Music is Medicine. Oh, not the pharmaceutical kind where you pop a tune and it puts a band-aid over your symptoms but you gain 10 pounds and you have lots of dry mouth but no orgasms. Not that kind of medicine. It’s the kind of medicine that you get from a Shaman, who shakes a […]
I sing to my clients. I sing to call in guides and angels, or to connect with their higher selves. I sing because it seems more powerful to me than just speaking the words. And my clients tell me it makes what I do seem so mystic, so special, so magical, so holy. But when […]
I fell in love with the guitar when I was three years old. My parents let me stay up late to watch the Smothers Brothers one night, and the minute Tommy Smothers walked out with that big blonde Guild of his, I was hooked. “What is that?” “That’s a guitar, honey.” “Can I have one?” […]
I haven’t been camera-shy my whole life; I have been camera-phobic. Terrified of having my picture taken, not because I was afraid I’d lose a piece of my soul. I just didn’t want to see how I looked. Like many women, I am my own worst critic. Used to be when people said they thought […]
Musicians spend a lot of time in The Now. We drop in to Now-time every time we bring our heads and our hands together, even when we are performing. Once in a while, we reach an altered state and the lights, the mics, the direct boxes and amps and audience and everything fades into mist, […]
I’ve been doing a lot of reading and contemplating about our primal archetypes, the ones that are so ancient and so universal that they show up nearly everywhere. Most cultures worshiped a life-giving Mother and some kind of vegetation God. As a card-carrying member of the Reformed Druids of North America (RDNA), it makes perfect […]
Great bookstore score this weekend! I found Jean Markale’s Merlin: Priest of Nature at our wonderful Haunted Bookshop–and I devoured it. It will get re-read, probably numerous times, so I don’t feel too bad about speeding my way through. Maybe I knew instinctively there was a puzzle piece in there that I had been searching […]
I’ve been working with a batch of Songwriting Mastery students, playing with chords a LOT. This chord progression came up for me after a lesson, and something in it really grabbed me. My soul sister Laura had been out walking with her squeeze one night, and he asked her, “Is that moon half full or […]
I’ve been tossing the B-word around here quite a bit, ancient Bards, Bardism, Bardic arts . . . And I feel a need to offer a definition of what this word means to me and why I am adopting it. A Bard is generally agreed to be someone who is of a creative nature, a […]
Laura and I had spent my birthday in Chicago, and were headed home. It was snowing pretty hard, big, heavy flakes turning to water as soon as they hit the ground. We took Highway 88 back toward Iowa, taking it easy, knowing we needed to use some caution. About an hour outside Chicago, we began […]
