It’s always good to have a strong sense of motivation when you’re working on something new.
The motivation for my 3rd album comes in the form of our little son Jack who is nearly two years old. He’s developed this wonderful, inquisitive (sometimes exhausting) personality, always wanting to try new things and always just loving life!
It’s been a few years now since I released a new CD. In 2013 ‘This Is The Moment‘ which was the launch of my solo career and ‘And I love You So‘ dedicated to my wife Beata, went on sale in shops and online (CDs, MP3s and Spotify).
So, my thoughts turned to a new CD when the baby was around a year old (to be honest the first year was a bit of a blur for me and my wife, but a wonderful blur filled with love, nappies and little sleep!)
Looking back, this was completely normal and the more friends and family we talked to, we realised that this wonderful experience of having a little person to care for was showing and teaching us some valuable and very important life lessons; things that were once not important to me became important and vice versa, creating an inner feeling that nothing had changed yet everything was different.
This had a big impact on my music making, especially my singing. My breathing was coming from a deeper, much more grounded place. The lyric and emotional content of the song came to life. What I’ve found to be the most important lesson; I became less concerned about what people thought of me, which reduces the pressure and opens me up to new positive feelings instead.
On top of these benefits, challenging situations became much easier to handle. It’s amazing what the motivation to lead a child through school, college and guide into adulthood can do to the psyche!
Whilst all of these feelings were changing, I happened upon a wonderful song called ‘Here I Am’ when I was chatting with a friend Allan Wilson*. We have collaborated on a couple of projects over the past few years; and he is probably one of the most prolific studio conductors in Europe, if not the world.
Allan regularly records with the Philharmonia in London and he suggested I listen to the music of Eric Genuis, an American composer whom he’d worked with (and recorded with the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra) for his ‘The Winds Have Changed’ album. The words of the song and the ethereal feel were exactly how I felt about my little son who had overtaken my life forever. Allan was only too happy to talk to Eric for the permission to use his song as the title track of my third album and the perfect song to dedicate to our son.
Most of the other songs on the album are well known and have a meaning for me in my life which I’ll touch on another time, but the final song on the album is a little known song called ‘Thankful’ written by the incredible Canadian musician/record producer David Foster. Again, whilst searching for suitable songs for the album I was blown away by the words and soul-touching melody of this song.
‘Thankful’ sums up perfectly how I feel about what I have in my life today. It is so easy for us to dwell on what is missing and what we don’t have, but when we take stock and look around at some parts of this world, I feel truly blessed. As my Mother says: “there’s always someone worse off than ourselves!”
These feelings and emotions are not just granted to us either, they take work, sacrifice, patience and as I mentioned at the beginning, a lot of motivation.
So, thank you little Jack for instilling these new qualities in me, for your wonderful inquisitive personality each day and for motivating me to produce the third CD, without you it wouldn’t have happened.
* I’d like to add here that Allan Wilson conducted all the music for the Doha 2006 Asian Games, the London O2 Arena Premier of “Ben-Hur Live” in 2009 and his many conducting credits include films such as Avengers: Age of Ultron, Nightcrawler, Fury, Elysium, Cloverfield, Sleepy Hollow, and games such as Fable, the Harry Potter series, Evil Genius, Call of Duty 2, Dead Space 3, Myst IV, Kinect Star Wars, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 and many others.