the works, and I am filled with hopes and worries. It’s different from my first album, different methods of composition and recording, and with different purposes. Every creation is an act of courage, and this will be more courageous for me than the last.

It’s time to hit the record button, and hear what my hands and heart have to offer tonight. My fingers almost ache with what is about to come out, and I know I will have never heard this music before. That’s the dangerous beauty of creating, and I love it and it scares me to death.

Thank you for joining me tonight for this small moment. I can’t wait to share what I’m about to hear.

Written by Philip · Filed Under: Where Music Lives

Making it sacred: a music practice

Many of us have practices, things that we do to honor that sense of the sacred in our lives. We may have a meditation practice, or a yoga practice. I was just reading about some who go a little farther and consider themselves to have a gardening practice, or what they call an exercise practice.…

A moment in the sun

This is the story of the oddest thing, a spiritual experience (or hallucination, depending on your point of view) that happened to me almost a year ago. It’s taken me this long to even consider writing about it.…

Let’s get together for a nightcap.

Last week I finished a week of broadcasting live from my studio every night at 9 PM for 7 days. It was intense, scary. Crazy fun.

Here’s what didn’t happen that surprised me:…

Beginning with intent

When you take your pen in hand and press its tip into the paper the ideas begin to flow.

When you open a new document and press the tips of your fingers against the keys to form the first word, the rest of the words begin to come.

When you sit at your instrument with the intent not merely to play but to create, and then touch your fingers against the strings or the keys, the music starts to flow.

Magic is summoned. The dance between the temporal and the eternal, between the human and the divine, begins. But we must always take the first step.

That first step is both internal and external. It is the intent to create and then the act of physically beginning.

Many times our first few steps are clumsy, as we try to lead, but before long we are merely following. The process becomes less about writing and more about taking dictation. We seem to be guided by some unseen force, by some troop of angels that moves us along the path toward greater and greater creativity, moving us along the path toward a more divinely inspired, utterly sublime creation.

And this is why our best work seems not to come from us, but through us.

At other times the dance continues in its awkwardness, as we make our common-sense decisions, fearing the work will turn out to be very commonplace. Only after time has passed do we return to the work to see the touch of the divine.

Creativity is funny. The only wrong way to do it is to not actually do it.

When we begin to do something brave, unseen forces come to our aid. Creation is a brave act, and never is that promise of guidance, of assistance more true than when we truly begin and do so with intent.