Our church just had its 14th anniversary celebration, and the message was entitled "Stretch". The pastor encouraged us all to go beyond what we are comfortable with, and actually use the potential we have been given. The last thing we want to have hanging over us on our deathbeds is all the things we could have done.

So in a bold effort to live this out, I have started recording myself singing some of my melodies/lyrics a capella. I am starting to post them on SoundClick and hope I get interest from composers who might want to add some music to them. I figure, at the very least, it'll help me to get over my fear of copyright infringement. Or perhaps my total fear of other people hearing me sing and saying it's worse than drunken karaoke or something.

I mean, seriously, I have been talking about doing this for a couple years, and all I've been doing is TALKING. What the heck is keeping me from really getting my songs out there? Um...FEAR, fear, and more fear. Fear of failure,...

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I found my "people" a couple of weeks ago. After years of searching, I have finally found the group that I thought might be here, but I didn't know how to find before. My fellow Hawaiian songwriters. And I couldn't be happier.

I thought that I had quite reached my end of songwriting. Discouraged and feeling quite alone and uneducated about the whole thing, I had determined to just enjoy the music created by others, ignoring the nagging voice inside my head that "I could write something like that". But just when I was 'enjoying' my hiatus, a friend invited me to a weekend songwriter's workshop hosted by the local community college, which has a relatively new music/recording industry degree. To be honest, I had plenty of excuses not to go, but I thought it might be encouraging to my friend if we could go together, so I agreed. Then my friend decided not to go; but I was stuck having already signed up and paid, so I figured there was no harm in going and treating...

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We enrolled our son in choir for the summer. I already knew the boy could sing, but he was highly recommended for the choir by his 'music basics' teacher. The theme for this year's performance is a "mini-musical" about song and dance. There are 10 songs they will sing, which are pretty much all about singing and dancing. The show starts off with one of my very favorite songs ever--"Sing" (Words and Music by Joe Raposo; performed by the Carpenters) and goes forth from there with an assortment of fun and interesting musical tidbits.

So we will be playing these songs daily in the car on the way to school for practice. I am sure by the end of the summer I will be able to sing them in my sleep. But perhaps that is a good thing. Perhaps it is not by coincidence that I will have a daily reminder to sing and dance, and together with my children at that. Music is at the very core of my being, but there are times when life gets me down and I don't feel like singing. And so...

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I sort of wish I could go back and do over this month. It seems like in most areas I gave up and/or regressed. I fell off my 'read-the-bible-in-a-year program', my 'lose-twenty-pounds-by-the-end-of-the-year program', and my 'write-to-keep-sane program'. I am just now catching up on things from the end of April! And I never did get a party planned for my daughter's birthday (next week). And the impact of trading all my solid, self-help activities for general chaos and disorder is that I have been in a down mood where I really haven't wanted to do anything besides watch hours and hours of Planet Earth on TV for the last week or so. To quote Karen Carpenter: What I've got they used to call the blues; nothing is really wrong, just feeling like I don't belong. (Rainy Days and Mondays)

But thinking back on it, it does seem that late spring is the time I usually get into a funk. I look at my previous journals, and they all seem to dry up in...

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I finally did it--I bought the M-Audio Axiom 61 MIDI controller keyboard that I have been drooling over for the past six months. My big ticket birthday present; a very expensive new toy, and probably way more buttons than I will ever learn how to use effectively. But it will be good for trying to get a few songs of mine to be more than just lyrics and melody. I tried it out, hooking it up to the Mac and running Garageband and loving the way I can use the 8 trigger pads to do the drum effects. Man, I could spend WAY too much time playing with this!! So I must restrain myself, as I have a lot of other things to get done (like laundry for example) and we have friends in from out of town to take care of too. But with this lovely piece of equipment on my desk, I might actually finish one of my songs this year. Of course, I fully expect it to cause multiple waves of excitement-frustration-despair before then, as I remind myself how woefully untrained I am at this music production thing and therefore...

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