Durham, North Carolina. Part of our goal for this trip was to re-connect with Eric’s people down here and explore the possibility of a more in-depth tour in the future. A lot of those people are right here in Durham… this is where Eric went to college (Duke), where he first connected with the Bahá’ís, and where the One Human Family Gospel Choir was born. I attended a rehearsal last night, and you can definitely feel it: they’ve been doing this for a long time.

The response to the shows has been great. We’ve had people singing along with us quite a bit (even when they don’t know the songs), and when we cross into deep Moanin’ Sons territory they ask us if there’s more where that came from.

There’s so much potential in the Moanin’ Sons project it freaks us out a little. It’s almost like it just exists and we’ve stumbled upon it, like when you write a song that comes out so naturally that you can’t really say you ‘wrote’ it.

Part of it is just that there is some cultural work to be done in the States. The well of history and music in this country is so deep, you could spend your whole life delving into it and still only scratch the surface… but somehow in Eric and me connecting, it seems like we go from digging with a shovel to moving large amounts of earth with heavy equipment. And this feeling is intensified threefold whenever we’re in the South.

American roots music, especially in its 20th century African-American forms like blues and soul, was the reason I decided to take music seriously in the first place. I remember being the only kid at my school listening to Sonny Boy Williamson instead of Bon Jovi. But over the years I’ve wondered where that stuff fits into my own work, because during my time in other countries and then Los Angeles, I was immersed in Latin music, Electronica… everything but the blues. Most of all I was caught up in trying to find an expression of my own that didn’t owe too much to any one particular genre.

But with Moanin’ Sons, we both kick into another mode, sort of ethnomusicological reality show on wheels. We connect each other with certain things about music, and its relationship to race, religion and social change in America, that made us fall in love with it in the first place. People catch on to it pretty quick, because we all know there’s something under the surface here that needs to be explored… good, bad & ugly.

After spending a week in that headspace, I’m looking forward to coming back and letting the next step reveal itself. No doubt it will.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

People have been asking me for a long time why I don’t have an album out. Or a couple of albums. Or, say, eight or nine albums. It’s a really good question, since I’ve been producing other people’s projects for 15 years and constantly writing my own songs, performing them… even recording them. Man, if I had a dollar for every time someone asked me “Is that song recorded?”…

Well, it recently dawned on me that I could have a dollar for every song I record, and that I’d rather make my living with a guitar in my hand, telling my own story instead of someone else’s, traveling with my family instead of sitting in a studio all day (and all night). The last time I saw Carlos Santana, we had just performed together and he said, “when are you going to stop hiding behind guys like me?” (How’s that for an Artist’s Way moment?) Anyway, as usual, the man had a point.

I’ve been working on my own project, on and off for about four years. It started out as a basement experiment in a little backhouse we rented on the outskirts of Los Angeles, continued throughout our year in Mexico and really picked up during the dark, rainy winter on Vancouver Island. I started finding sounds and lyric ideas unlike any I’d created before, and for the first time I felt like my music felt like more than the sum of its influences… I could hear the Saskatchewan prairie boy in there, as well as the multicultural West Coast experience that was my life for a decade. It felt like the truth was coming out.

Actually, LA figures highly in the theme of this record… at least leaving LA. I had reached a point in my life where the noise of the music industry was louder than the music in my head. It was time to get out of that environment for awhile and be around something completely different, be unaware of the Billboard 200 and who was hired and fired at which record company. I found a lot of things to love about that city, and spent a lot of time unearthing every shred of authenticity I could find there, but it was time to move on.

That word: authenticity. The search for it is pretty much the subject of the whole album. All the songs are in some way about getting out of a haze of ideas that come from who-knows-where, and finding that authentic core that feels like home… even if in my case ‘home’ meant not having a home for awhile.

So to answer people’s question: why no album all these years? Honestly, there was no album because I found creative ways not to do one for a long, long time (more on that later). And now there’s an album. All the support from loved ones and colleagues, and from myself, is paying off. I’ll keep posting as it gets closer to release… right now I’m doing a few extra guitars and getting ready for the final mix. Shouldn’t be long… hold me to it!

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The Badasht Project is dedicated to the development of the arts as envisioned in the Bahá’í Writings, particularly music, which is described as ‘a ladder for the soul’. The project’s first endeavor was a series of public devotional gatherings centered around various art forms, and this CD was born from that experience. A lot of blessings have come from it in its first few months, and among them is that it’s brought me together with the perfect musical brother-in-arms.

Eric Dozier and I have known each other for awhile. We met in Atlanta in 1995, and ran into each other every few years after that, but we never had a chance to do any music together because we lived on opposite coasts. I was always blown away by his songwriting talent and his ability to motivate large groups of people to sing. Eric is like the Johnny Appleseed of Gospel choirs; they sort of spring up in his wake.

In 2005, a twist of fate landed us both on Vancouver Island. We figured there was a reason we were in that corner of the world at the same time, and eventually Eric and I started working on the songs for a devotional CD called Badasht vol. 1 – While the City Sleeps. It was partly a compilation of songs that each of us had already written, but by the end of the project we found a groove as a writing team and started collaborating on new music from the ground up.

The purpose of the Badasht CD was to present the Bahá’í Writings in a musical context unlike other projects we were aware of, and to combine our different backgrounds – musical and cultural – as an expression of the central Bahá’í principle of unity. The music itself is on the mellower side of what each of us does, as we were going for a meditative tone in general, but we couldn’t help ourselves – the Gospel and rock tendencies rear their heads at a few points, and inject a little bit of adrenaline into the proceedings.

It’s a pleasure to work with Eric, because he has a natural way of taking religious texts and making them sound fresh, relaxed and natural in a musical setting. His is a rare gift, and I’m learning a lot from Eric in that regard. One of the central purposes of music and art in history has been to illuminate the meaning and beauty of Sacred teachings, and we’ll always be looking for ways to contribute to that process in our work.

The odd song out here is the title track, ‘While the City Sleeps.’ It doesn’t quote the Writings, but instead tries to capture the moment when a burst of Divine Revelation hits the earth without anyone noticing but the most spiritually attuned. The song opens with the sound of the Persian ney, a flute used in Sufi whirling-Dervish music, and the lyric describes how every new spiritual Message is rejected when it doesn’t conform to our literal, physical interpretation of prophecy.

We’ve been playing this music at concerts more and more over the past year, and have noticed that some of the songs are becoming well-known enough by audiences for them to sing along note for note. People have contacted us from all over the world describing the different ways they use the Badasht CD in their devotional lives, and we’ll be doing more of this sort of thing in the near future – hence the ‘Vol. 1′…

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _