My Goals

Five years ago, I wrote a song for my wife and then performed it as a surprise during her birthday party. It took me over a year to complete and it was the first song I created in over twenty years. This opened a gate that had been holding back the music side of my creative energies. My work, responsibilities at home, financial worries, elder parent care, church and school support and charity related activities all helped to keep the ideas and melodies buried. In the past several years, I’ve slowly freed myself of those anchors and now the only things that are stopping me are my own limits and any obstacles I alone carry.

A couple of years ago I started taking guitar lessons at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk music. I characterize myself as a fairly low level player and I’ve got a good distance to travel before I will be satisfied with my guitar skills. At this point in my career, my songs are bound to my level of guitar ability and I am still in the three/four chord realm. I know there are other levels I can attain and as I progress in my playing abilities I hope to progress to new song writing levels as well.

My goals are:

1. Complete any song that I begin.

2. Record the dirty copy of the completed song (a dirty copy is one where I play it through while signing all the lyrics just to get a recording of the song.)

3. Record a complete clean copy of the song where the vocals are correct, the guitar parts have no errors and any rhythm parts are precise and make sense for the song.

4. Upload my songs onto my Reverb Nation account and link them to my Facebook site. This will help me to overcome my fear of friends and family not understanding what I am doing, why I am doing it and what my music is all about.

5. Continue to progress in my knowledge and skills of home studio production.

6. Build my home studio to a point where I have sufficient tools to make my visions a reality.

7. Improve my guitar abilities by continuing to take lessons.

8. Seek out performance opportunities so that I am not just a basement musician.

9. Build a support community of like-minded individuals so that not only am I encouraged and energized by their enthusiasm and musicianship, but that I may share with them whatever I can to help them along on their own journey.

10. To do all of this with a spiritual realization that the act of creation is the essence of what it means to be “created in the image of God.” For the creation and appreciation of art are two of God’s gifts to us, and these along with love, laughter and a continuing sense of wonder are what makes a life worth living.
I believe that writing this blog will help me focus on these goals and allow me to share the success and failures of the many facets of song creation, performance and recording.