I was chatting briefly with my friend Wes, and he was asking if I had used Last.FM before — not able to recall all that memorable an experience with them, I couldn’t answer for certain. Curious, I visited last.fm (a site about music essentially — listening to it, sharing it, and recommending it) and of course couldn’t resist searching to see if they were carrying any of my music through my connection in CDBaby. And sure enough, I have tracks up there. Which of course, prompted me to think about my music, where I’ve come from and where I may or may not go with it some day. I’m contemplative that way.

Music has always been an integral part of my life, past and present, and has often been a sustaining force for me when all other things failed. It has been inspiring, motivating, heart-sobering, enlightening, and even at times an amplifier for some of the most emotional times in my life. And like my friend Jamison has shared, there have been albums, songs, artists, and musical experiences that have become hallmarks in my life — things that will always remain framed and hung in my memories.

My first memorable encounter with music was when I was roughly four years old — I had my own transistor radio at my bedside and recall hearing Elton John’s “Yellow Brick Road” for the first time and cried when I had heard the passionate singing and music throughout the chorus. As a four-year-old, it was an incredibly sad song for me, but it was equally beautiful and captivating. The memories still linger to this day of that experience.

My parents put me through piano lessons with an older lady when I was in second or third grade — I think it was around the gas crisis era, and I knew that they could barely afford to put me through lessons and teaching me how to play “Hot Cross Buns” and other elementary tunes on the piano. After a couple years, we dropped the lessons because we could no longer afford them — or at least, that’s what I recall as being the reason.

Just years later, I took up the trumpet in fifth grade after attending a musical instrument “expo” at our elementary school. The school music teacher demonstrated each of the band instruments, and though I had a slight impulse towards the drums (and quickly steered away from such decision by my parents), I took up the trumpet. My first day in band wasn’t all that pleasant, recalling that I blasted my trumpet in my conductor, Mr. Essila’s face. He was NOT pleased with me and surprisingly allowed me to continue playing trumpet from that day forward, but on the condition I never do that again. X^)

I continued playing and learning the trumpet throughout junior high and into high school, with a brief one-year stint on the organ. Decidedly an unpopular instrument, I gave up the organ after a year — it also didn’t help that our organ sucked — yes, we actually owned an organ… bought used from our church’s rummage sale. But despite the fact I wasn’t exactly ecstatic about playing the organ, I had a growing love for playing music and even started to write songs here and there in my early teens, none of which have been kept in any way, shape, or form, and are lost in the vaporous archives of history.

High school brought about much more concrete memories and experiences with music, things that helped crystallize my love for music into outward expressions and events that have become fond memories for me and life-changing events. And at the core of that epic time in my life was my band teacher, Mrs. Mary Stedtfeld. She was my teacher, my hero, my mentor, and my friend. She did more than just teach us how to play the songs she picked, she imparted a passion for music, gave me a sense of self-respect, and helped cultivate a leader within me.

As I progressed through high school, my responsibilities increased as I became involved in the band council, continually competing for first chair, helping with younger students, and eventually becoming “Sted’s” right-hand man, the drum major. Lunch periods I’d hang out at Sted’s office, talk about life, music, and help plan out and stage our marching band arrangements. When I was around Mrs. Stedtfeld, I was treated like an equal, a person of destiny, and was in her eyes, an adult.

Without her influence, I would not have had such experiences like my first time listening — really listening — to the 1812 Overture and having tears running down my face as the bells began to toll towards the finale and the canons launching left and right in Peter Tchaikovsky’s amazing piano concerto. It still gives me goosebumps to this day every time the trumpets and the timpani come thundering in towards the end, bringing about the climax to this fourteen-minute piece. Who would have thought that a 16-year-old kid would sit there listening with breathless anticipation to such an ancient song, over and over and over on his walkman, with goosebumps and tears? I think without having Mary Stedtfeld as a teacher throughout those formative years, I might not have had the same degree of passion for music as I do today. [Side-note: if you really want to be on my most admired list for quite some time, take me to go see the 1812 Overture being performed by the likes of the Minnesota Orchestra or their equivalent. I will ooze the kind of gratitude not often seen in these parts.]

Towards the end of my high school experience, at our annual band banquet, I had a nearly prophetic experience as Mrs. Stedtfeld was handing out pins to all of the graduating band council members. She had been handing out pins in the shape of various instruments, she handed me a small guitar-shaped lapel pin, apologizing that she had run out of the trumpet ones. I was slightly disappointed, but at the same time it was curious, as I had been wanting to learn how to play the guitar. Several weeks later I’d see the fruition of that foretelling when I would buy my first guitar, which in itself was quite the story.

My graduation party had run long and was quite fruitful — with a huge fist full of cash, I was prepared to go buy my first guitar when the youth director of our local Lutheran Church said she had one that she never played and would be willing to sell it to me. SWEET! So though I generously offered a handsome purchase price of like $150 or $200, as the night passed, Kari Paulson kept dropping the price on her guitar — $125, $100, $75… and finally said, “oh, just give me $50 — that’s enough. Just meet up with me after church and we can do the exchange then.”

Well, the party ran into the wee hours and missed church and ended up running into each other (figuratively) halfway between my house and church, where the exchange took place on the corner of Minnehaha and McKnight. With $50 in hand, she handed over her guitar and refused my money saying, “keep the money and spend it on some lesson books or some lessons. Just keep the guitar, okay?” GAH! She outright gave me her Yamaha acoustic guitar.

With overwhelming exhilaration and amazement from this transaction, I went out and bought two lessons books to get me started — and to my disbelief, I had pounded through both those lesson books in a day, learning all of the “essential” chords, picking and fingering styles, and proceeded to write my first “real” song that week, “The Same Color,” inspired by all the senseless acts of bigotry and racism that was transpiring in the early summer months of 1990.

I was so thrilled about this new-found passion and was spending three hours a day on my guitar, writing songs, and learning more and more. I can’t say I was all that great, but for being self-taught and being disciplined as I was to learn the guitar, I sure progressed quite quickly and recorded my first lo-fi cassette, “The Same Color”, which I believe had ten songs on it. I recorded them in the basement of my parents’ house on an old Emerson stereo console that allowed me to “multi-track” ghetto style, that is, record the first track on one tape, then dub that tape onto another tape while simultaneously recording from the microphone input. Though pretty low-tech and low-quality, it worked and I recorded my first album in December of 1990 — and it goes without saying that I don’t think I distributed this album to anyone because it was that lo-fi.

College came along and brought with it a variety of tough life lessons, and propelled me into more song writing and the joy of performing with my instrument. I had purchased my first electric guitar in 1991, a Yamaha Pacifica 921, which proved to be a versatile and reliable electric guitar for many years. In college, I wrote more songs and recorded another album, “I Will Wait For You,” filled with enough sappy, immature songs of love and young spirituality to make the seasoned musician want to laugh amusingly for the quality level, while simultaneously applauding for the effort. I think I only handed out a copy of that cassette to one or two people, and can only hope that they’ve destroyed those copies as not to fall into the wrong hands.

By this time, I had a three-ring binder full of songs, half with music and the other just collections of poems, lyrics and groups of phrases with not a note connected to them. I think at one point I had counted over 40 full songs and dozens more poems and lyrical bits. For a self-taught guitarist and music-lover, this was quite the accomplishment for a 19-year-old… at least in my mind. Sometimes I wonder how much further along I would have been if I had the right instructor(s) or the right teacher throughout my post-high school years to help guide me. One thing’s for certain, though, I would have never guessed that I’d have such a rich, complex future ahead of me — and who would have thought that I’d have my own compact discs… or even more amazing, that people would conceptually be able to listen to my songs from anywhere in the world on their computer! In the early 90’s, computers weren’t good for much in my world — typing up my essays and papers for class, playing text-only adventure games, or even early versions of Missile Command, where every item in the game was an alpha-numeric character of sorts. Who would have thunk that there would be such a thing like iTunes, and having the capacity to share music with people around the world.

Only time would tell.

January 24, 2008, 1:33 pm

Filed under: General, Music, Recording

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