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ALIVE and SCREAMING...

There is an ache that resides within the hope that I carry. This album is the result of every moment I never thought possible in life, and for those who took the time to care and believe in someone. Produced and recorded by Mike Risha and Jake Walden.

Below are random thoughts about each song on the album....a few at a time

The Storm

The most authentic releationships seem to be the ones that remain indefinable; the ones that take us by surprise. There are moments of heightened dark or light that can instantly push us off the line of convention and twist us onto a new plane, a new version of ourselves, a new version of how we see the world that we can never go back from. And life, life is beautiful and dark all at once. The storms we encounter are experienced only through perception....a gift, or a burden. And such is love, the pursuit of understanding, the pursuit of being understood. This song began as a discovered philosophy, a heightened reaction to a week where i took my sister to the Grand Canyon after her heart was torn and crushed so hard and deep that it was all she could do but to just melt down into the ground and die. The song found a melody and lyrics recently as an ode to my friend Jacky. Jacky calls me her "dark light"....and I like that. She has saved my life and dreams many times and continues to be the my partner in discovery and reflection. The greatest gift in life is said to be love, but for me, I believe the greatest gift in life is hope. For love is a given, but hope is so easily swept away by the storms of our lives.

Alive and Screaming

A broken heart is a broken heart. It is the universal experience, the aftermath of the greatest risk we all aspire to take. there is no known path or true wisdom to penetrate the journey of the wounded to the inevitable seasons to come in a life. My Mom is the one person in this world who understands me beyond reason. Once I grew up and let go of a lot of shit, I began to share with her all the intricate truths of my life, my struggles and great dreams, my found loves and lost moments. She has seen me through my triumphs as well as my fears and dissapointments. But most of all she has spoken truth and always made me aware that she looked at me with awe and wonder. In a dark moment of my life, when her worry even worried me, i told her not to worry, that I was alive and screaming. She liked that. It kind of stuck between us. Autumn always makes me think of my Mother, and this song is rooted (at least in my mind) in that time of year/life. Autumn is the time that most feels like home. Autumn is change, the dramatic finale of life's most inspiring, beautiful and mysterious creatures. It is the shedding of what was. It is the forgiveness of youthful mistakes and the challenge to start anew. Autumn brings us the unique ability to embrace that which we had, while at the same time, with conviction and strength, braving the barren time ahead not in hiding...but in wonder.

Too Young

I can still picture myself, this is almost seven years ago now, laying in the grass of the campus of UC Irvine. My best friend and fellow traveler of the world, a great love of mine in retrospect had dropped me off at that place a week before. We had just gotten back from three months backpacking abroad...and before that Yohan and I, and our group, discovered the world of philosophy and music and living our own way...of youth and the beginning of understanding of who we are (or at least were). When you are young and on the brink of the edge, everything is heightened. You forge relationships so strong, so tied to who YOU are that it is impossible to comprehend those friendships fading away into time. In fact, as we grow, we learn that but for the very few, even the most intense of relationships in life eventually find there way into our past. This I would learn is natural and healthy as people change and evolve. I later learned that this didn’t take away from the experience or the time we had..when the world was before us and the thought of tomorrow was a rare blip on the radar...Everything was so far away that it allowed for the mind, body and spirit to live in the now. This time of my life was when I felt most present, not clouded by experience, but consumed by love and heartache and the search for the now. "Too Young" was the first song I ever wrote, even though it would take some years to become a song, and many more years to evolve into the experiment it is today. This melody, the chorus was the first time I got it...songwriting that is...the simplicity, the intricacy...all of it....it was like my first day of Kindergarden and holds a special place for me. It is about the lifelong hope we all carry to keep those we love close....even as they sometimes slip away. I hope you enjoy it....the arrangement was created by Mike and Rob and I in the studio.

We Are

This is a song that I have been wanting to write for too many years. When one performs, looking out at the crowd, there is an overwhelming sense or rush of opportunity to say something that is all at once personal, and , at the same time universal. The only way to live this life, I believe, is with the knowledge and faith, that each and every one of us is doing the best we can with what we know, and what we have been given. One can never know the complex truths and pasts of another, the how and why each of us do what we do. What is obvious to me is that we all want to be better, that we must try and look at each other, and the world, as not only tarnished and hopeless, but also as a beautiful mystery, a woven quilt of dreams both lost and found. It evolved out of my desire to have a song I could sing live, to create a moment that would move the audience to look at each other and see beyond the love and lies we all possess but are so often afraid to express. I love to take walks with my Mom. I love to talk about philosophy and to try and make sense of all the madness, of all the joy. But in the end, i want to tell each and every person who will listen, that we are, we are, we are not broken...anymore.

Be Still

Thought of the day...winter, three years later...January 14th 2009 I remember three years ago....it rained a lot...in fact the winter setr ecords in L.A. for rainfall. I had walked out and moved to that room, to that guest "house" in the back of that ladies house. I left in youthful rash reckless abandon and found myself instantly full ofregret. You begged me not to go, but I did. And there I was, in that room, just me, an old stove that I never touched, in fact, i don't really remember eating those four months...must have....me, the stove, my bed and the piano sat tightly in the corner under those windows that I would open in the rain while the candle burned alongside my "marajuana cigarette". When I could move, I would beg on your doorstep, OUR doorstep. For months I lost my mind and was forced into thedarkness , into loneliness and regret. You treated me as if I were dirt, you spat in my face as I sat outside OUR door and begged your forgiveness for leaving, for hurting you, for abandoning you. But, some things we can not take back. Looking back,three years later, I know why you couldn't get past it. I know now how it was never meant to be. I know now that our purpose for those two years of passion and madness happened to both of us for other reasons. I am sorry. And thankful you didn't open the door. That next February, with my three original songs, a few Neil Young songs, "Wild World" by CatStevens and "Romeo and Juliet" by Dire Straits', that night I would perform a concert for the first time. I sat up there that night and bled. I growled and reached for notes I was not yet capable of hitting. I sat there barefoot at the piano and watched the audience cry, with me, for me...I remember, three years ago now, that moment....that moment I was a part of something special, something raw and never to be repeated. and I knew.....I sang for you...I did....for a long time I did..... I remember how I wrote "Be Still"...how it was my escape....and listening to it now, it is so full of hope, hope I didn't know at the time I even had. I remember the endless nights, so full of pain and hate...for myself...I remember how it felt to sing these words I made, putting my ear to the wood of the piano and melting into the sound. I wonder what I was thinking. I wonder if I knew in the delusions of my mind that what I was writing was not real, that it would never come to be...not with you...not in that time. Like most of my work, I find it rarely reflects where I am at in that moment. It is reflective and haunted. I wonder why? I wonder if this is some metaphor for life, for living in the moment...for being aware of who we are, the experience, the energy and purpose of each moment, while we are in it. You will never know this, but I am writing this blog all over again. I woke up and before my coffee, before the sun hit my skin, or water hit my teeth and face, I wrote. I was so proud, it came out so effortlessly...and then it was gone....I pressed "post", with a sigh and a smile, inspired and excited to share my insights, and POOF, something happened and it was gone....no recovery...nothing.....WHY? So, I took a sec, opened the blinds and started writing again. You work so hard, you follow your heart and you think....this is it...this is my path, my life, my dream, my......and then, blank....yes, it was real...I saw it, it existed...yes, it did exist...but now, for some reason, life has chosen for that to be gone, to be over, to end. So, you start again....or not. It will never be the same. You will never capture THAT again. For many years I think I lived in that. The cruelty of a life well lived...the cruelty of expectation and memory. The cruelty of thinking I knew what one could never know. Three years later, I am finally past that way of life...of being enslaved by the past, of not listening to my mind and heart, and instead being ruled by my emotions. I still remember. I remember the rain and writing a "call to all the dreamers, whether lostor whether found". I remember a lot....but with peace in my heart and with today on my mind. When I wrote "Be Still" I wanted it back...I wanted back what was never really mine...what never really happened....I wrote what I thought possible as if it were truth, reality...and it healed me...it did. So, tonight, as a moment of it is played on T.V for millions, I have to laugh; at what I put myself through...at what I have now. We have to lose control sometimes. We have to fall from the plane and land in the mashed potatoes (inside joke)....you just never know...you never know. I am sorry though. For all we went through. You spit in my face and treated me like shit as I begged in the rain...for three months I did this until my sister came and saved me. Thank you.. Thank you...it was the right thing to do. I was wrong...it was me who threw it away and you who wouldn't give it back. With that, you gave me a life I never could have dreamed of. You made me look at myself, to be strong, to be weak. I think of you sometimes, sometimes when I sing "Be Still" on the stage...and I hope you are happy...I hope a lot for you....always will.

Wide Awake

WIDE AWAKE begins as a whisper, a somber, yet inspired call to let go of the weight of what has come before us, and to embrace yet agian the simple act of falling....as the song builds, the words and celebration of the gift of connection becomes more and more visceral, free from the fear of what it may bring. The irony is that there is no end to any story, only the strength of character you must find in order to open your eyes, let go, and once again become wide awake. This song was the first I ever wrote with other people. I can picture the day Rob and Dena and Mike and I sat for hours in the studio with a guitar and simply talked for hours....I remember walking into the booth with Dena putting her ear to my mouth and the mic, so I could literally whisper the begining of the song to her. How that moment taught me the control and vulnerability that resided within my voice and performances. I am very proud to have worked with these people, friends and mentors.....Life changes in an instant.

Come Along

Few songs I write come from a place that is solely mine...from my own experience, my own space of loss. Come Along is a song I wrote a couple of years ago, when after the hardest heartbreak of my life, I found myself temporarily living in this tiny converted garage on the other side of town...it was very old, but charming I guess, like a little hut in the backyard of a sweet lady. It was winter and I had my bed, cold tile floors, my piano and a bunch of Xanex. This was not my most shining moment. I could barely breath for months and no light, no light at all could find me. So I wrote, and I hoped,and I remembered. Most of the songs I write come from a place of hope, of an understanding of the yin and yang we all encounter when we risk being fully engaged in our lives. But this one is masked in hope and is truly the saddest song i ever wrote...for it did no good. It took me to demented places of falsehoods and skewed realities. On the other hand, when I listen to it today, especially in this sparse yet warm recording on the album, I think it is one of the best written pieces, lyrically, I have ever written. It captures a moment in time so vivedly. It captures all of who I was at that moment...and I hope it captures a piece of you.

Buy 'Alive and Screaming'