Album Notes

It is the music. It is always the music. It all started on February 9, 1964. Like many of today's "Boomers," watching and listening to the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show was a landmark and turning point in my life that inspired me to pick up my sisters knitting needles and begin drumming on boxes and various containers around the house. My brother Don immediately gravitated to the guitar and the two of us formed a small neighborhood combo with our good friend Nick Baker. We played the R&B tunes as recorded by the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Animals, and other Brit bands. At the same time we wrote and performed our own original material. The band broke up and we went our separate ways. Finishing grade school, high school, college, beginning a career, getting married, raising kids, and living life was my immediate focus to survive while maintaining a living. But I never abandoned my love for music. Somewhere in the house I had access to a guitar, keyboard, or a set of drums to express this relentless passion for melody, harmony, rhythm, orchestral textures, any aspect of sound that stirred my heart. I composed my first song in 1980 ("Nightingale") because I saw a poster hanging on a dormitory wall of a lonesome figure staring despondently into a pool. I realized this song was a spiritual journey of realization and liberation. In short it was about my life. I had been practicing the teachings of Eckankar (Religion of the Light and Sound of God) since the late 1970's and began to compose songs with spiritual themes because it was a natural expression of my love for divine Spirit. It helped open my heart to God's unconditional love. In the early 1980's I wrote "Winds of Heaven," a song about the divine sound current, "Slumber Light," a dream journey into a heavenly world, "Theme 973," and instrumental dedicated to the 973rd Living ECK Master, Sri Harold Klemp, the Mahanta, "The Blues," a song about a little duck who is in search for his own sound. Then came a 20 year hiatus. Family demands superseded all other aspects of day-to-day living. The kids grew up, went off to college, started their own careers and family life and my attention drifted back to sound. More specifically, creating sound from my imagination. Simply, that is how I compose music. I listen to an internal melody and then apply it to a musical canvas for coloring. My creative juices began to percolate again at the turn of the new century and fresh material began to manifest on paper and tape. "Memories of Saguna Loch" was a new direction for me as I began to dabble with orchestral textures. The composition is a programmatic piece about souls who are led to a pristine lake of nectar to bathe in as they shed the last sheath of their material bodies before entering into the world of pure Spirit. "HU (Sing HU)" was inspired during an Eckankar dream workshop I attended in December 2001. Half way through the event, a melody internalized and became very persistent as I struggled to split my attention on the speaker and this melodic phrase. Once I arrived home after the workshop I wrote down the melody in the exact key it was given to me so I could preserve the original essence of the gift. Over the next two months I composed "HU (Sing HU)" for voice and orchestra. It's a monstrous orchestral work written in 7/8 (it feels more like 4/4) in the B Phrygian mode and is supported with African and Brazilian type ostinato rhythms. The vocalist flirts with 3 octaves as the song progresses at a break neck pace of 275 beats per minute! "Morning Glory" (title track) followed as a simple melody supported by a simple three chord progression in F# minor. It's a dreamy love song. The last piece "We Come as Eagles" was written in three days in March 2004. It just gushed out as I have always loved and embraced the figure of an eagle soaring high on the thermals and air currents. The eagle represents myself as soul, an imperishable spark of God's love, that s