So, what am I doing? and why?

A long time ago, I dedicated my life to creating music. I was around 20 years old, and I had spent my first year out of high school touring the world and singing original songs with my friends in a folk rock band called Manna. We weren’t a Christian band and I hated the name. Larry had spent two years in Pakistan learning sitar. He was making such a name for himself on it that he was hired to open for Procol Harum with the Edmonton Symphony. We were famous. Chuck wrote amazing songs, but sang out of tune. We toured the world playing with symphonies as part of a Jesus Christ Superstar concert tour but I felt like a complete fraud and quit after one year to become an honours biochemistry student.

That year the urge to create music wouldn’t leave me. I had perfect pitch and could play anything on the piano without really understanding it. My friend Sem Field and and I started co-writing comedy songs and started a new band. We called it the BA’s to celebrate the lack of status we had on campus. It was supposed to be a one off, but it sold out, and I remember one guy was laughing so hard he fell out of his chair and was rolling around on the floor in front of me. Comedy beckoned, and science began to lose its luster.

That same year I was living with another high school friend who was a second year art student. John Baldwin was begging me to quit science told me I was a fool to turn my back on music. So I auditioned to become a music theory and composition major, and even though I couldn’t read music, I got in on the strength of my ear skills. I was terrified.

John‘s dad was the Dean of Arts at the time and just before the next term started he called in the middle of the night to tell me that John had fallen off a cliff in Oregon. He was 20 years old. I was devastated. John’s belief that I could do great things with music became my mantra. Life is too precious to waste not chasing your dreams.

It took me years, but losing John give me the determination to make composing music my life. I finished my degree and got a scholarship to go to Banff. I followed that with jazz studies in Texas. Above all, I learned how to embrace failure. It turns out that the secret to creative freedom is to learn how to love the process of improving terrible ideas. Eventually, I came to write songs and musicI love – and in the years that followed, I came towrite tv scores, symphonic music, funk tunes, comedy bits. I reached a level of success and confidence beyond my wildest dreams.

I try to do it all. I have shared my music in living rooms and been broadcast around the world to billions. But why?

I believe in all my heart that pursuing creativity and encouraging each other to connect with the things that we write and paint and sing about is not a bad way to try to give meaning to our lives. In the roller coaster that has been my life, this has been a reliable source of joy and comfort. So I’m posting my thoughts for you now in the hope that you might be inspired in the same way.