If you survived my previous lengthy post about some of my music history, then you should have the fortitude to withstand this one — but then again, I’ve only just begun to type and have no clue as to its length. But take heart, I’m already half-way through my life’s history as it pertains to music.

College was a shorter experience than I had hoped, only attending two years, and being interrupted by a four-month stint with Lutheran Youth Encounter’s music “ministry” Captive Free. Forgive me for the quotes on “ministry,” but releasing five or six college-age students to travel throughout a region to minister to a congregation can be an unpredictable proposition. While I relatively enjoyed traveling from town to town and meeting all sorts of new people, we were never prepared for or equipped to handle living in such close proximity with five other people, how to deal with conflicting ideas, opinions and egos, and how to be most effective out on the road.

I was on the Captive Free (West Great Lakes) team in fall of 1992 and only survived four months on the road with my team — not that they were bad people or that I was unfit for the experience, rather we were poorly equipped and not mature enough to handle having such differing opinions, backgrounds, beliefs, and needs, that as each week passed, the conflict within and without only grew. One-on-ones with our regional representative became counseling sessions for me, pouring out my heart how I felt so misunderstood, disliked among my group, and feeling so desperately alone even though we were with people all the time.

So during our Christmas break, it was decided for me by the director, that I would no longer be on Captive Free, would have to undergo counseling for my “problem”, and would be left to pick up where my life seemed to be left off at — not able to return to college and a wide-open future ahead of me filled with uncertainty and no direction to speak of.

I don’t resent my experience, traveling with Captive Free and meeting all the incredibly hospitable people along the way, but in some ways I felt that the congregates often times ministered more to me than I could to them. I’m sure if there are those that might speak otherwise. But when you throw together such different people and have little training on how to just get along with each other when times are tough, it’s hard to imagine that team ever being fruitful. I had often felt like I was disliked because of my “ego” and seemingly being in the limelight all the time, and having a more outgoing personality. And I felt resentful because I felt so deeply misunderstood and given no chance to shine, whether it was because they were jealous or envious, or just didn’t like me much. Regardless, that was a milestone that was complex and filled with experiences I both cherish and regret because they were so bittersweet.

As I began to pick up the pieces after the catastrophe that was Captive Free WGL, I continued my songwriting and it eventually became a sanctuary for me, where I could express myself to God and about Him. And in the midst of my own endeavors, I hungered to have the band experience — to make great music, travel the world, and share that music with the masses. It wouldn’t be too far out in the future, when I would be in my first real band, Allegory.

In 1993, meeting up at a musician fellowship event at the old New Union (back when it was on Hennepin Avenue), I met my now long-time friend, Jamison. At the time, my cousin (a drummer) and I were looking to find a decent bass player to start up a band — he wanted to find someone that could play a sort of 70’s rock-funk style, I just wanted to play period. That night we found two bass players, one he was interested in because he was a great player, and one I was interested in because he seemed like a really easy-to-get-along-with guy — both of which are important for a band. The former was already in a band, which had us hooking up with Jamison to try things out.

I recall that my cousin didn’t like Jamison much or something, and lost interest in starting up the band. Well, at that time, I needed to pull together a band for a rock musical I was writing and directing for the Ramsey County 4H program. [I'm sure you're like, WHAT?? Where'd THAT come from???] Yep, I was writing and directing a musical for the local 4H program for the Ramsey County Fair and then to compete on at the State Fair level. But I needed just the right band for it. Enter in Jamison.

Now I just needed a drummer. With my cousin disinterested in playing with us, I found another drummer at the Lutheran Church I was a member of: Peter Weinke. We had such a blast coming up with the music for the production — taking such songs like “Summer in the City” and “What Are We Going To Do?” and shaping them to our style and needs. It was rockin’ and most certainly a departure from the conservative, overly-done vaudeville style musicals everyone else was doing… because that’s what 4H musical groups did: vaudeville. No, we did a rock musical on environmentalism and saving the planet! Being progressive in 1993! At first the kids hated working with me and wanted their old director back, but with two weeks before the production, they came to love the experience and wanted me to come back next year (which I politely refused).

As we were nearing the end of the production, it was then that as a band we asked the question, “so, do we wanna try a few other songs? Maybe even start writing some?” It was then that Allegory was conceived, already with an opportunity in the near future to perform for the Freshman Orientation Night at Concordia College [now University] in Saint Paul. With a lineup that included Runaway Train, Secret Ambition, and a few other tunes, we rocked the house with our hooded, sleeveless vests, and were well-received by all the newcomers to Concordia College.

That launched us into a whole new realm — we began to rehearse more, we wrote some songs, and recorded our first album, “The Life of Brian” in 1994. Unlike my previous solo attempts, this cassette sold pretty well among friends and fans as we performed at various events and competed in the New Union’s band tournament in ‘94 and ‘95. Recording that cassette was an interesting experience, hacking our way through the production process with unprofessional gear and recording and mixing the music down on Jamison’s 4-track cassette recorder. But because we were creative with what we had, I’m still pretty proud of what we were able to accomplish.

Into our second year together, we began recording our first professionally-recorded EP with Brian Ricke, called “Lawnboy” — a cassette that had four songs on it, capturing our more “bubble-grunge” style of music. I was also contacted on my pager by the tour manager for Starflyer 59 to come tour with them, but unable to return the call as he left no area code with his phone number. A near-hit opportunity for us as a band to go further along and reach more and more people. But life has a way of throwing curve balls and altering the course that is best-suited for you at the time.

The band started to fizzle out after our second year in the band tournament with anything but glowing reviews, and simultaneously the other band I had joined as a side-project [Chinashop], had also fizzled because of various reasons. 1995 became a year of transition for me, figuring out where I wanted to go as a songwriter — choosing the path between solo musician and that of a band. On the heels of experiencing the break-up of two different bands I was deeply committed to, I chose the solo route.

As I continued to write more songs and find my voice musically, I began to work more closely with my friend and producer Brian Ricke on putting together my first real recording. Though our EP’s with Chinashop and Allegory were great, they just lacked that sense of arrival — they only had four songs on them. So in late 1995 Brian and I began the recording process of my first album in his studio at Holy Cow Productions in the Union Depot in Lowertown Saint Paul. We spent hours laying down scrap tracks and the foundational pieces of the songs and contemplating musical directions as he played for me inspiring examples from singer/songwriter Seal. Having limited income and already in debt, I just couldn’t see how I was going to have the capacity to cover the costs of recording, hiring musicians, and eventually paying for mastering and replication of the final product.

That was when Brian thought, “hey, let’s just strip it down — just you and the guitar — and see where that goes.” So an album that was nearly three years in the making was finally finished in late 1998: Through. I celebrated its completion by sitting on it for nearly two years, unsure what to do with it and unsure how I was going to pay for a thousand CDs — let alone who was going to buy them. Eventually the once-epic MP3.com was born and gave musicians the opportunity to share, sell, and promote their music online for nominal fees — more importantly, it gave me the opportunity to sell one-off’s to people who might wish to buy my music AND didn’t require me buying a large quantity of CD’s that I was unsure would sell.

Eventually time would prove MP3.com to be a virtual flea market of music nobody wanted to buy, and folded about four years after its launch, forcing me to consider other options as a musician.

In 2003, I had happened upon DiskFaktory, a service that allowed people to order short-runs in blocks of 100, which in turn meant I had to spend less to get the quantity that I wanted as an independent musician. So as incentive to finally release my CD as I wanted, I spent time recording a few songs and simultaneously re-released “Through” along side an EP that I recorded, called “Studio72 Sampler 2003“, a vast departure from my previous release. The “sampler” was really a six-song EP that captured a more urban-style acoustic flavor of music with props to David Gray being a heavy influence at that time.

The last track on the sampler also gave a hint of a band that I had been trying to forge with my good friend Jim Orvis, Two Mile Stretch. We made many attempts to record, had played out frequently at cafes, and even had a few relatively higher profile opportunities to perform at places like the Kitty Cat Klub in Minneapolis and the Fallout Art Festival. But when the time came to really hunker down and narrow down our style and our approach as a band, we could not come to a consensus and it led to each member going their own separate way. The third time isn’t always a charm.

Feeling the need to become more self-sufficient and able to stand on my own, I forged further out into solo musicianship and explored the realms of creating live loops, improvisation, and instrumental music. With all the things I was experiencing both in life and spirituality, I had a lot bottled up inside me but no voice or words for what I had been feeling inside. The lyrics were few and far between and I had felt more security and freedom in expressing myself through improv and free-flowing instrumentals.

So in March of 2005, locked up in a room that had wonderful acoustics at a church I used to attend, Tranquility was born. This ten-song CD (with one additional bonus instrumental track, non-improv) was a collection of free-flowing improv pieces created literally in the process of start the record button, start laying down the loop sequences on my Boomerang, and begin exploring whatever direction the music takes me. It’s imperfect, is raw and filled with humanity, and captures the idea of tranquility. And of course, the album was not complete without a nod to Jamison for all the years he’s helped me in my musical-related endeavors, using a photo he took of me on the northern shore of Lake Superior one early Saturday morning.

To date and without any promotion whatsoever, this album has been my best-selling collection of songs on iTunes with hundreds of listens on various music download services and dozens of purchases — ironically mostly from places in Europe, like Ireland, England, and Spain. In fact, I’d be willing to wager that I have had more “listens” in Europe than America. Crazy.

A year later I would follow up that release with another instrumental CD entitled “Mystique,” which really was a thrown-together collection of instrumental pieces I was messing around with on the side. I decided that I had enough “keepers” to put together a CD, and hastily sent it off to DiskFaktory to get duplicated and eventually released it to CDBaby, iTunes, and whomever else would carry it. I had no vision of this becoming a best seller or topping the New Age charts in Boulder, Colorado let alone Grand Marais, Minnesota, but I think it was simply to keep me actively creating music. As it was, I was fighting off a purposelessness in my musical endeavors, no substantial audience to give me feedback, and a barren desert with not a song (nor inspiration of such) to be found.

I really didn’t know what to do. I was losing interest in the one thing that I was passionate about, I couldn’t write a completed song to save my life, and was also seeing less and less connection to God in my songwriting as time passed — this correlating to some serious changes in my world view as a Christian and the life-changing and soul-piercing experiences I had been having over those past few years. There was no reason to write, no reason to play, no reason to record, and no reason to share the music I created. In years past you couldn’t stop me from creating more and more, from recording, and from finding the ways and resources to share it with the world. Now I was just struggling for the motivation to even pick up my guitar, let alone play it for more than 30 minutes. I think if my high school band director, Mary Stedtfeld, could have seen me then, she would have been truly sad for me — losing the passion and the drive for music.

Of course there were so many circumstances that played into that desert experience and would be too numerous to share about — some too personal — but as Paul Harvey would say, that’s not the rest of the story. The summer of 2006 would bring with it renewal and Jamison would enter the picture musically once more, helping bring new life where there was none and playing a catalyst type role to help me keep on keeping on. Eventually I would re-enter a season of a frenzy of songwriting and would go on to form a new band — Crash Effect — creating new music and taking one more stab at this “band thing.”

But before I tell the rest of the story, I think it’s time to give the mind a break. I think these have been my longest entries to date. I will conclude this three-part retelling of my story soon enough, sharing about the present and asking the question “where do I go from here.”

January 24, 2008, 3:51 pm

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