Tuned-In: The Paranormal World of Music Book Excerpt Part 1
Tuned In: The Paranormal World of Music
INSPIRATION
In connecting with
us
We connect to you
The message is one
of love
Tune into a higher
frequency and align with the light
Trust in yourselves
Spend quiet time in
nature
Observe the
elements
Feel the wind,
admire the trees, and hear the animals
We set these out
for you
They are there as a
symbol for you to remember
To remember
yourself and to connect
To go inside, go
within
Be still
Experience it, the
everything in the now
The information you
will receive in this space
Is more empowering
and more important than anything you can read
It is the
inspiration
Divine inspiration
What each of you
does with it is up to you
But the vastness of
this message
Is unique to each
of you
So, you will
interpret this differently
This is so you can
share it, but in different way
One might paint,
one sing, one play it through an instrument
The message flows
through each one differently
But when it’s
shared, you feel it through your interpretation
But it’s the same
massage
Expressed
individually, uniquely, through different ways
This is why we said ‘The message is in the music’
Desta Barnabe - channeled message.
Introduction
Sometimes it drives me crazy. In absolute silence, I hear music. I hear music, I hear rhythms, I hear bird songs. I live in an aural world. It's never totally empty. 16-Grammy Award winning singer Sting talking about music in his head that he can't shut off.
What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand. Ah, what then? Samuel Taylor Coleridge
This is an excerpt from my book Tuned-In. When I decided to put out sections of my books, I had to change a PDF back to a word document. All the formatting got messed up. I was forced to slowly read the whole thing over and make it readable again.
As I did that I realized that I don't recall writing most of it. It was as if someone else had written it. It was a strange feeling that I have had with many books I have written.
This actually made me feel good. As my memory fades I managed to get hundreds of weird musical stories into a book for history. Had I not written it down it would all now be gone.
As I write this
introduction, the idea that I would ever write a book on music still makes me
uneasy. The reason for this is simple. I
am in most ways a music idiot.
I took piano
lessons for a couple months before my parents realized the mistake they had
made and pulled me out. Even though my
whole family is musical I cannot play even the simplest song on any instrument.
I never intentionally listen to music, and even after two years researching
music and the paranormal I still don't listen.
I have only bought two records in my entire life - one 45 and one long
play 33.
The only reason I
got into the musical world is that a UFO experiencer/abductee, whom I respect
deeply, told me that the aliens had told him the message was in the music.
However, this alone was not enough to drag me down the music rabbit hole.
What dragged me into the world of music were two songs that my friend believed to contain the message. One was "Kashmir" by Led Zeppelin, and "After the Gold Rush" by Neil Young.
The reference to
Young was the bait that made me willing and ready to spend time looking at the
connection between the aliens and rock and roll. I didn't have much faith in the music
connection, but I had been in the world of the paranormal paying close
attention to coincidence or synchronicity.
When I heard that
Young may be carrying a message from the aliens, I was very interested. That is
because Young grew up in the same Canadian city where I grew up and have lived
my entire life - Winnipeg. It is not a
major city, and many may never have heard of it. As I was being told he might have a message
from the aliens, I was immediately thinking in the back of my mind, "What
are the chances that someone coming from the insignificant place I live in
would be carrying the alien message?"
That one
synchronicity made me do a check and the light went on when I read the lyrics
to "After the Gold Rush." It was an environmental message which I
already knew experiencers were getting from the aliens. In a recent survey of experiencers, 37.50 %
answered yes to the question, "Did the ETs give you an environmental
message regarding the Earth?"1
I was further
convinced when I discovered that other famous musicians, who themselves
appeared to be experiencers, had also done versions of the song "After the
Gold Rush."
I was convinced but
knew that it would not be easy to sell the crazy idea that aliens were
influencing music to raise consciousness. I had been in the paranormal
investigation field long enough to know that as Max Planck once said, new ideas
get adopted only when there are enough funerals of older individuals who still
buy into the old ideas they were indoctrinated with in school.
In 1994, Professor John Mack, M.D., professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and founder of the Center for Psychology & Social Change, learned about how slow change can move. He was presented with a letter from the Dean of Harvard Medical School, Daniel C. Tosteson. In that letter, Tosteson stated that he had appointed a committee of peers to confidentially review Mack's clinical care of people who had shared their alien encounters with Mack, which he documented in his book Abduction. The investigation would last 15 months and represented the first time in the history of Harvard that a tenured professor had been subjected to such a peer review investigation.
Tosteson told Mack,
"You wouldn't be in trouble if you had just said you had just discovered a
new psychiatric syndrome whose cause was unknown. It's when you said that this
work required that we reconsider the nature of reality. That's what got you in trouble."
The idea that
aliens/extraterrestrials might be influencing modern music faces an uphill
climb. Even music itself faces the
challenge that every new form of music is generally rejected. Like UFOs, most new forms of music are
rejected by the older generation.
In this book I will
show that it appears from the evidence that beings behind the UFO phenomena
have communicated with musicians to help change the consciousness of the
younger generations to bring in new ideas and concepts to the world.
At first, this
claim may seem ridiculous. There is, however, a significant amount of data
which shows a huge interest by musicians in UFOs and extraterrestrials. No polls have been conducted, but if there
were, the numbers would be staggering.2
This interest seems
strangely unique to musicians. This
became apparent to me after doing a lecture for a very elite golf club in
Phoenix. In preparation for the lecture,
I did an internet search to see if I could find a big-name golfer that everyone
could relate to who had seen a UFO, claimed to have been abducted by aliens, or
was interested in UFOs. After much searching, I could not find a single one. If the same search were done for musicians,
it would be in the hundreds. It is
almost like an interest in UFOs is required of musicians.
The interest into
UFOs goes way back to people like singer Sammy Davis Jr. who had a series of
sightings in 1952, or orchestra leader Jackie Gleason, who was absolutely
obsessed with the UFO subject.
The association
extended to the biggest bands of the 20th century like The Beatles. John Lennon, a key band member, had at least
one UFO sighting that he acknowledged, and later research showed that Lennon
may have been abducted.
Ringo Starr was also hooked on the subject, talking about it at length in a 1969 interview.3 Audiences are usually shocked when I play a 1974 commercial made by Lennon and Starr for Starr's album Goodnight Vienna. It was narrated by Lennon and shows Starr getting into a UFO which has landed.
The UFO then takes off, flies over Los Angeles, and lands on the RCA building, where Starr gets out and waves. The cover of the album has Starr outside a flying saucer with one of the extraterrestrials from the 1952 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.
 |
| Ringo Starr uses UFO theme in 1974 Album |
Many of the videos for songs on the album have Starr standing on a flying saucer while singing.
What follows in
this book is a stunning list of musicians who claimed to have had UFO
sightings, had UFOs show up at their concerts, claimed they were abducted by
aliens or even claimed that they were actually alien or part alien.
This book looks at
not only modern musicians but also musicians back through the centuries. What
was found was the same claim of being aided in their musical creations but
referencing God or spiritual guides as opposed to aliens.
Thus, the book began with aliens but branched out into other sources of inspiration referenced by musicians to produce their music. These inspirations included dreams, spiritual guides, muses, and other non-physical sources. This is a key to the story as it starts to point research towards what is really going on and the non-local nature of music creation.
The stories I came
across were some of the strangest stories I have ever heard. The stories involve some of the most famous
musicians to walk the Earth.
Finally, the
stories these musicians tell seriously challenge our basic understanding of
song creation and of reality itself.
What follows is
strong evidence that there is something called creativity and that this ability
is connected with the right creative mind, opposing the standard paradigm that
the left, rational, analytical brain is the creative facilitator.
Everyone has this
creative ability, and it is just a matter of accessing it. It is no different than tuning into a radio
or TV show or getting on the Internet with a password.
The musicians named
in this book are some of the ones that used their creative minds, procuring
fame and fortune.
As I point out in
Chapter 4, there are many musicians who had creative moments, and they either
were not able to get the resulting music onto the music charts or they chose to
not publish the song that came in a dream or in an inspired moment.
There are others who heard music during a near death experience or lucid dream. It is clear from the evidence that there is only one consciousness that contains all that is needed to be creative and everything hinges on the ability to access it.
Note on Terminology - The word paranormal as used in this book simply means "beyond the normal." It is the world beyond the materialistic, rational world we have come to accept as reality.
Chapter 1- Musicians' Dreams and Music
To me, the best songs are the ones that come to you in dreams. I wake up, put it down on a cassette next to the bed, turn over and go back to sleep. I wrote "Satisfaction" that way. Keith Richards, The Rolling Stones
I think I've dreamed all the songs I've written. I don't dream regular dreams. I dream stories. When people tell me they had a strange dream last night, they were riding down a street, and blah, blah, blah, I don't relate to that. I dream in abstractions, in colors. I dream music and shapes and paintings and sculptures. I have awakened at four-thirty in the morning with a whole symphony in my head. I say to myself, 'This is so good I don't even have to get up now. I'll remember it when I wake up later.' And then later when I wake up, it's gone. And then weeks, maybe months, maybe years later it reoccurs to me that the song I have just written is from some old dream. Billy Joel
"The Lost
Chord" is a song composed by Arthur Sullivan in 1877 after receiving it in
a dream. After waking he could only remember part of the melody he heard in the
dream - thus the song's title "The Lost Chord."
The song was one of
the first songs ever to be recorded on the phonograph by Thomas Edison in the
1880s. Years later, The Moody Blues rock
band would do an entire album on the theme of the Lost Chord.
Claims of musical
inspiration from dreams are quite common.
(See Appendix 1 for a list.) This
indicates that it may be the norm rather than the exception. It also hints at a possible connection to
other inspirations such as those reported by inventors, artists, and
writers. Each of these groups has a
percentage claiming to have received important material in dreams.
In 2005 at the
University of Florence, Valeria Uga, Maria Chiara Lemut, Chiara Zampi, Iole
Zilli, and Piero Salzarulo published a paper called "Music in Dreams"4
in which they set up a controlled study of the phenomena.
They employed two
groups comprised of thirty-five professional musicians and thirty non-musicians
who both filled out a questionnaire about the characteristics of their musical
activity and who for 30 consecutive days provided a structured dream log upon
awakening.
It was found that
the musicians dreamed about music twice as much as non-musicians and "the
recalled music was non-standard, suggesting that original music can be created
in dreams."
The modern, scientific, materialistic paradigm would discount such accounts of revelatory experience as either an illusion that happened to be a creative random accident or just a biological robot stringing together random lyrics and melody. Despite the skepticism, more and more researchers are studying this and other revelatory accounts in hopes of explaining what appears to be a unique state of consciousness. What is being found is defying the accidental universe belief that scientists cling to.
The Process
When a musician is
composing new music, he may have an idea of what the theme of the songs will
be, but when it comes to the song he/she has to wait for the melody and the
lyrics to come into his/her head. It is at that point that inspiration takes
over, and some sort of higher-self provides the song.
An excellent
example of this is the 2016 winner of America's Got Talent TV show, Grace
VanderWaal. Twelve-year-old Grace was asked how she came up with the first song
that she sang in her audition for the show. The song "No One Knows My
Name," had been written by Grace as she was doing her grade five
homework.
It went on to have
38 million hits on YouTube just after she wo and was being played by people all
over the world.
Grace explained what happened in the song's creation-
Well, in the beginning, it's very hard to find. Usually, it starts with a completely different meaning. It starts out like this, and by the end, it is totally different, and I say 'What? How did that become like that?' It's because that was in you and you didn't even know it. It was there. So, when you do a few words, then it just starts to spill out.
Some bands like Maudlin of the Well actually knew the process and used it to create music. They referred to it as finding music rather than composing it. They used the practices of astral projection and lucid dreams in which they would "bring back" preexisting music. Based on the technique, they released three full-length albums, My Fruit PsychoBells, A Seed Combustible and Bath and Leaving Your Body Map, before disbanding in 2003.
The late David
Bowie was asked if his inspiration included dreams and he stated it happened
frequently." There's a thing that, just as you go to sleep, if you keep
your elbows elevated you will never go below the dream stage. I've used that quite a lot and it keeps me
dreaming much longer than if I just relaxed. I keep a tape recorder by the bed,
and if anything comes, I just say it into the tape recorder."5
Arlo Guthrie, an
American folk singer and songwriter, once said that music was like a stream
going by. "Songwriting's kinda like
catching fish - you just sit there and pull them out as they go by - though I
think Bob Dylan's upstream from me somewhere."6
"The best
songs that are written write themselves," said Michael Jackson. "You don't ask for them; they just drop
into your lap… I don't force it. I let
nature take its course. I don't sit at
the piano and think, 'I'm going to write the greatest song of all time.' It doesn't happen. It has to be given to you. I believe it's already up there before you
are born, and then it drops right into your lap."7
Based on the
descriptions, musicians get music in dreams, most probably lucid dreams.8
The reason for this is that lucid dreams do not have the weird disconnection
and lack of control experienced in ordinary dreams.
Musicians report
that when they dream a song, it comes to them clearly and with a strong sense
of importance. There is no disconnection and symbolism that must be
interpreted. Most report that the dream song simply has to be documented and
many report they are able to do it in minutes, note for note, based on what
they heard.
This aspect of
dream musical creation was studied by Dr. Irving Massey who pointed out that
strangely, "Music is the only faculty that is not altered by the dream
environment, whereas action, character, visual elements and language may all be
modified or distorted in dreams."9
In addition, music
in dreams does not become fragmented, chaotic or incoherent; neither does it
decay as rapidly as do the other components of dreams upon awakening. The music
dream download experience is unique and unexplained.
Musicians describe
that it is easy to pull the music from their dreams. The only catch is you have
to do it immediately. Many musicians
report that they keep a tape recorder or pen and paper by the bed to be ready for
the moment. Musician Merrell Fankhauser
told me that he built a music studio near his bedroom, so he would not have far
to go when the inspiration arrived.
The great guitarist Jimi Hendrix told Musical Express in 1969,"I dream a lot and I put a lot of my dreams down as songs. I wrote one called 'First Around the Corner' and another called 'The Purple Haze,' which was all about a dream I had that I was walking under the sea." His song "Angel" was inspired by a dream where his mother came down from heaven to take him with her. A couple weeks later Hendrix was dead.10
Then there are the songs that come in more an integrative type of dream process described by Steve Vai. He wrote the song "Little Green Men" where some of the lyrics indicate Vai might be an experiencer.
The beings will only reveal themselves to those who are pure of heart, for these enlightened. Aliens leave permanent imprinted information on the psyche of those chosen humans, Only to be revealed to our deteriorating planet at the point in which Our civilization shall enter the new age of 'light without heat.'
Vai spoke about the dream process to produce the album that contained the "Little Green Men" song.
I think a lot of people get their inspiration from dreams, says Vai, but this was a different type of thing. It took place when I was about 16 years old. I was studying dream states, and I stumbled across a couple of things that were like experiments or exercises in this particular avenue of investigation. And this particular experience - later on I found out that a lot of people term it as an astral projection or an out-of-the-body experience - was extremely vivid. It had a pretty devastating effect on me as a musician, and from it came a whole series of writings. The writings turned into the album, Passion and Warfare.11
Some of the stories about dream music are so bizarre they just couldn't be made up. Consider the story of "Mystery Woman" written by U2's Bono.
As Bono tells the
story he is about to play a major concert in Wembley Stadium and was not able
to sleep the night before. He stayed up most of the night watching the movie Blue Velvet on repeat and became aware
of Roy Orbison's song "In Dreams" every time it came up in the movie.12
Orbison, himself,
claimed that when he came up with the song "In Dreams" in 1962, he
got the lyrics to the song in a dream.
Eventually, Bono
fell asleep and woke up with a song in his head. At first, he believed it was
another Orbison song but then realized that it was new. He played the new
Orbison-sounding song about a "mystery woman" to his band during the
concert sound check. When they heard how it happened they told him he had
"a bit of voodoo in him."
When the concert
was over, Bono sat down backstage to finish the song. Suddenly, his bodyguard
knocks on the door and says Roy Orbison and his wife were at the concert and
would like to meet him. No one knew
Orbison would be attending!
During the meeting,
Orbison synchronistically said he would like to work with U2, and then asked,
"you wouldn´t happen have a song for me?" Bono then told him of the Orbison-like song
that appeared in his head that morning.
Orbison sang the
song and it was released after his death. The album, Mystery Girl became a worldwide hit reaching #5 on the US Billboard
200, and #2 on the UK Albums Chart.
Country singer
Johnny Cash talked about his dream song, and the important feeling that came
with the dream, “The Man Comes Around” saying, “I dreamed I saw Queen
Elizabeth, that I went into Buckingham Palace and there she sat on the floor. And she looked up at me and said, 'Johnny
Cash, you're like a thorn tree in a whirlwind.' And I woke up, of course. What could a dream like this mean - thorn
tree in a whirlwind? Well…for two or
three years…it kept haunting me. This
dream, kept thinkin' about it. How vivid
it was. And then I thought that maybe
it's biblical, so I found it. Somethin'
about whirlwinds and thorn trees in the Bible. So, from that, my song
started."13
Noel Gallagher of
the UK rock band Oasis sold the third bestselling record in the country. Gallagher stated he used lucid dreaming to
create songs. "I write a song before I go to bed," Noel told Alternative Press in December 1995.
"I won't have any lyrics, just a melody.
If I can remember it first thing in the morning, then I know it's
good. I've done it with 'Don't Look Back
in Anger' and nearly every song on Definitely
Maybe. When I woke up, I remembered
the songs chord-for-chord - I knew the vowels and syllables I was gonna
use."14
Brandon Boyd of
Incubus, recorded a song on his phone as he woke up. This song, “Avalanche”, became the seed for
his album Sons of the Sea.
Boyd told one
interviewer that he has now learned how to control the practice to some extent,
"I have been dreaming of music for most of my life, but only in the past
few years have I begun to be able to wake myself up in time and hold shreds of
the music before it slips away like a bar of soap in my hand… I don't fully
understand the dreaming process and so when a song comes hurling forth out of
one, it almost feels like a weird gift from the ether."15
The claims for
dream music go back for centuries. Mozart claimed to hear his best music
when he slept but couldn't remember it when he woke up. The composer Revel
stated that the most wonderful music came to him in his dreams.
Anton Bruckner
spoke of perhaps his most famous piece “Symphony
No 7, 1st movement." “This theme
wasn't mine at all. One day the
(deceased) conductor Kitzler and old friend of mine from Linz appeared to me in
a dream and dictated the thing to me. I wrote it down straight away. 'Pay
attention,' added Kitzler, ‘this will bring you success.'"16
Stuart J. Sharp and
his wife ran a pub and lived in the countryside. On the eve of the birth of his son, whom they
were going to name Ben, his wife's uterus suffered a rupture and Ben died in
the womb. As a result, she almost died
as well. Stuart did not know what to
do. He buried the baby. The night of the funeral, he had a dream that
would change his life.
In his dream, he
was back at the grave side, and saw Ben rise from the coffin and travel up
toward the skies. Then he started
hearing angelic music. Angels came down
and said, "Ben is safe now and your gift is you will remember
everything." He could hear every
single note of this piece of music. He
heard everything. He felt a great
spiritual power that was going guide him to do whatever he needed to do to
recreate this music, even if he had to devote the rest of his life to
this.
He told his wife of
his plans to move to London. His family
thought he needed therapy and when he said he had made up his mind to leave,
they thought he was joking. He wanted his
family to go with him, but his wife did not support him. He knew his destiny awaited and left. He lived in his car, eventually sold his car,
moved into a hostile for the homeless and one day saw a guitar in the window
and bought it with the few pounds he had.
He knew nothing about music. He
took it back to the hostile. He slept in
a room that was infested with cockroaches and slowly started to compose
music.
Eventually, he was
hanging out outside BBC studios and one day as he was playing, Anthony Wade, a
Jazz musician, asked him what he was doing, took pity on him and invited Stuart
to stay with him, despite his wife being furious. Stuart and Anthony started working on making
Stuart's vision a reality. The year was
1982. Anthony said the London
Philharmonic Orchestra should play the music but that it was going to take a
million pounds. Stuart spent the next 15
years working various jobs and managed to indeed save a million pounds. He went back to Anthony and said he was
ready. Anthony asked him what he was
talking about. Stuart said he had the
million pounds. They approached the guy
in charge of the London Philharmonic and the day the orchestra finally played
the piece, the whole orchestra gave Stuart a standing ovation.
He sent the CD to
his ex-wife. She said it was magnificent
and that she was playing with the windows open.
He cried.17
James Taylor stated
in an interview that the song "Baby Buffalo" off his album October Road came to him both in a dream
and while he was in a trance-like state.18
Probably the most
famous song that came in a dream was the song "Yesterday" by Paul
McCartney. It has the most cover
versions of any song ever written (2200) and, according to record label BMI,
was performed over seven million times in the 20th century.
McCartney described a song being his head when he woke up one morning. There was a piano in the room and he quickly recorded the melody and lyrics. McCartney stated:
I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, 'That's great, I wonder what that is?' There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th -- and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot, but because I'd dreamed it, I couldn't believe I'd written it. I thought, 'No, I've never written anything like this before.' But I had the tune, which was the most magic thing!
Once he had the song McCartney was still unsure, so he checked around to see if he had just rewritten something he heard but had forgotten.
For about a month I went around to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before. Eventually, it became like handing something into the police. I thought if no one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it.
That was not the only song McCartney got in a dream. In 1984 he got the song "No Values" in a dream.
I dreamt this song. I dreamt that I was with The Rolling Stones. They were all there, Mick, Bill, Charlie, Keith, and Mick were up front. I woke up and said to myself, "I really like that song that they do." Then I thought," Hey, wait a minute, there is no Rolling Stones song called No Values. They don't do that song." My brain just created it. So, I thought, "Well, there it is. I've got this new song called No Values." But I won't be telling Mick; he'll probably claim the copyright.1
McCartney's band partner John Lennon spoke about all the songs from the album Double Fantasy coming to him in three weeks after not writing for five years.
But my joy is when you are like possessed, like a medium, you know. I would be sitting around, and it would come in the middle of the night when you don't want to do it - that's the exciting part. So, I'm not lying around, and this thing comes as a whole piece, you know, words and music… Can I say I wrote it? I don't know who the hell wrote it. I'm just sitting here and this whole damn song just comes out. So, you're like driven and find yourself over on a piano or guitar and you put it down because it is given to you or whatever it is that you tune into.20
Jon Anderson was
the lead singer for the U.K. band Yes which sold 50 million albums
worldwide. He was asked if he had ever
had a song in a moment of inspiration like during a dream.
Anderson replied,
"Yes, it happens all the time actually. I remember vividly in 1971 I woke
in the middle of the night. I always
kept a cassette machine next to the bed, and I just sang the song into the
cassette machine. We were actually on tour.
I sang this song and I put the tape away and forgot about it for a
couple of years and then I found it and listened to it and the words were word
for word exactly correct. I didn't have to change a thing. The words were pure
and correct. It was the song I called 'O'er.' It's on a record somewhere - over
the green mountains and over the green valleys."21
Marcus Eoin from
the band Boards of Canada wrote the song "Gyroscope" which came in a
dream. He stated, "Yeah for me it
would be the track 'Gyroscope'. I dreamed the sound of it, and although I've
recreated dreamt songs before, I managed to do that one so quickly that the
end-result was 99% like my dream. It
spooks me to listen to it now."22
Even lesser known
musicians such as Kevin Estrella from the group Pyramids on Mars have known the
experience of getting a song in a dream.
Estrella told me that the famous guitarist Joe Satriani was in his dream
and was being asked what he was going to play.
He began to play a piece though the soundboard already pre-recorded.
Estrella was able to listen to the first minute of the song before he woke up. He thought that it was a wonderful song. At the same time he realized that Satriani
had never played the piece.
Estrella quickly
recorded what he had heard note for note and it became the song "Dream
Division" of his album Echo Cosmic.
In 2016, Estrella had another music download called Veritas while dreaming.
My name is Kevin Estrella.
I am Pyramids on Mars, instrumental rock from the Mystical Red
Planet. UFO Researcher Grant Cameron has
documented many stories of musicians who get ‘downloads of music.’ Music that comes from a different
consciousness, from the Universe itself.
Music that simply did not exist, until it was dreamed of. This is one of those cases.
January of 2017. I had
a dream. I remember vividly driving in
my car on a country dirt road. I
recognized it as a road that looked very familiar to my old home town of
Orangeville, where I lived with my parents before I got married. This looked like a dirt road off the old
highway #9. I had in my hand a new CD. I realized that it was of a band that I
belonged to (even though this is completely fictional as I was never in this
band. But in the dream, I was). We were a cover band of the power rock band
Tool. The name of our
band was ‘Veritas’, which I thought was a really cool name for a band. Mind you, I had NO IDEA what Veritas even
meant. However, it had a very Tool-ish
ring to the name, sounding like something they would have come up with.
I remember the CD
cover vividly. It was black, the name
Veritas written across the top. And then
there was a picture of our band member’s faces, just in a white outline. But half of our faces looked to be
electrified like lightning. I thought it
was pretty catchy looking. I recall
putting the CD in the CD player and hearing the first song. Now what I remember was that we were a Tool
cover band so all the songs on this CD would have been songs written by Tool. It sounded like a live recording because I
could hear crowds cheering at the beginning of the first song.
The song blasted in with a very poly-rhythmic groove, very
Tool-esque. I remember it as it was the
guitar and drums that started the song.
4/4, 5/8, 5/8, 5/8, 5/8 repeat...
And then went into a very powerful off-time groove. Very Tool!
All I could think was, ‘Wow, this is so powerful!’ But it was then that I came to the
realization that I have never heard this song before! And I had every Tool album, so I wasn’t
missing anything. It became very
apparent in the dream that Tool had never written this song.
I woke up in excitement! Literally jumped out of bed, humming the rhythm in my head as to lock it in not to forget. I also maintained my consciousness to remain in an Alpha-state as to let the song continue to manifest, because I knew it would continue to write itself. In the process of waking up so startled, my wife at the time said to me “Did it happen again?” (referring to my previous song download from my first CD that this same event occurred). “Uh-huh!” was all I said.
I ran downstairs; it
was only 5:30am. Still an hour before I
had to start getting ready for work. I
got my laptop up and running, turned on my recording software, grabbed my
guitar. I set up a metronome groove and
began laying down the bed tracks of this song.
The introduction just like I heard came down hard and heavy. I then doubled up the tracks to pan stereo
rhythm guitars left and right for a very heavy sound. It sounded powerful! And then, the main riff/verse, it came together right afterwards. The energy
was captured. I knew that this song had
life breathed into it, and that for the rest of it, it would write itself.
But then I thought, “What am I going to call it?” Then I thought of the band name in the dream. Veritas. It sounded cool. But I had no idea what Veritas meant? I googled it. It is the Greek word for ‘Truth’. I thought... “How appropriate.” For everything I am experiencing, my consciousness continues to expand.
And so it was, the song Veritas was written. A gift from the Holographic Collective Consciousness. A list of songs that came in dreams can be found in Appendix 1
Chapter 2 - Inspirations in Modern Music
I had a sound in my head that was bugging me. Keith Richards Speaking of his Music Writing of "Street Fighting Man."
You don’t have to
create it. It is already in existence. You just have to reveal it. Paul Simon
In spiritual literature there are many claims that there is a hall of music where downloads are given to earthly musicians. Henry Edwards (1893-1976), for example, described that music was telepathically transmitted from the music room in the Hall of Learning into the minds of musicians.
This idea has its
modern proponents such as Robin Gibb from the Bee Gees who sold 220 million
albums worldwide, "they're already written, but they're only written for
us and they're out there." His brother Barry added, "It's almost as
if the songs are in the air and we hear them." 23
This may seem
far-fetched until one realizes that most of the greatest musicians of the 20th
century such as The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson, Barbra
Streisand, The Bee Gees, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Jerry
Garcia, Billy Ray Cyrus, Jimmy Page, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine,
Adam Jones of Tool, Dimebag Darrell, Brandon Boyd, Pete Townshend, Kurt Cobain,
Tori Amos, Thom Yorke, B.B. King, Marvin Gaye, Angus Young, Eddie Van Halen,
Adrian Smith, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, famous blues singer Robert
Johnson, George
Lynch, Rosenberg Trio, and Jackie Gleason could not read or write music. Music
was therefore not something that they were trained in lessons to produce.
Edgar Cayce stated
that music in the material world is a reflection of the music of the spheres
(discussed in Chapter 5). When a
musician begins to compose, he taps into these realms of spirit. Cayce
recommended music for deeper meditation stating it was a bridge from the finite
to the infinite.
Tommy Emmanuel, an
Australian guitarist and songwriter, stated an obvious fact of songwriting,
which is that "a songwriter waits patiently for inspiration to
happen."
It can happen
anywhere where the mind has been stilled like it did for Pete Seeger on a
plane. "I'm sitting in a plane,
kind of dozing," said Seeger, "and you know, when you're dozing,
that's when the creative ideas come."
What popped into
his head was a short passage in a chapter of a famous novel about Czarist
Russia that he had written into a notebook years before. In seconds the song "Where Have all the Flowers
Gone”, formed in his head.
Leaving out where
the music might be coming from, there is absolutely no doubt musicians get
downloads of music from somewhere. If it were not for the music claimed to have
been downloaded some of the most popular music of all times would not exist.
There are no direct
statistics to prove it, but it appears that not just ordinary songs, but the
greatest songs came in some sort of inspiration. Such was the case of
"Yesterday" which Paul McCartney got in a dream and which went on to
have 2,200 cover versions and become recognized as one of the most covered
songs in the history of recorded music.
Another song,
"Stardust" by Hoagy Carmichael, has been recorded almost 2,000 times,
and is listed as #44 in the top 500 songs of all times by Rolling Stone
Magazine.
Carmichael described its sudden appearance in his mind.
Well, I got the idea just walking across the campus one night, my university campus where I went to school. I'd just left the college hangout called the Book Nook, and I started whistling, and I whistled this opening strain of "Stardust," and I knew that I had something very strange and different.24
Following are some
examples of the inspiration behind the writing of some of the most popular
songs of all times. Many of these came in dreams, which is significant because
dream music appears to be the only element of dreams that is not distorted by the dreams process. The music
heard is clear without the usual fragmentation, chaos, or incoherence normally
associated with dreams.
Take note that there are lots of stories of an inspired hand in writing songs that have occurred all throughout history. It is, therefore, part of the songwriting process and is not exclusive to Rock and Roll.
Adele - A British singer and songwriter
talked about moments of song inspiration saying, "it's usually in the
middle of the night when I wake up in a cold sweat and I've got an idea… when I
get up to get a drink of water I grab my blackberry and sing into it. I kind of like it because other than the fact
that it is three in the morning and you’re tired and want to sleep, you can't
sleep, otherwise, you are going to lose the idea…it is never when I would like
it to be.25 Sometimes when I sit there and try and plan it that's
when some of the worst songs that have ever graced the earth have come
out."
Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman - from the British Band Yes wrote the
song "Madrigal" about UFOs and the alien message came in a few
minutes in a "flow of consciousness."
Jon Anderson - Asked if he had ever had a song come in a moment of inspiration,
like during a dream, Anderson replied, "Yes, it happens all the time
actually. I remember vividly in 1971 I woke in the middle of the night. I always kept a cassette machine next to the
bed, and I just sang the song into the cassette machine. We were actually on
tour. I sang this song and I put the tape away and forgot about it for a couple
of years and then I found it and listened to it and the words were word for
word exactly correct. I didn't have to change a thing. The words were pure and
correct. It is the song I called ‘O'er.’ It's on a record somewhere - over the green mountains and over the
green valleys."26
Joan Baez - "It seems to me that those songs
that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them.
The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page…"27
Ginger Baker - Formerly of Eric
Clapton's group, Cream - "It
happens to us quite often - it feels
as though I am not playing my instrument, something else is playing it and that
same thing is playing all three of our instruments. That's what I mean when I
say it's frightening sometimes. Maybe
we'll all play the same phrase out of nowhere.
It happens very often with us."28
David Bowie - In 1972 Bowie had a dream in which his father appeared and told
him he had only five years to live. The message is an environmental disaster
such as shown by aliens to experiencers.29 At that point, Bowie
produces the song "Five Years."
It becomes the
opening track to the album The Rise and
Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. In the song there is an aired announcement
that the world will end in 5 years because of a lack of natural resources. The
song then proceeds to describe the frenzied aftermath of the announcement.
To make matters even weirder, in 2012, a year before David Bowie announced to a shocked music world that he was ending his 10-year hiatus from music with a new album called Next Day, he was beaten to the punch by Robert Fripp a guitarist and former Bowie collaborator. He stated that Bowie had appeared to him in a dream and told him. Fripp referred to the 2012 blog indicating he had in fact made the announcement about the dream.
Aaron Bruno - lead singer for AWOLNATION - Talked about the song
"Sail" from the 2010 album Back
to Earth. The song was about being abducted by extraterrestrials. Bruno
stated "When I write these songs my ideas come out of nowhere and I
couldn't really explain to you why they happen or how. If you look at
megalithic structures, it's been suggested that there's really no explanation
for where these things come from and why they're here. The rock on the cover
image is a place I saw in my brain one day.
Hopefully one day you'll discover it too.”
“I came up with the string section part at the beginning, and the song just came to me," Bruno stated about “Sail.” "I recorded the strings, the beat, and the synth - all within 45 minutes. My engineer went down the street to get some sodas for us, and by the time he got back, I'd sung the lyrics and it was done. It happened so quickly it was almost an accident.
Coldplay - Frontman for Coldplay Chris Martin has admitted to an interest in UFOs. Many Coldplay songs, such as “X&Y”, “Speed of Sound”, “White Shadows’, “Spies”, “Charlie Brown”, “M.M.I.X.”, “Major Minus”, “U.F.O.”, “Violet Hill”, “Brothers and Sisters”, “Only Superstition”, and “High Speed”, indicate what could be contact experiences or message downloads. Coldplay performed during the Super Bowl 2016 halftime and the energy was off the charts, ending with the message "Believe in Love" that the audience held up in inspirational rainbow-colored placards. Bradford Cox - Frontman for Deerhunter, Cox stated, "I'm basically the audience for my own music. Because I don't write things consciously, I don't set out to write things, it's all automatic writing, like the music and the chords and the lyrics and everything. So, when I listen to it, I'm sort of analyzing it the same way that somebody who gets the record and listens to it for the first time.”30
Karyn Crisis - Crisis frontwoman for the experimental metal band Crisis has much to say on the inspirational process in music. "On tour, I always had premonitions about how shows would go…and I always felt this sensation when I was singing, whether it was on stage or in the studio or in rehearsal where there was something bigger than myself, moving my voice through me. I would call it summoning, and it would be very frustrating for my band mates because whenever we had to write songs, I felt like I have never written a song in my life. I don't know how to write the lyrics or write vocals. But once I sort of got my mind out of the way which for me was like taking a word out of a thesaurus and getting into it. The singing became what happens in a meditative state. My vocals would write themselves in my mind…they would be created in my clairvoyance/clairaudient space and I would have to figure out how to sing that live. So often I was writing material that was right out of my vocal range but when it came time to sing them, the range was there…I was very aware of these forces that I considered bigger than myself, more knowledgeable and more talented than myself."31
Rodney Crowell - Crowell is a Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter. Speaking of songs that he wrote for such bands as Bob Seger and the Oak Ridge Boys he stated, "These songs picked me. These songs exist somewhere else, fully written. My job is to bring them into the time and space that we are in. I'm careful to let the song tell me what to do. My intention is to be the receiver for the inspiration. It will come to visit, and then the songs come pouring out of me."32
Chris de Burgh –British/Irish folk-rock giant de Burgh wrote a song called "A Spaceman Came Traveling" was released in the mid-70s on his album Spanish Train. It is unknown whether the lyrics were inspired from an encounter or perhaps influenced by books published at that time by Erich von Daniken, such as Chariots of the Gods. "Do not fear, I come from a planet a long way from here...Peace and goodwill to all men…Now I must fly, when two thousand years of your time has gone by, this song will begin once again..."
Dntel - The Dream of Evan and Chan - 33 Electronic music artist Dntel (Jimmy Tamborello) in 2001 was inspired by a bizarre dream involving Evan Dando of The Lemonheads and Chan Marshall.
Donovan (Donovan Philips Leitch) - Scottish songwriter and singer - "With songwriting, it all comes out in one flash. Then you work it, then you craft it." Later Donovan stated, "I believe I'm a reincarnated poet from an old tradition."34
Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan once said he was struggling to channel consciously what
formerly came to him subconsciously.
Listed as the number 2 musical artist of all time by Rolling Stone
Magazine, Dylan wrote his 1962 "Blowing in the Wind" song in ten
minutes one afternoon35.
"The best songs to me," said Dylan, "are songs which were
written very quickly. Yeah, very, very quickly. Just about as much time as it
takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it."36
This quick creation
is a common characteristic of many of the greatest songs of all times. Michael
Des Barres, for example, who played for Led Zeppelin and many other bands,
stated that anything he ever wrote that became successful was always written in
under five minutes.37
Dylan is on record
as saying that the protest song, which he insisted wasn't a protest song, came
out of "that well spring of creativity."
The first time he performed the song, he
couldn't read his own handwriting and ended up having to adlib new lyrics.
In an interview
with 60 minutes, Dylan was asked about the writing of his 1964 song “It's
Alright, Ma." "It came out of
that well spring of creativity I would think," said Dylan. He also said,
"I don't know
how I got to write those songs…those early songs were like almost magically
written."38 He stated,
"Try and sit down and write something like that. There's a magic to that,
and it's not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic. It's a different penetrating kind
of magic. I did it. I did it at one time."
He added he doesn't think he can do that kind of magic anymore.
Asked why he still
does the tours Dylan said, "I don't take it for granted. It goes back to
the destiny thing. I made a bargain with it a long time ago and I am holding up
my end." Asked what the bargain was, Dylan said, "To get where I am
now."
When asked who he made the bargain with Dylan chuckled and said, "With the chief commander in this earth and the earth we can't see."39
Yelena Eckemoff - Eckemoff spoke about dream inspired music saying:
"I often hear music in my sleep. Many times, I woke up hearing the tune that I liked, and several times I made myself get up, find a pencil and notepaper and write it down. Some other times I was too sleepy to get up and was trying to memorize the music I heard, but most likely I would not remember in the morning. There are several compositions on my CDs that I borrowed from my dreams. One in particular comes to mind. I woke up like at two in the morning hearing some persistent tune, got up and went to my piano room where I remained the rest of the night and wrote the entire piece (it was "Quasi Sonata" from my CD Forget-me-not). Another memorable encounter was when I clearly heard the tune in my dream that I still remembered when I woke up, but I did not have time to write it down in the morning, and then I forgot about it. To my surprise, I dreamed about it again the next night, and the next day, I sat at the piano and played it as if it was already done. This was the tune "Pep" from my latest CD, A Touch of Radiance."40
Kevin Estrella - Estrella is the man behind the instrumental rock band Pyramids on Mars. His song "Dream Division" came to him in a dream. It was being played by American instrumental rock guitarist Joe Satriani. "Or at least," said Estrella, "he was playing it though the soundboard already pre-recorded."41 When he awoke, Estrella realized that Satriani had never played the song. He quickly recorded the song.
Estrella also recently stated:
I would like to share a revelation I had in church two weeks ago. I was born and raised Catholic. Gone to church my whole life. And through my connections and revelations through our community discussions and our spiritual awakening through our Star Family, I finally saw my Catholic experience as flawed.
90%+ of church experience focuses on everything else, but Christ's actual teaching. Christ was the teacher and it's like the Church is forgetting the message. So much is focused on loving Christ and on Him when all He was trying to do was to get us to look into ourselves that we are all like Him. And that all Star beings are in a "Christ consciousness." The religious doctrine has hijacked Jesus' true message to make our religious awakening outside of our own experience, when in fact Christ was trying to show it's within yourself and we all have direct connection to The Creator IF you look inside yourself and realize there is no separation between anything in the cosmos.
Neil Finn - Finn was a New Zealand singer/songwriter and musician in the band Split Enz. Speaking of his songwriting method he stated,
For me, the early stages of the songs are always sounds and words that just form. They come with a melody, married to the melody. Then I start singing nonsense and all of a sudden, a line will pop out of the nonsense and it'll seem to have some kind of resonance. I'll write it down, and then another couple will turn up. On rare, beautiful occasions I'll get the whole thing in one fell swoop, without really thinking about it. But most of the time I have to fill in the gaps.
Every now and again I'll sit down and have an idea about what I'm gonna write about, but most of the time it just falls out.42
Robert Fripp - guitarist for King Crimson - "That certain feeling happened to me in a big way quite often with the first King Crimson. Amazing things would happen -- I mean, telepathy, qualities of energy, things that I had never experienced before with music … you can't tell whether the music is playing the musician, or the musician is playing the music."4
Juan Gabriel - The Diva of Juarez - A few people are saying that hidden in a song is a description of Gabriel's "true origins." According to TV Y Notas, Gabriel revealed his origins in the third song on his album Todo Esta Bien (Everything is Fine) released 10.26.99. The song, "No apaguen la luz" (Don't turn off the light) states:
Farther than the sky, than the full moon, than the sun, than everything, than the sea of stars, than those six planets, that is where I come from. Among Mercury, Uranus and Pluto, I had a planet and it was my home, but war broke out and the light was extinguished. Around Saturn my devastated planet, Erra, turns and turns. That was its end. I ask that you not extinguish the light. Come to Xel-Ha, come to Tulum, come to Cancun. Some went to Cetus and Orion, some to Boras and Aran, I was brought to the land of the Sun, and I am now here.
Jerry Garcia - Garcia of The Grateful Dead said music was a kind of channeling. We're opening the door, but we are not responsible for what comes through. So, in a sense, I can't take credit for it. We're a utility, like a conduit for life energy, psychic energy - whatever it is."44
Robin Gibb - The Bee Gees - Gibb talked about their moments of inspiration, "After a three-hour session in studio (we) come up with nothing and then just as the band is packing up to leave you know it's the end of the session so you play something, and it makes the hair on your back stand on end and you know you've got something. You don't know what it is, but you know that if you've got something it is bound to affect other people. That was really the spark to the flame. You have to do about three hours before you get where you want to go, and the brain opens up. It's worth it to come up with a great idea. The worst thing is to try too hard. The minute you stop, and give up, the mind relaxes and then it happens. I don't know why that is. It feeds itself. It writes itself.45" Jay Greenburg - Jay Greenburg is a young musical prodigy who had composed five symphonies by age five and had the London Symphony record the fifth. He stated, "the music just streams into my head at lightning speed, sometimes several symphonies running simultaneously. My unconscious mind directs my conscious mind at a mile a minute"46
Patty Griffin - Grammy award-winning folk singer and 2007 Americana Music
Association's "Artist of the Year" award winner Patty Griffin said,
"It's always amazing to me that songs show up (laughs). I've practiced
writing songs for a long time. I still am practicing writing songs. I'm not really sure how it works. That's a very good way to put that, it is
amazing (laughs)…You know there is something mystifying about it. When I sit
down to write I try to feel what I want to sing. That's how they show up. When
they're really strong and written quickly…the words and music arrive together.
That's very strange, but that's how it works. "47
Harlan Howard - Howard, a country and western singer thought he could not really take credit for his hit song, "The Blizzard." "The pencil kept on moving and I didn't know where it would end. Did some great songwriter in the sky use me as a medium?"48 Jimi Hendrix - Hendrix got the idea for his song "Angel" from a dream he had where his mother came down from heaven to take him with her. The song was recorded on July 23, 1970 - just a few before his death on September 18, 1970.
Jackson also stated, "The songwriting
process is something very difficult to explain because it's very
spiritual. It's, uh...You really have it
in the hands of God, and it's as if it's been written already - that's the real truth. As if it's
been written in its entirety before were born and you're just really the source
through which the song come. Really. Because there is...they just fall right
into your lap in its entirety. You don't have to do much thinking about it. And
I feel guilty having to put my name, sometimes, on the songs that I - I do
write them - I compose them, I write them, I do the scoring, I do the lyrics, I
do the melodies but still, it's a... it's a work of God."49
Billy Joel - Billy Joel got a lot of song ideas in his dreams and often struggled to remember them when he woke up. For his song, "A River of Dreams" however, he woke up with the song in his head but tried NOT to write it down. He explained on The Howard Stern Show in 2010: "I thought, who the hell am I to try to pull off this gospel song, so I took a shower to wash this song away. I sang it in the shower and knew I had to do it." Joel added, "Many of my songs I dream fully realized. I dream that I am in the control room, listening to something on the speakers, and it is this piece of music that I have not written yet... This has happened so frequently that I can wake myself up and remember substantial parts. I don't know whether my subconscious has been working overtime writing these songs without my help and then revealing them to me, or whether they're transmitted to me by some kind of muse or angel, or whether there is a difference between the two... They're lucid to the extent that I realize I'm dreaming and wake myself up to write the song down."50
Jim Kerr - lead singer and lyricist of the Scottish band
Simple Minds, "I believe inspiration comes through me and that I channel
it" 51
Carole King - King was a prolific singer-songwriter with over 25 solo albums in 50 years. Her highlight album was the 1971 masterpiece Tapestry, which topped the charts for six weeks and remained on the charts for six years. It outsold The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album and included the iconic 1972 Grammy song of the year "You've Got a Friend."
Speaking of that song King said,
"That song was as close to pure inspiration as I've ever experienced. The
song wrote itself. It was written by something outside of myself through me… It
happens from time to time in part. That song is one of the examples of that
process where it was almost completely written by inspiration and very little
if any perspiration."52
Ed King - Saw Solo 1 and Solo 2 in "Sweet Home Alabama" in a dream. It was recorded note for note. Producer Al Kooper did not want it in because it was in the wrong chord, but the band members wanted it in saying "he saw the solo in a dream." The whole Southern mysticism thing really kind of fell in, said King, "played in my hands, because I'm not that big into Southern mysticism, you know? I'm from Southern California. But I figured, well, it meant enough to them that I saw it in a dream that it has to be used."53
1974 - The song, Dream #9 of course came to Lennon in a dream. He stated, "I just sat down and wrote it, you know, with no real inspiration, based on a dream I'd had." Lennon's one-time girlfriend May Pang said, "This was one of John's favorite songs because it literally came to him in a dream. He woke up and wrote down those words along with the melody. He had no idea what it meant, but he thought it sounded beautiful. John arranged the strings in such a way that the song really does sound like a dream." Pang also stated that the phrase repeated in the chorus, "Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé," has no specific meaning but came in the dream. Lennon wrote and arranged the song around his dream, hence the title and atmospheric, dreamlike feel, including the use of cellos in the chorus.
Lennon stated, "I felt like a hollow
temple filled with many spirits, each one passing through me, each inhabiting
me for a little time and then leaving to be replaced by another." 56
Lennon recalled his lifetime of dissociative events:
There was something wrong with me I thought because I seemed to see things other people didn't see. I thought I was crazy or an egomaniac for claiming to see things other people didn't see. As a child, I would say, "But this is going on!" and everybody would look at me as if I was crazy. I always was so psychic or intuitive or poetic or whatever you want to call it, that I was always seeing things in a hallucinatory way.
It was scary as a child because there was nobody to relate to. Neither my auntie nor my friends nor anybody could ever see what I did. It was very, very scary and the only contact I had was reading about an Oscar Wilde or a Dylan Thomas or a Vincent van Gogh -- all those books that my auntie had that talked about their suffering because of their visions. Because of what they saw, they were tortured by society for trying to express what they were. I saw loneliness…
Only dead people in books. Lewis Carroll, certain paintings. Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realized that my imagery and my mind wasn't insanity; that if it was insane, I belong in an exclusive club that sees the world in those terms. Surrealism to me is reality. Psychic vision to me is a reality. Even as a child. When I looked at myself in the mirror or when I was 12, 13, I used to literally trance out into alpha. I didn't know what it was called then. I found out years later there is a name for those conditions. But I would find myself seeing hallucinatory images of my face changing and becoming cosmic and complete. It caused me to always be a rebel. This thing gave me a chip on the shoulder; but, on the other hand, I wanted to be loved and accepted. Part of me would like to be accepted by all facets of society and not be this loudmouthed lunatic musician. But I cannot be what I am not."57
Lisa Lopes - Lopes who was with the
group TLC had a very vivid dream during the filming of Last Days of Left Eye (1:04:18)58, which was filmed
shortly before her death. Lopes stated,
"I looked at the sun and it was a fourth of the size of the Earth, that is
how big it was…It was bigger than you have ever seen … yea, that is the sun, we
are in trouble." Compare this to
the lyrics of guitarist Steve Vai in his song "Little Green Men."
Ray Manzarek - The Doors - "When the Siberian shaman gets ready to go into his trance, all the villagers get together... and play whatever instruments they have to send him off [into trance and possession] ... It was the same way with The Doors when we played in concert... I think that our drug experience let us get into it... [the trance state] quicker...It was like Jim [Morrison] was an electric shaman and we were the electric shaman's band, pounding away behind him... pounding and pounding, and little by little it would take him over...Sometimes he was just incredible. Just amazing. And the audience felt it, too!"59
Paul McCartney - "I believe in magic. I believe in the magic of music, so if I hear a nice little idea I won't often question it. Okay, where are you going to lead me. I just write that little thing down, then play it again and sing it again. If I am lucky the next line will come. Once or twice I will have a line that I don't think is good because of that. I figure I am just blocking the song out and I'll fix that line later. I do that sometimes. My most vivid memory of that kind of thing happening is when I did “Hey Jude.” I had 'the movement you need is on your shoulder.' I looked at John and I was playing it to him and I said to him, 'Don't worry, I'll change that. I'll get rid of that.' He said, 'You won't you know.' It was the best line in it. I was going to lose that line, but he made me keep it.
McCartney wrote about the writing of his
1984 song "No Values." "I dreamt this song. I dreamt that I was
with The Rolling Stones. They were all there: Bill, Charlie, Keith, and Mick
was up front. I woke up and said to myself, 'I really like that song that they
do.' Then I thought, 'Hey, wait a minute, there is no Rolling Stones song
called “No Values.” They don't do that song.' My brain just created it. So, I
thought, 'Well, there it is. I've got this new song called 'No Values.' But I
won't be telling Mick; he'll probably claim the copyright."
McCartney's
song "Yesterday" came in a dream.
The song has the most cover versions of any song ever written and,
according to record label BMI, was performed over seven million times in the
20th century. McCartney stated, "I woke up with a lovely tune in my head.
I thought, 'That's great, I wonder what that is?' There was an upright piano
next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the
piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th -- and that leads you through then to B
to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the
melody a lot, but because I'd dreamed it, I couldn't believe I'd written it. I
thought, 'No, I've never written anything like this before.' But I had the
tune, which was the most magic thing!"
John McGlaughlin - "One night we were playing and suddenly the spirit entered into me and I was playing but it was no longer me playing." 60
Daryl Oates - Hall and Oates - "When I'm singing and in touch with the energy I'm generating, I sometimes literally have no awareness of where I am. The ego disappears, and me and my surroundings with it. … that's the reason I'm in music--to achieve that feeling." 63
Carl Perkins - Perkins is the man who wrote the lyrics to Elvis Presley's song, "Blue Suede Shoes." The song came to Perkins in a dream. In an interview with Gadfly Online, Perkins stated, "I was playing at a place called the Roadside Inn. I heard this boy tell the girl he was dancing with 'Watch out, don't step on mah suedes' and I looked down at his feet, and he had on this pair of blue suede shoes. It kinda stuck to me." The incident stayed on his mind all night and when he woke up in the morning he immediately began writing down the lyrics on an old brown paper potato sack, the only piece of paper he had around the house.66
Mike Pinder - Pinder was the lead singer for The Moody Blues a British rock band that toured with The Beatles on their U.S. tour. In the early days of the band, Pinder spoke about the source of many of the band's lyrics, "Lyrics were placed into the public domain from somewhere else."67 In a conversation with crop circle researcher, Pinder stated he and his lead guitarist actually remember being told about their job in this life as musicians before they were born.
Mike Reno - Loverboy - Lead singer Reno talked about writing the song, "All I Ever Needed" that came to him in a dream complete with music and lyrics. At the time, he was working with David Foster.
He asked me to come down to do the backing tracks for his solo album. And while we were there, he asked me to come over early one day and see if we couldn't write a song and that night I had a dream. I dreamt all the lyrics and I woke up and wrote them down and I hummed into my tape recorder the melody. And I went over and he said, "Do you have any idea what we can do?" and I started him off on this thing. And he started playing it and it developed in about an hour into that song.69
Richard Rodgers - "It took about as long to compose it as to play it." (Rogers was referring to "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning," the opening song in "Oklahoma!")
Peter Rowan - "I do believe that music itself is a spiritual force. The inspiration I feel is like a holy thing. It's beyond any words I can use to describe it." 70
When I started immersing myself in a suit of musical and conceptual ideas I began to actually dream fully completed songs. They may be completely unrelated to everything else I'm doing. It isn't necessary during the recording process to bang the drum with something that just popped into my head one night. I don't know how that song I dreamed was called “Bang the Drum All Day,” but the musical part of it was fairly complete. The title lyrics must have been in there too. Songs like that, I can't deny them. In other words, I have to finish them, and I have to put them on the record, even if they don't sound like they belong to me. If a song comes to you completely realized then it's really your muse at work if it comes to you completely realize and you don't know what it's about, and you have to figure it out you think, where did that come from? Well, it came from inside me somewhere. So, there must be something in me, yet another thing that I have to uncover and examine in order to fully understand myself.71
Johnny Rzeznick - Rzeznick of the Goo Goo Dolls told Katie Couric in October 2005, back when she was with the TODAY Show on NBC, that the lyrics to the incredible song "Better Days" came to him while he was at home and that they seemed to "fall out the sky."
Mike Scott - Scott from the Waterboys stated, "I was six or seven when I noticed the music in my head. It was there in the classroom, on the football pitch, at the dinner table, when I went to sleep and when I woke up. And it's continued ever since."73 Patti Smith - "I do have an ability... If I surrender and let these things come into me….Sometimes I don't think I know where certain things come from, sometimes I believe they come from angels, from God, from an ancestor….I have experienced enough things to know that even if they were part of my subconscious, they are a real thing, and I think they are often helpful."74 Bruce Springsteen - "In the end you have to look at the song and not where it came from."75
Ringo Starr - Starr spoke about his making of the album Rain. "I feel as though that was someone else playing. I was possessed!"76 Sting - Sting spoke of songs that took six months to write and then, "Some songs almost wrote themselves, as if through automatic writing, as if they were already written and you just channeled them. One of my most successful songs was written that way - 'Every breath you take.' It took maybe 10 or 15 minutes."77 Sting added that any musician who ignores their dreams is effectively ignoring half of their creative potential.
Stereophonics - Stereophonics Lead singer Kelly Jones reported the song “I Wouldn’t Believe Your Radio” came in a dream where Ringo Starr and George Harrison were sitting on a curb singing the song to him.78
Marc Storace - vocalist with the heavy metal band Krokus, "You can't describe it except to say it's like a mysteri-ous energy that comes from the metaphysical plane and into my body. It's almost like being a medium..."79
Michael Stipe - R.E.M. - Stipe has claimed in concerts that the song “Electric Blue” was inspired by a dream he had about a drug called electron blue that's made out of light.
Stipe stated some of the lyrics to “It’s
the End of the World as We Know It” also came him a dream. In 1992, he revealed to Q Magazine that
"The words come from everywhere. I'm extremely aware of everything around
me, whether I am in a sleeping state, awake, dream-state or just in day to day
life. There's a part in 'It's the End of The World as We Know It' that came
from a dream where I was at Lester Bangs' birthday party and I was the only
person there whose initials weren't L.B. So, there was Lenny Bruce, Leonid
Brezhnev, Leonard Bernstein… So that ended up in the song along with a lot of
stuff I'd seen when I was flipping TV channels. It's a collection of streams of
consciousness."80
Richards stated, "We receive our songs
like inspiration, like at a séance.
People say they write songs, but in a way, you are more the medium. I
feel that all the songs are floating around, and it is just a matter of being
like an antenna, of whatever you pick up. So many uncanny things have happened
to us. A whole new song appears from
nowhere in five minutes, the whole structure and you haven't worked at
all."
Pete Townshend - The Who - "When I am on stage I feel this incredible, almost spiritual experience(s). When they occur they are sacred." Townshend also stated, "I got lost in the sound of the mouth organ, and then had the most extraordinary, life-changing experience. Suddenly I was hearing music within the music -- rich, complex harmonic beauty that had been locked in the sounds I'd been making.
The next day I went fly fishing, and this
time, the murmuring sound of the river opened up a wellspring of music so
enormous that I fell in and out of a trance.
It was the beginning of my lifelong connection to ... what might be
described as the music of the spheres. ... One day I found some chords that
made me lightheaded. As I played them my
body buzzed all over, and my head filled with the most complex, disturbing
orchestral music. ... I had the ability to create alpha-state music in my head,
go into a creative trance, have musical visions... Since so much of this music
bubbled up urgently from my subconscious mind, I'm left to interpret it much
like anyone else."81
Townshend also said, "In a room at a
Holiday Inn in an Illinois town called Rolling Meadows…I heard the voice of
God. In an instant, in a very ordinary
place at an unexceptional time, I yearned for some connection with a higher
power. This was a singular, momentous
epiphany - a call to the heart. Why did
God favor this particular place in America?
Because it was so new? Because it
was so sunny? Suddenly it became clear that I longed for a transcendent
connection with the universe itself and with its maker. This was the moment I had longed for. My mind was being set alight by the
psychedelic times, but the revelation came to me in the quietude and seductive
order of Middle America."82
Townshend
heard music in his head as a child. He
wrote, "The tide was high and it wasn't safe to row, so the men fitted an
ancient outboard motor to the stern and fired it up. As we swept past the Old Boathouse at
Isleworth, once again I began to hear the most extraordinary music, sparked by
the whine of the outboard motor and the burbling sound of the water against the
hull. I heard violins, cellos, horns,
harps and voices, which increased in number until I could hear countless
threads of an angelic choir; it was a sublime experience. I have never heard
such music since, and my personal musical ambition has always been to
rediscover that sound and relive its effect on me." Pete Townshend from
the band The Who taken from his book, Who
Am I: A Memoir.
Townshend would later write an Internet
novella called "The Boy Who Heard Music" which became a rock opera
that would fictionalize his own story.
The story takes place in 2035 and Townshend is
now an older musician named Ray High who is in a mental institution looking
back on his life. A period of time in the life of three children is covered as
they grow up to form a band based on the concepts of High.
High is the narrator of the story living in an
alternate plane of existence called "In the Ether." The three young children have various gifts. There is Gabriel who "could hear
music," Josh who "could hear voices" and Leila who "could
fly." The three live in the same neighborhood but are of different
religious faiths: Gabriel is Christian,
Josh is Jewish, and Leila is Muslim.
It was in "The Boy Who Heard Music"
novella that he described the music he had experienced as a child, "Not
like the music I heard in church. I heard it in the air, between the stars and
the trees. It was sometimes like singing, sometimes like grand orchestras
playing Beethoven's symphonies. It was always very beautiful. There is a
difference between the inspired composer and the skilled orchestrator. A good
orchestrator can sit with sheets of manuscript and, as the arrangement
develops, can read the notes and actually hear a phantom orchestra in his head.
But an inspired composer hears music in his mind so complex, so diverting, that
any attempt to write it down seems facile. What this kind of visitation
produces in the subject is a desire to rediscover what has been heard
before."
But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles he told me, and this is when it all changed for him. And he's speeding along, and, all of a sudden, he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, you know, it's gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn't have a piece of paper, he doesn't have a pencil, he doesn't have a tape recorder. So, he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, "I'm going to lose this thing, and then I'm going to be haunted by this song forever. I'm not good enough, and I can't do it." And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. He just looked up at the sky, and he said, "Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen."83
Ryan Wang - Wang was a 5-year-old piano prodigy who played Carnegie Hall and went to China to play with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. When he was asked how he remembered all the music he plays after only 18 months of playing, "It's just in my memory. I love it and sometimes it just goes through my fingers."84
Bill Ward - Black Sabbath - Ward stated, "I've always considered that there was some way
where we were able to channel energy and that energy was able to be, from
another source, if you like, like a higher power or something, that was
actually doing the work. I've often thought of us just being actually just the
earthly beings that played the music because it was uncanny. Some of this music came out extremely
uncanny" 85
Hank Williams -"If a song can't be written in 20 minutes, it ain't worth writing."86
Brian Wilson - Brian Wilson was fascinated by spirituality and said that the song "God only Knows" came out of prayer sessions in the studio. "We made it a religious ceremony," said Wilson. The song was ranked by Rolling Stone Magazine as the 25th greatest song of all times.
Gary Wright - Wright, himself, once claimed that the music and lyrics for his signature 1976 hit "Dream Weaver" seemed to flow out of him" as if written by an unseen source." The song was written in one hour, and it made it to #2 on the Bill Boards chart. The song featured only keyboards, drums, bass and a soaring synthesizer. Best lyric: "Fly me high through the starry skies; maybe to an astral plane; across the highways of fantasy; help me forget today's pain." Wright described the song as 'it was about a kind of fantasy experience... a Dream Weaver train taking you through the cosmos.
Angus Young - AC/DC guitarist - Young stated, "It's like I'm on automatic pilot. By the time we're halfway through the first number someone else is steering me. I'm just along for the ride. I become possessed when I get on stage." 87
Led Zeppelin - No one in the band knows where the song "Stairway to
Heaven" came from. Robert Plant
stated 'Pagey had written the chords and played it for me. I was holding the
paper and pencil, and for some reason I was in a very bad mood. Then all of a sudden, my hand was writing our
words. I just sat and looked at the words, and then I just about leaped out of
my seat."88
The idea of inspiration in music may have been best summed up by Brandon Boyd of Incubus who wrote the song "Where all the Songs Come From," as part of his solo project Sons of The Sea. He told Rolling Stone, "This is a piece about the moment when you understand that as good or as bad as something seems, it's exactly where you are supposed to be. If perceived as such, one can have access to a limitless inspiration, a 'place' of sorts that is the wellspring of creativity!"89
Check out my whitehouseufo blog articles as I will be putting out part of all 20 books I have written.
Comments
Post a Comment