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Part 2

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

Wake up, yawn, stretch, leap out of bed, do a little dance, feed my dog and cat, praise my ancestors, have a healthy snack or drink, put on some music, water my plants, check emails, exercise, play an instrument, go thrifting, write / produce / record music, read, teach a couple drum lessons, go for a walk or bike ride, smoke ganja, play retro video games, fall asleep watching an old movie.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

There's a song "Give My All" from my first album, the bass line literally came to me in a dream and I built the whole song around it.



Right before I wake up is when my dreams get the most vivid and one morning as I was approaching waking consciousness that bass line just appeared in my brain and I woke up humming it. I immediately went and grabbed my bass guitar and found the notes, plugged in, recorded it in Logic and then built the entire song around that bass line.

There's also a song on my new album called "Peace, Love, Respect & Adoration" whose title came to me in a dream.



It was a nightmare, I was being pursued by a menacing figure with a knife who was trying to attack me. When they finally cornered me and were about to strike I started repeating the words "peace, love, respect and adoration" over and over to them in an attempt to diffuse the attack. I woke myself up mumbling the words and immediately pegged it for a song title.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

There's definitely a collective consciousness that can be formed when like-minded people gather and channel their energies together, and that is something extremely exciting and powerful to be a part of.

There's also tremendous value in those private moments where you are alone in your room transfixed by the music, it's a very intimate thing. I think both kinds of experiences have a lot to offer.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

I struggle with this issue, sometimes I worry that music is just some meaningless performative ritual commodity rooted in human ego.

But then once I gain some perspective those doubtful feelings pass and I remember that music at its best is such a powerful healer and a connective universal language. It brings people together and provides respite from all that is cruel and painful in this world.

Art enriches life, no doubt.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

Music has helped me through all of the most difficult periods in my life whether I was feeling down and needed to listen to a sad song and wallow in my misery or I was feeling down and needed to listen to something more positive to try and lift my spirits.

Sometimes you need to listen to something that connects with how you're feeling, or sometimes you need to listen to something that has a different energy and can pull you out of whatever slump you're in.

My most popular song "Soon Never Comes" was written when I was really in my feelings about a romantic situation, and composing the lyrics was one of those cathartic experiences that helped me cope with it and get through it.



There's clearly something in that song that resonates with people because I constantly have folks tell me how it perfectly described something they were going through or how it helped them get through a really tough time. When I hear things like that it makes me feel vindicated and aids me in remembering that what I'm creating truly has the power to help and heal people in their darkest hours.

Then I remember how many times other people's music has been my savior and protector in my darkest hours and it just makes me feel so grateful and fortunate to be able to be on the other end of that and provide respite to a listener who needs comfort.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?

I see music as largely the practice of affecting matter through vibrations. It's a physical thing as well as mental and emotional.

I'm very fascinated by Cymatics, and the work of Masaru Emoto. I think looking at sound creation in terms of cause and effect can really give you an interesting perspective on the approach you choose to take as you transmit those frequencies - it's important to understand the power of doing it with intention and using that energy responsibly.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more "mundane" tasks?

There are absolutely parallels between music and other forms like cooking but I feel that with music you're constructing with material that is much more abstract.

As a composer and songwriter my mission is to create form out of nothingness, to take a blank tape or an empty page and fill it with sounds and words plucked from the ether. It's a much different challenge than building things using raw physical materials. With music there's more of an opportunity to communicate with emotion and language.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

The key is resonance, I suppose - "the phenomenon of increased amplitude that occurs when the frequency of an applied periodic force is equal or close to a natural frequency of the system on which it acts."

When the music vibrates in a way that is equal or close to a vibration that's happening within you, or when the music is so powerful that it makes you vibrate at its frequency even if you weren't initially - that's the magic.


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