"I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music." ~George Eliot (1819 - 1880)
I find this to be a very bold statement. Really? No other mortal wants if only one is surrounded with music? Alan Watts used to say that he liked to exaggerate his statements in order to make a point - perhaps that's what Eliot is doing here.
Or is he? Can you honestly say that music has this much significance in your life?
To speak to his true point, however, music does tend to have the ability to infuse our bodies with strength and our minds with inspiration. Crank some up today - it does a body (and mind) good.
Guitarist and blogger Mike Doughty delivers ‘relaxed rock’ influenced by everyday experiences
By Ian Holliday, Senior Writer for The Ithacan
Indie rocker Mike Doughty has been recording music since the mid-1990s. Since his original band, Soul Coughing, split in 2000, he has released three albums and collaborated with Grammy-winning producer Dan Wilson. Senior Writer Ian Holliday spoke with Doughty about the inspiration for his music, his religious beliefs and the necessity of blogging for modern musicians.
Ian Holliday: You used to lead a band called Soul Coughing. In what ways is your solo work similar to that work? How is it different?
Mike Doughty: It’s just different because it’s not collaborative. With Soul Coughing, I was the leader, but it was a lot about group sound and what individuals sounded like in the band. I actually sort of revisited that for “Golden Delicious,” my last solo record. I really sort of tailored it to the individual musicians, the drummer and the keyboard player in particular.
IH: Your songs and albums have some great titles. One of your most famous songs “Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well” is a really interesting image.
MD: That’s taken from a Haruki Murakami novel called “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.” There’s a character that actually goes down into a well and looks at the sky and reinvents his life down there.
IH: Where do the titles for your songs come from? And in the case of ones that are titled after the lyrics, where do the lyrics come from?
MD: I just sort of keep my ears and my eyes open as I walk through the world. I write things down, I eavesdrop on people, I clip things out of the newspaper, and then I just sort of pay attention to my own stream of consciousness and write down the stuff that seems good at the time. Then when I sit down to write I sort of gather all of this stuff together and comb through it to find the gems or at least the stuff that I like.
IH: Your music sometimes has religious messages, whether obvious in “His Truth is Marching On” or more subtle in a song like “Unsingable Name.”
MD: It’s a spiritual message. It’s not really a religious message. I don’t really belong to any organized religion, and I don’t really subscribe to any common faith.
IH: So how would you sum up your spiritual views?
MD: Well, I believe in God and I don’t believe in God. It’s a hard thing to sum up. I have relied on a power greater than myself at a number of really critical times in my life. And then I spend a lot of time doubting the existence of God. I’m definitely a split-decision, agnostic kind of a guy.
IH: How does your spirituality affect your music?
MD: Just as much as my girlfriend and the food that I eat and the people I hang out with. It’s just a part of my life, and everything from my life eventually somehow gets in there. I start from words or phrases much more than I start from concepts.
IH: You’re a pretty avid blogger, correct? What’s the attraction to that for you?
MD: I always had something going on online. I used to go to Soul Coughing message boards on AOL back in ’93 or ’94. I was kind of on the interaction-with-people thing pretty early. Eventually it just got the point where I was like, “Well, I should have my own space for myself.” I got much less democratic.
IH: You also contribute to the Huffington Post, correct? How would you say new technologies have affected your career?
MD: It’s been a mainstay of not just my career, but my life, as long as I’ve had a laptop. It’s at the heart of being a musician these days either with your blogging or putting up your songs online. But more than that, it’s just an important part of my life.
IH: In your various writing gigs, whether it’s a blog or the Huffington Post or one of the music reviews you’ve written to support yourself over the years, you usually write about music. Has being both a music critic and a musician ever gotten you into trouble?
MD: I wrote a catty thing about a certain rock superstar once, and he got really mad. Occasionally, just as a blogger, you’re talking about what’s going on in your life, and I wrote one thing about this guy that I’m not going to name. I was like, “That guy was a real a------ to me.” I just naively thought I could put that out there, and he totally freaked out on me ... He e-mailed me and was like, “Dude, what the f---? You’re making fun of me in public.” I guess I thought it would never get back to him, but even if it wouldn’t, it’s just not nice to write stuff like that, so I really regret it.
Newswise — One day Gisele Bigras was a college student finishing up another year of school. The next day, she was a cancer patient faced with having one of her fingers removed.
The diagnosis: epithelioid sarcoma in her middle finger. Bigras, 19, was in a state of shock and panic. But music brought her back.
“Music has always played a huge part in my life. Music therapy helped me focus on something else other than the traumatic events of the cancer diagnosis, and just forget for an hour or so, to just go into a different world for a little bit,” Bigras says.
Bigras is one of many patients at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center who participates in music therapy. The idea is to use music to help patients cope with physical symptoms, such as pain, reduce their anxiety and find an outlet for their emotions.
“We find that patients are trying to cope with many things. They’re trying to keep it all together, and sometimes if you give them a safe environment and permission to let go, a lot can come out through that,” says Megan Gunnell, a music therapist at the U-M Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Music therapy can be as straightforward as listening to recorded or live music. It could mean playing a guitar, piano or even just shaking a tambourine. It could mean writing songs or discussing the meaning behind lyrics.
For Gisele Bigras, music therapy turned into an opportunity to write and record her own song. The song, “Back on the Ground,” covers three stages: the happiness before cancer, the chaos of diagnosis and the realization afterward that she could move on.
“Listening to it helps me realize I’m coming out of this. Everything’s fine and I can move on from here,” Bigras says.
Research in music therapy shows that in addition to helping with emotional expression, music helps reduce anxiety and perceptions of pain. Controlled studies also show that patients having music therapy show improved immune system functioning.
Gunnell points out that music goes back to the womb, where babies hear a mother’s voice vibrating, her heart beating and the natural pulse of life.
“You don’t have to have any musical background to experience music therapy,” Gunnell says. “You’re able to participate because you are naturally rhythmical. You have a lot of rhythms and melody already going on in your own system.”
Getting started:
There are simple ways to enjoy the calming benefits of music. Start with these suggestions:
Listen to soothing music. Your heart rate can change based on the tempo of what you're listening to.
Bring an iPod or mp3 player to doctors’ appointments to help pass the wait time and reduce anxiety.
Listen to live music. Seek out local performances.
Analyze the lyrics to a favorite song and consider what is meaningful to you at this time in your life.
Find music that matches your mood. Music can support you through a multitude of emotions.
Check out this week's featured track of the week from Virginia-based roots artist, Sol. You can stream his song "Freedom" on the homepage this week with its bluesy, reggae vibe and lyrics such as:
Sing a song of freedom, sing a song of love...
Sing a song of power, sing of what is right...
Freedom, freedom joins you and me...
In addition, the RockOm Podcast has been hit-or-miss as of late, but we're back at last with a new episode featuring an interview with Sol. Check out the podcasts page now to listen in or you can download the file for your drive to work tomorrow. It's RockOm inspiration on the road!
Take two scoops of Funk, throw in a heathly serving of Reggae, stir in some Piedmont Blues, throw in a pinch of Latin Flavor for spice, and top it off with some Old School R&B and a dash of Hip-Hop. Shake it up and you've got Sol and his band - a venerable pan stew of groove.
Featured Track: "Freedom"
"The song 'Freedom' is a cry of the eternal struggle for liberation and of the consequences of what happens when we repress the human spirit. Spirit will, like a seed put in the ground, push through the frozen ground to find the light. It is a bold statement of our collective unconscious reminding us of the spark of love that connects everyone." (The Advance Tribune)
I see my music as my ‘spiritual path’. Both spirituality and music are central to my life. It’s taken me quite a while to realize that this is what it’s about for me. I’ve been a Buddhist for many years and have tried a number of different ways to practice as sincerely as I can, and in the end, it seems to me that this is my path. I once saw a video of Joe Satriani playing guitar (and I really am not into heavy metal) and I had an insight experience similar to what I might get on meditation retreat. And I realized how music really is a way in for people like me.
In Buddhist circles there’s quite a bit of debate as to how Buddhism can be practiced most effectively in the West – ie what is ‘Western Buddhism’? After all, it’s still only a few decades old here. It is so new that the first Western masters are still alive. Historically, Buddhism has transformed massively whenever it has arrived in a new culture. It transforms the culture, and the culture transforms it. The underlying message is still the same, but the way it expresses itself varies massively. Tibetan Buddhism is very different from Zen, which is in turn very different from the Theravadin Buddhism of Sri Lanka. So what is Western Buddhism?
The West encourages alienation from the self. Either we are completely disembodied and hypnotized by mass media until we don’t really exist as individuals at all, or we conceive of ourselves as objects - a product to be marketed. The market is more real and more significant than we are. We dress ourselves in ways that appeal to the niche we have decided to target, we learn the lingo, take up the hobbies, come up with catchy strap lines and hang out in the right places. And when ‘Who We Really Are’ protests, showing itself up as various neuroses, we drown it out with more TV, more shopping, more alcohol, more drugs, more therapy, more medication. The hollowness has been there for so long that we think it is normal. We think that is who we are! We have lost touch completely with our inherent beauty, our inherent completeness. And then we discover Buddhism and think that maybe this is a way to escape the pain, and we hear about ‘not-Self’ and think ‘yeah that makes total sense’. And thus Buddhism adds to our confusion.
It seems to me therefore, that the initial challenge for Westerners wishing to practice, is to reconnect with themselves. To heal from the alienation which is the almost inevitable result of growing up in contemporary Western society. You can’t realize the Buddhist ‘not-Self’ concept before you have realized who you are as a ‘self’. And music is excellent for this.
So music is a way for me to be connected with myself, and to communicate authentically with others. And if there is ever to be such a thing as Western Buddhist art, it will not be a standard image of a Buddha sitting in the full lotus. It will not be Buddhist mantras sung in the style of a Christian choir. It will be people who are genuine Buddhist practitioners, and genuine Western artists, expressing themselves without a conscious agenda. To the extent that they have realized the teaching, their work will be genuine Western Buddhist art. As Jack Kerouac, inventor of the practice of writing ‘spontaneous prose’ once said, ‘[if] mind is shapely, art is shapely’. That was before he rejected Buddhism, returned to his Catholic roots and drank himself to death, of course, and thus gave his own answer to my Zen koan. My Zen koan is not ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’, or ‘Does a dog have Buddha nature?’. It is something like ‘Your life is meaningless, beautiful, and passing. Now what?’
[This post entitled "Music and Buddhism" was written by Padma of JustMusic (www.justmusic.co.uk) - an excellent independent music label out of the UK. Check out their website to see and hear their artists and share in additional writings and news.]
International Award Winning Arvel Bird (Southern Paiute / Me'tis) is the 2007 Ninth Annual Native American Music Award (Nammy) Artist of the Year and the 2007 Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards (Cammy) winner for Best Instrumental Album.
This talented artist was voted Best Native American Male Performer for 2006 on PowWows.com and in 2006 won a NAMMY for Best Instrumental and an Indian Summer Music Award for Best Contemporary Instrumental. As an international recording artist Arvel is widely regarded as one of the hottest Native American artists on tour today.
Kimberly Kelley, who heads up his management team, attributes his popularity to, "...not only his rigorous touring and media schedule, but his incredible musicianship and easy going personality on stage and off.”
Arvel was raised in Utah and Arizona where he began his 11 years of classical violin training. He attended Arizona State University on a music scholarship, later transferring to University of Illinois-Champaign/Urbana to study with world-renowned Hungarian violin master, Paul Roland, whom Arvel credits with “taking me apart and putting me back together again.”
For 11 years Arvel toured with some of the biggest names in country music -- Glen Campbell, Loretta Lynn, Clay Walker, Louise Mandrell, Tom T. Hall, Ray Price and others. Now, however, his Southern Paiute and Scottish mixed-blood ancestry is the inspiration for his own unique style of music. Arvel has released eleven CDs and one DVD since 2001. Several of those albums have received nominations and have won awards from a variety of United States and Canadian music organizations.
As a sought-after collaborator, Arvel has recorded with Peter Kater, Joseph Firecrow, Jeff Ball, and Irene Bedard. His 2006 CD, Ananeah was created with Grammy nominees William Eaton, Mary Redhouse and Will Clipman.
I was deeply moved by my experience interviewing Arvel. He opened up to me in a way no other artist has. It couldn’t have been easy for him to describe his pain growing up as a child in an abusive home. The violin saved Arvel’s life and the tears that came as he described the magic discovered through playing the violin were genuine and unrestrained. I hope you are moved as well by the interview.
RockOm: You describe your music as, “world tribal fusion.” Tell us the back ground of your heritage and how you arrived at that label.
Arvel Bird: I am mixed blood Indian. I’m Southern Paiute on my mother’s side. Southern Paiute live in southern Utah, southern Nevada and northern Arizona. My great grandparents came up [into the area] in the 1880’s to get jobs. They faced three alternatives; one was to get jobs working for the settlers in southern Utah, move farther into the desert where resources were scarce, or become outlaws and thieves. I’ve come to really appreciate my Paiute heritage and the way they lived prior to the Mormon settlers moving down and taking over everything. The other part of my heritage comes from Scotland. I use my music from both my Native American heritage and my Celtic roots. I’m influenced by the 20th century and all the music from around the world. I incorporate a lot of world beats and instruments into my recordings and my music. I use my background of classical music with my current genres of Celtic and ethnic mountain music, bluegrass, jazz and everything in between, including New Age healing music as well. That’s where the fusion comes in. My heritage is blended and my music is blended also.
RockOm: You trained as a classical violinist as a child and on into college, and then went on to tour 11 years professionally with Glen Campbell, Clay Walker, Louise Mandrell, Tom T. Hall, Ray Price, Loretta Lynn and others. What did you learn from those years and how did that differ from what you thought you would be doing?
Arvel Bird: I enjoyed those years of touring with those artists, but there was a lot of party atmosphere. After playing with these artists for 11 years my own inner self, my own inner being, kept gnawing at me telling me, “You’ve got your own music in here.” I always thought of myself as a leader of a group. I always saw the violin as a lead instrument and in Nashville or touring with these artists the violin was only seen as a secondary instrument. That was fine, but I always knew that I had more to say, more to express through my music. It was watching a friend die of cancer that motivated me to go for it, take the risk. I‘ve always been a risk taker but I think that we get sidetracked from our main soul-purpose many times. In other words we follow the coyote instead of following our heart and wind up going in circles, spinning our wheels. When I saw this friend of mine, a brilliant artist dying of cancer, it occurred to me that he was more afraid of living than [dying] and that he had not let his music get out into the world and be the blessing it could have been. He was so gifted with his music; his artwork was so incredible. That made me realize I don’t know how many days I’ve got here. I better get my music out before it’s too late. His death was a gift to me.
RockOm: You write in your online bio this, “I believe with all my heart that the violin saved my life and then healed my spirit.” Tell us a little about this quote and how violin “healed your spirit.”
Arvel Bird: I started playing when I was nine years old. At the time I was very inhibited, shy and backwards with very low self esteem. I was afraid of everything. I grew up in a family that had a lot of anger, turmoil and upset. The negativity - I can look back now and see that my mother and father both lacked any self empowerment. They didn’t have any personal power. When a person doesn’t have personal power that’s how they act out; they act out with anger and frustration. This was surrounding me. My brothers and sisters were playing instruments, accordion and piano, and I was desperate to play something (I always wanted to play the trumpet). We had a violin in the family that no one was playing, so with that I decided I would try the violin. It was a big instrument - made for big hands and I was an undersized nine-year old. It was too big for me to start with. My parents were kind enough (neither one played music but both enjoyed music and dancing) and found a violin teacher [for me] and I auditioned for her. I think she just took pity upon me because I was so pitiful.
She saw something in me that she felt was worthy of her time and my violin lessons became a magical experience for me. Music became magic, the violin became magic! She created this whole mystique around the instrument. I always looked forward to my lessons each week. She helped me to not only play the violin but to walk, talk, smile, and present myself onstage. She helped me gain self confidence and poise. The violin became my refuge because I could go in my room, shut the door and play. I could be away from all the chaos in my family. It was okay because I was practicing and no one had to make me practice; I was practicing to get away from my situation.
As I began to play the violin I began to see rewards for it. Not only appreciation from my parents for my accomplishments but from other people. I was never the best. I worked hard for everything I accomplished but my teacher always told me, “You don’t have to be the best or fastest as long as you play with passion. That’s what people want to hear. That’s what they’ll remember.” I always remembered that. The passion really became important to me. I always played with passion because I began to love the violin. Everything I’ve ever wanted has come through music and playing the violin. I began to grow in my life and learn more; learning to love myself and improving my self-image. The violin was always there helping me.
Violin resonates in the heart chakra, like the Native America flute does. That’s why I was able to evoke happiness or sadness. That’s why they use a lot of violin in romantic situations in movies because it’s a heart instrument and my heart needed a lot of healing. In an abusive family a person either retreats or they become angry, aggressive and fight back. I was a retreater; I was afraid and so I retreated to the violin.
RockOm: What have you been able to accomplish through your music?
Arvel Bird: [Earlier in my practice of the violin] I quit taking lessons and quit going to school and reading music. I would just go in my practice room and sit there, waiting and listening for whatever the universe had for me. After a while I would pick up the violin and fiddle around and pretty soon stuff started coming to me. Themes started coming and along with the themes I got a visual image; I started having visions while I was playing. I was playing from the heart and started getting these visions. It was the violin playing a sound track to a movie I was watching in my mind. I would do this every day. This movie kept getting more and more detailed and intricate, and the music became more defined. I can remember the music by watching the movie. I knew what was coming next.
It became really emotional for me because I felt I was actually watching someone’s life set in the not too distant past. I knew it was a past life of someone - didn’t know if it was mine or whose, but the experiences of this person were going through me and the music that was coming out was very emotional. Many times I would be reduced to tears while I was playing.
That’s what made this so special to me. I think those tears are what healed me because tears are good, whether they’re tears of joy or sadness; they’re always cleansing and a release of some resistance that we’ve been holding onto. I cried a lot of tears while I was playing, playing this music. Now when I perform people come up to me and they’re in tears. They’ve had an experience. They’ve been touched. What I think is happening is that the music, which come from creation, from the creator, it comes through my soul, out through my instrument and it helps others align themselves with their higher being. Anytime a person comes into alignment with their higher being I think a healing occurs. That’s what the tears mean. The joy that comes with aligning with higher being, I think reduces you to tears.
I remember I was playing at a Paiute pow wow in Las Vegas, in the desert. No trees, no grass, just rocks and sand. The wind was really blowing hard. I played my set and went back to my booth and I’m there talking to people and I noticed this man come up to the booth and he has his granddaughter who’s probably seven or eight years old. He gets real close to me, doesn’t look at me and says, “That red-tail hawk song made me cry.” (Pause with trembling in voice) He didn’t want anyone to see him crying. But he wanted me to know. (Long pause) It was just great.
[Music] touches people and often I don’t know why. But, I don’t need to know why. Just the fact that my music connects with people that strongly is really the answer to my prayer. Why perform? I put my tobacco on the ground - that’s a Native American tradition of offering your prayer and a gift to the Spirit. Tobacco has always been a way of giving a gift in exchange for asking a favor or question. When I put my tobacco on the ground, I’m asking Spirit to be with me and to let me be the conduit to whatever message of music that it may have. It’s like any oral tradition - when I speak or play my vibration goes out and people get what they need from it. If they’re listening and paying attention they get what they need. Everyone walks away feeling good, feeling like they got something. That’s my gift as a musician, to give to people something.
Then their gift to me is to buy my CD’s and a lot of them do. They write back and say they listen to my music before they go to bed or it helps them get to work or get home in traffic. One person said it helped them stop smoking. Another said it helped them over writer’s block. One lady said it helped her through nursing school. It’s inspiring music. I didn’t set out to make it inspiring music; I just played it from the heart.
RockOm: Arvel, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. We went a lot deeper than I intended us to go and it really makes for great communication between us and everyone who’s going to be touched by reading this. I appreciate your opening up, your honesty and your willingness to share, to be vulnerable and to let it show. I agree with you - you do have to expose yourself and let that flow through you and it moves you and you don’t know how you’re going to react. Sometimes you may cry or feel peace; sometimes you may feel bravado. You just never know. I appreciate you opening up as you did.
Arvel Bird’s music is available from Four Winds Trading Company, Drumbeat Indian Arts, New Leaf Distribution, Borders Books & Music Cafes, and other independent New Age and music stores. Music can be purchased directly from www.singingwolfrecords.com, www.amazon.com and downloaded from www.itunes.com and other online retailers.
The musical term pedal tone (also known as a drone or organ point) is a low, sustained tone that remains steady in the bass of a composition while other voices move about above it. It's a presence that's always there, underlying whatever dance is going on above it. If the music gets intense enough the pedal tone may be completely drowned out, but even then it can usually still be felt.
Through the effects of a spiritual practice, or a relationship with God, or a connection with the Ground of Being or emptiness we too have the opportunity to have a constant presence at our side, a droning and infinite sustained “tone” that can always be at least felt during whatever may be going on in our lives. And that is precisely the purpose of having a spiritual practice – a regular, disciplined time of prayer or meditation or creative practice or interaction with the natural world... whatever it is that connects you with the divine. It trains us to be able to hear and feel that quiet “pedal tone” that we hear and feel when we are in the quiet of our practice out in the loud and restless world.
If you'e fallen out of disciplined practice, regular prayer respites, or scheduled meditation – consider jumping back into this week. Start tomorrow. Or start today. For if we find comfort and meaning in that droning “pedal tone” of our quiet times, we can certainly train ourselves in being able to experience it through the loud jazz of everyday life.
A few years back, I stumbled across Masaru Emoto’s unusual book, The Hidden Messages in Water. Dr. Emoto illustrated through high-speed photography how ordinary H2O exposed to different types of music formed frozen crystals which appeared to reflect the intention or meaning of the lyrics. Wow! That got my noggin thinkin.’ What if there are hidden messages not only in water exposed to sound, but in the music of one of my favorite bands, Cheap Trick?
Now, no moaning, “Oh gawd. Not more crapola about hidden messages in songs played backwards. Enough already with the ‘Paul is dead’ stuff.” Believe me, I hear your pain. But you can’t always judge a song at first by its lyrics because searching for hidden meanings or themes in a Cheap Trick tune is like going on a treasure hunt. And what does every modern game of musical geocaching need? Not a metal detector or GPS device, but a lyric and symbol detector. I promise it’s tons o’ fun.
Despite listening to some of Trick’s tunes for a quarter of a century, I recently went on a musical beachcombing expedition and discovered there are boatloads of new twists and possible double entendres that previously went right over my noggin. In my case, I unearthed an unlikely theme: the healing force of music.
How did I come up with that? Let’s start with an image often associated with the band’s logo; nothin’ fancy, just checkered black and white squares. For years, it totally eluded my symbol detector, and looked like a simple chessboard to my eyes, until one day the same tiny black and white squares on a Tarot card made the detector shake. “Hey, what’s Cheap Trick’s checkerboard motif doin’ on a hundred-year-old Tarot card?”
Since the Tarot is highly symbolic, the esoteric meaning piqued my curiosity. In the Tarot, the squares represent the dualistic nature of reality, and the dark and light aspects of human consciousness. Who knew? Not only that, but the image was also widely used in alchemy, which has its basis in spiritual transformation and healing. Alchemists were often thought to be magicians, and the band’s name implies magic… Cheap Trick.
Speaking of magic, one day my detector buzzed when I spied this sentence in Jonathan Goldman’s book Healing Sounds. “In the Ancient Mystery Schools, the priests and magicians were often also the musicians.” That’s kinda weird. Why did the priest, magician, and musicians’ jobs overlap? It seems that during the middle ages, they became intertwined because it was believed each had the power to heal the human body and psyche. Aha! There’s that “healing” theme again.
The word “priest” got the lyric detector all fired up. What hidden wisdom might I find in the song “High Priest of Rhythmic Noise,” from Trick’s 1980 All Shook Up album? The lyrics imply some dude’s wrestling with deep psychological turmoil. But does the high priest use rhythmic noise or music to heal? Buzz, buzz, I’m getting closer. The poor protagonist says he’s contemplated “first degree,” and my detector had a hissy fit. I always thought “first degree” implied murder. Recently, while reading Daniel Levitin’s book, This is Your Brain on Music, my detector discovered a possible alternative meaning. “In a major scale, the most stable tone is called the first degree, (my ital) also called the tonic.” The first degree is “stable” or brings peace and harmony, and another definition for tonic is a “medicine that invigorates or strengthens.” Music is vibrational medicine! So does that mean the responsibilities of high priests, magicians, and musicians braid together like Willie Nelson’s hair to help us subconsciously heal in numerous ways?
Most healing in our modern society is associated with doctors or physicians, and my oscillator beeped at a change in the magnetic field when it scanned the lyrics to the Cheap Trick song “The Doctor.” On the surface, the doc seems like a typical allopathic guy who cures all ills with a pill. But dig a bit deeper, and it’s the cover of the 1986 album The Doctor, which boasts a caricature of a witch doctor that reveals an obvious, but somehow ‘missed my sensors for several decades’ important clue. The “Doctor” was the witch “doctor.” Duh. Witch doctors are sometimes referred to as High Priests or shamans, and frequently use drums, rattles, and their voice to heal a patient. So, ‘The Doctor’ is not just some dude with a stethoscope, but actually symbolizes the healing force of music!
When I ferreted out an ancient copy of the album All Shook Up, a lone paragraph on the upper left hand corner of the inside sleeve had the poor detector flailing back and forth like a hyperactive teenager in a mosh pit. Though I’d read it eons ago, a complete brain fart made me forget that the words not only touted music as a healing force, but also how addictive music can be. My detector started working overtime when it recently uncovered that the words printed on the sleeve are spoken very quickly under a musical bridge during the song "Love Comes A-Tumblin’ Down." Yowza. Was this a hidden subliminal message about the healing power of Rock ‘n’ Roll?
Lastly, a song on the 2006 Rockford CD, “Decaf,” struck me as rather odd because the lyrics didn’t jive. The band sings about satisfying their addiction with Decaf, but as far as I know, decaffeinated java doesn’t give you any zest, zip or zing. So what’s it all about Alfie? My lyric detector’s batteries were low, so I showed a friend the CD cover with the song listed on it, and after eyeing the title for a moment, she exclaimed, “It’s a code!” She was absolutely right. Decaf is a code for the notes played at the beginning of the song: D-E-C-A-F. So, could Decaf mean getting your fix with music, since D-E-C-A-F are the actual notes in the tune? Is D-E-C-A-F the real “Doctor” and another example of healing through music?
Do musicians intentionally cloak secret themes or codes in their songs? Maybe some do, perhaps in some instances it’s purely coincidental. But whatever the case, becoming a “Lyric Sleuth” can certainly bring a new dimension to your listening pleasure. It’s unlikely I ever would have realized the connection between alchemy, magic, and music and the concept that music heals if it hadn’t been for Cheap Trick.
Music is an aural elixir, and we don’t need a Rx from the doctor to receive its benefits, because music is our doctor. Once upon a time, Beatles producer George Martin said "They're a healing force in music." He wasn’t referring to the “Fab Four” of the Magical Mystery Tour or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but to a completely different quartet across the pond. Yeah, you don’t need to be psychic or have a lyric detector to figure this one out. It’s Cheap Trick.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Laura Faeth’s book I Found All the Parts: Healing the Soul through Rock ‘n’ Roll was published November 2008 by Wyatt-MacKenzie publishing. Find out more about her wild journey of self-discovery with rock music at www.soundofyoursoul.com.
Chances are you're not doing much site-surfing today, you're glued to the TV or the news sites... afterall, it's only one of the most monumental moments of our lifetime! Happy Obama Inauguration Day!
With that out of the way, we're happy today to introduce you to Amy Steinberg. According to her bio,
With irreverent humor and crafty intelligence, Amy Steinberg uses her original music and poetry to promote tolerance, openness and diversity. Combining a sassy sensibility with a loquacious socio-political and spiritual awareness, Amy brings forth a fresh and solid energy.
Currently Amy is touring the country in support of her 8th independent release, "Fall Down to Fly" and continues to sell out shows of her one woman theatrical show "Oh My God Don't Stop" where she plays six characters, all centered around the themes of sexuality and spirituality.
Hear Amy's track "Shine" this week on the RockOm.net homepage, and be sure to click on her links to purchase some albums and find out more about Ms. Steinberg!
Newswise
RockOm.net brings you a special weekend blog post featuring an exclusive interview with Native American musician and violinist, Arvel Bird. 
By Laura Faeth
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