Tag: News

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. Of the five of us, I had the hardest time writing songs, and only had two songs I thought worthy of doing with the band, and neither of them did I think were very good. Most of our material came from Chuck Carson and Bev Ross, and their songs were amazing. The lyrics were captivating, the melodies seductive and expertly crafted. Larry Reese also had the gift, but wasn’t as prolific as these two. Tom Cairns wrote one or two, but didn’t take the writing side of things as seriously as the rest of us.

After a full year, I felt like a failure, and left the band to pursue science which I thought was my real calling. My last year in high school, I took two math courses to prepare for university, and I had hopes of finding new medical cures and doing great things. But for an optional course, I took harmony, and for the first time started to understand the music in my head that would not leave me alone. I took a gig playing some original comedy songs I had cowritten with another friend Sem Field, and we called the band the BA’s . 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.

My room mate that year was a second year art student who had played bass in a band I had put together back in Grade 10. John Baldwin was openly jealous of my ability to pick out chords from records, and harmonize tunes on the fly. Having perfect pitch felt like the gift I could never live up to, because I couldn’t create with it, only recreate things I had heard. By the end of the year, my marks came in, and it turned out the time I was still spending playing the piano was taking a toll on my dreams of curing cancer.

John was working long hours at the painting studio. If he wasn’t going to succeed as a bass player, he was going to leave his mark as an artist. His dad was an English Professor who had been newly minted as the Dean of Arts. John adored his dad, and desperately wanted to earn his admiration. He had been raised with a deep respect for all things creative, and he said I was out of my mind to not choose music. My mother told me the same thing and urged me to audition for the music program. My step father, a world famous biochemist told me I could either become an average scientist or an exceptional musician. So I auditioned to become a Theory and Composition major, and was accepted in the spring of 1971. That August, John and our good friend Tony Godfrey decided to hitchhike to California. They wanted me to come along, but I had been offered a gig in a bar band, and decided not to go. Tony was also a guitarist from our high school days, and was finishing up a premed program on his way to becoming a doctor. His dad was also an English Professor. How lucky were we to be torn between academia and bohemia. As the children of University Professors, we truly did not know our asses from a hole in the ground, but were aware of the weight of our choices.

It was a few weeks before classes were to start, and I got a phone call in the middle of the night. It was John’s dad. He told me that there had been a terrible accident, and that John and Tony had not survived. I was speechless. I went to visit him the a few days later at his house. We were dazed, in a dream. He asked me if I could find 12 friends to be pall bearers, they were arranging a double funeral at the local Anglican church. I started to make some calls.

This was all more than 50 years ago. My entire life has been shaped by this. To know that any day can be your last, that every moment is a gift, a miracle, has a profound effect. I found a way to write songs I believe in, and went beyond that to write tv scores, symphonic music, funk tunes, comedy bits. I try to do it all. I have shared my music in living rooms and been broadcast around the world to billions. But why? In no small part to honor the many gifts and the life I was lucky enough to be born into. Amazing friends and a beautiful family to share that life with. I do my best, and sometimes I fail, other times I knock it out of the park. It’s all good.

Anyway, that’s what I do, and why.