Tag Archives: music

Just imagine

Julian Lennon has done a cover of his father’s song to raise money for Ukrainians who have been devastated by war.

These lyrics have always spoken to me:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today… Aha-ah…Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace… You…You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

~ John Lennon

Man’s inhumanity to man is shocking. The violence that happens in the name of country and/or God has been continuous for all of recorded history.

One people, no counties, no God to worship. I can’t help but think the world would be a better place. It would probably be more spiritual rather than less, with humans understanding that we are all connected… all one race, the human race… and all part of a greater ecosystem that we must work together to nurture.

Just imagine.

Live events

Last night I watched my daughter perform live for the first time in 2 years. It was her university class performance, with 11 students singing two 1-2 minute shortened versions of songs from the 60’s to today. And there was also an opening and closing song along with three group songs. The event went by quickly, the audience was small, and everyone including performers wore masks the entire time.

It was wonderful!

I loved being part of a live audience. I loved watching talented kids put their heart and soul into a performance. I loved the sense of normalcy that an event like this gave me.

I even loved that we had to show our vaccine card to enter the audience. The idea that we can slowly start to expand our opportunities and see live events needs to come with precautions and concern about reducing risk of covid contagion. Live events are wonderful, but as we move back to normalcy, it needs to be done cautiously… or we’ll take a step backwards and lose out on enjoying many live events like this one.

Mixed tapes

A couple days ago I shared how we had to wait for songs to come on the radio to record them. Today this 7 year old memory came up on Facebook:

Oh, the hours put into making the perfect mix. The frustration of making a great mix, but realizing too late that one song should have been left off. The too long gaps between songs, which were actually better than the too short gaps with a song getting truncated (which at least happened less frequently, unless you were recording from the radio and had to cut off when the DJ started talking).

The challenge of getting the volume of songs consistent. The stretching of songs near the start and end of the tape. The tangles, pulled out and then retracted with a pencil.

But above all, the time it took to make a good mixed tape… that’s a thing of the past that carries a lot of nostalgia, and would be hard to meaningfully share with someone who never had to do it.

I had to wait

A couple days ago I heard a song I liked being played and I opened Shazam. This handy app told me the name and artist of the song, and shared a link to iTunes. It was in my library in under 2 minutes. Growing up, this was a different story.

I’d hear a song I liked on the radio and maybe they’d re-announce the title and artist at the end of the song. If not I’d just have to hear it again before finding out more. If it became popular and I really liked it, I’d have a cassette recorder next to the radio and hit the Play and Record buttons together simultaneously to record the song to listen to it later… often trying to time when the DJ would stop talking over the intro, so I didn’t get his voice, but maximized the amount of the song I got.

I would only buy the song if I heard and liked enough of all the songs from the album to justify buying the whole thing. I remember having an entire side of a cassette with either Freeze Frame or Tainted Love ‘on repeat’ because I kept recording either one as I heard them on the radio.

And there was no YouTube. If I wanted to see a music video, I had to watch MTV, with 3+ minute long commercial breaks, hoping they would show the video I wanted to see.

We don’t often think about the conveniences we have today compared to our childhood. Conveniences that are now expectations for kids, but would have been pure luxury or us.

Family recordings on 8 millimetre film, that was played on a projector. Waiting for a roll of film to be developed, after waiting for weeks or months for the roll of film to be finished and ready for processing. Missing your favourite show and hearing everyone talk about the episode that you wouldn’t see until reruns started being played 13 weeks later.

We had to wait. That waiting doesn’t happen anymore.

What’s your Walk-up music?

If you’ve ever watched a boxing match, a UFC fight, or even fake wrestling, you know that fighters come in to ‘Walk-out music’. They have a song that pumps them up and gets them ‘Ready to Rumble’. These Walk-out/Walk-up/Walk-in songs energize you and get you ready for ‘game time’. Almost everyone knows this one.

John Spencer asked on Twitter: “If teachers had walk-up music when they started class, what would you walk-up song be?”

The resulting thread of replies is fun to check out!

I went with a song that’s very new to me, but that I love to do workout sets to, Tujamo ‘s ‘Drop that Low (When I dip)’.


A former students reminded me in a response to my tweet that for last year’s grad my walk-up music to the stage was ‘Rock Lobster’ by the B-52’s. I responded, “That was old school me, this is new school me 🤣“.

I have a small playlist on my phone called ‘All On Repeat’. These are songs I like to listen to over and over again when I work out.

Just recently, I shared a video of myself working on my handstands listening to Kesha’s ‘Your Love is My Drug’. My plank music is Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’. And my chin-up music, along with other exercises, rotate between ‘Paper Planes’ by M.I.A., ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ by The Verve, and again my new favourite, Tujamo ‘s ‘Drop that Low (When I dip)’.

I also have music that I listen to when I write. I always chose music either with no lyrics, or with lyrics that are easy to ignore. Enya is a favourite, especially songs from her album, ‘Memories of Trees’. My current go to is a bit more frenetic, Michael Denny’s ‘Nerve Centre’ available on the Calm (meditation) App. I’m listening to this as I write, now.

Music stimulates my mind, and it sets positive moods for me. When you look at my eclectic selection of songs above, they give no indication that I grew up loving Led Zeppelin (still my favourite band – and ‘No’, not a password recovery answer to retrieve any of my passwords), as well as Boston, AC/DC, and the Rolling Stones. But I also grew up on Bob Marley, Blondie, and Boney M. I’ve also grown to love musical theatre songs, thanks to a family that is obsessed with them.

My tastes vary considerably, and my workout songs are far from classic rock, but they really do ‘Pump me up‘ and motivate me to push myself. So what about you?

What’s your Walk-up music? If you had ‘game time’ music to put you into a mood to do your best, what would it be?

Rhythm and Rapport

I felt it. I mean I really felt it. A rhythmic wave resonated throughout my body. Before this moment I had enjoyed music but I never had it consume me so completely. And I was surrounded by others who felt the same way.

It was the early summer of 1992, and I was 24 years old. My uncle had introduced me to an NLP teacher, paying for me to take his course, and I loved it. NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming is about harnessing communication patterns, that we all use, in more effective and powerful ways. The course I was in was very interesting because it seemed as if half the people were there to learn to be more effective and the other half seemed to be there for therapy.

The 9-day course started on a Saturday and ran daily from 8am to 4pm through the week and into the second weekend. It was the Friday morning and we were told we were in for a treat. We were taken to a small room filled with drums, shakers, tambourines, cow bells and assorted traditional music makers. The lesson was on rapport and we were going to use music to demonstrate it.

I think there were about 18 of us in this small room and we were broken up into groups of 2, 3, and 4, depending on the number of similar instruments. I don’t remember if we ended up with 5 or 6 groups. Next, each group was given a different beat to play. For instance, the cow bell players got tap-tap, tap-tap, pause, tap-tap, while a few drummers got a beat of 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, 1-2. That second example would have been the most complicated of the options with most others being quite simple.

We got counted down and everyone started playing their own beat in their groupings. As someone that doesn’t have musical training, it was good to have other people playing the same beat as me so that I could follow along and not be too distracted by the other groups. That said it was a ruckus in this small room. To put it kindly, we were making noise, horrible and loud clattering, pounding, clanging, dinging noise. It was awful.

I understood that we were supposed to build rapport and the music was somehow supposed to come together but it didn’t. There was just noise. We switched instruments and tried again. Noise. We switched beats. Noise. We switched instruments again, and I was given cow bells. More noise.

We were tired, and we were overwhelmed with the echo of instruments clamouring out of synch, and then something interesting happened. A professional dance instructor that was taking the course had a big gourd shaker in his hand, he stepped forward into the middle of our circle and connected with an older man on drums. This older gentleman that the dancer connected with was a retired music teacher. They sped up the beat slightly and I could hear their individual beats come together as if they were one pattern. The dancer with the gourd shaker was dancing to their beat and my beat fell into synch with his feet.

That was the moment it happened for me, and it was obvious that it was happening for everyone else in the room… our noise became music. But this was so much more than music, it was a wave of sound that reverberated through my body. I watched the dancer and realized that his gourd and feet were the backbone of the beat. We were all following his lead. Then I looked at the retired musician’s drum and I realized that it was him driving the beat. Then I looked at my cow bells and realized it was me that was leading the beat. Then I really understood what was happening. We were in perfect unison, we were one.

None of us were in the lead. All of us were in the lead. This was full rapport. We were all connected, all one beat, all one musical experience. We built up the sound to a full crescendo, it was all-consuming, bordering on ecstasy. There was a countdown, 3-2-1, and we all stopped playing. The instant silence was a final exclamation on an overwhelmingly beautiful experience. For the first time in my life I had felt, truly and to my core felt, the sound of music.

“All Those Christmas Cliche’s” by Katie Truss

This is a solo my daughter sang last night at her school Christmas Concert:
https://youtu.be/qev9te9pm_U

The gentleman in front of me gave her a standing ovation and came up to her afterwards to tell that he was a professional musician for a decade, and that he loved her presence.

It’s so wonderful to watch your child shine at something she loves to do. Music and drama have made Katie’s high school experience truly special, and last night we got to watch her in her element.

Yes, I’m playing the role of a proud father. Way to go Katie, you sounded great, and more importantly, I could tell you were truly enjoying yourself. I could see the nervousness before you started to sing, and then it all melted away and you were fully present and giving it your best. I loved it! <3

Piano keys

Tuning in

Yesterday the piano tuner came to our school for our piano’s yearly tuning. I asked him if he used a machine or if he tuned by ear?

”I use a tuning fork for the first note, then I’m good.”

Later in the day I was in my core fitness class and I was doing an exercise where I was supposed to be activating my gluteus (my butt muscles), but I kept activating my quadriceps (front leg muscles). The Physio at the class asked me to show her how I sit down, and it turns out that I don’t know how to go from a standing to a sitting position properly.

A little background here, I have a bad lower back, and deal with discomfort or pain on a regular basis. For decades now I’ve been compensating for my lower back by using it less and using my legs more. While this protects my back for working too hard at a given moment, it also limits my range of motion and creates tightness in my upper legs and lower back that makes things worse.

The challenge, however is that after decades of misuse, I have no idea what the sensation is to use the correct muscles? Essentially, I can’t ‘tune in’ to the feeling of what it’s like to do the right motion versus doing the wrong motion. As I’m being coached and physically guided to use the correct muscles, and my Physio says either, “No, you are still activating your quads,” or, “That’s good, you’ve got it,” my internal reality feels no different. I can’t distinguish what I’m doing differently.

While the piano tuner has spent 40 years finely tuning his ear to be honed to the sounds needed for his trade, I’ve spent almost as long dealing with a bad back and tuning out certain muscles that I should be using to help me be more mobile and agile. He has become an expert at doing something very well, while I’ve become an expert at doing something very poorly, and I am now a novice at doing it correctly.

Like with most things, it’s probably much easier to learn something correctly the first time, compared to unlearning and relearning it. But that process of correcting ourselves is seldom something we can do on our own. We can’t tune in if we don’t have that reference point, that tuning fork, that coach/mentor, or in my case physiotherapist. We often aren’t aware of how we’ve tuned out, and we need outside help to help guide us to tune in.

Where do you need to tune in more? Who are you going to get to help you?

Elton John Farewell Tour

Elton John has been performing on stage for 50 years. He has had the opportunity to follow his passion his entire life. Having recently watched his autobiographical movie, it is evident that fame brought him many lows to go with the highs, but not many people get to follow their dreams for 50 years!

And although he is in his 70’s, he put on an amazing show! He was on stage for almost 3 hours, his only breaks being a few minutes between a quick change of outfit, and before his encore. He belted out old favourite songs like he was on tour for the first time. He was gracious to the audience and to his band. And he spoke about his charity to support Aids victims, a charity he started and that has raised almost a half billion dollars.

Not everyone can achieve what Elton John has, but he stands as a model of what’s possible when you follow your passion.