I was 12 when I got my first guitar. . .

My mom saved up enough Blue Chip Stamps from store purchases to fill one booklet - enough to redeem my prize. I had the catalogue on my bed stand for months open to a page with glossy pictures of cassette decks, Polaroid cameras, and my steel string folk guitar circled with magic marker. My excitement the day we picked it up soon gave way to the sheer pain of trying to press the strings to the fret board just to produce a sound. The catalogue could have boasted that this contraption could double as a bow in your archery set. But I didn’t know any better and I sweated away. I would cut my teeth on that thing for the next 3 years learning all my first and second position chords until the neck literally separated from the body - not mine, the guitar’s.

Being one of ten children in a fatherless family in Los Angeles added to the perfect alignment of creative angst welling up within a preteen melancholy kid. I used to steal away with my guitar at dusk, climb up on the roof and dream awake to random melodies and arpeggiated chords while gazing at the first stars of twilight on those warm San Fernando Valley evenings.

C.S.Lewis said that “music is a medium to meet God”. This certainly proved to be true with me. As I would grow, moving through seasons of life, honing my craft and performing where ever I could, songwriting would become a sort of wilderness compass for me. It helped me interpret life. Feelings inside could be lifted out and held within arm’s length to get some baring of “true” North. And like the sky itself, it had to be honest. When it rained, you got wet. If it sent a chilly wind, you shook, and if it opened up for the sun, you’d raise your hands and lift your face to soak in the warmth.

As “a medium to God”, music to me was like the temporary thrill of fireworks set to the backdrop of the celestial heavens above them. Once the sulfury smoke clears, if you can hold your gaze upward long enough, the canopy of stars begin to reveal another created spectacle; one far more brilliant and not from human hands; one that whispers of eternal things. It was as if the night sky was saying to me, “Daniel, meet God our creator. And by the way, it was Him who sent the rain and the sun, not me.”

All God ever required from me was honesty. After that, giving Him my heart was as easy as singing a song. I committed my life to Jesus Christ when I was twenty two.

THE PAVEMENT

To our cabin in the Serra Nevada mountains a few years ago, my wife and I discovered something I forgot I still had. It was the remaining inventory of an album I recorded in 1987; one box of albums and one box of cassettes. I opened a cassette and to my surprise the shrink wrap had kept the moister from degrading the magnetic tape and it sounded fine. I was instantly taken back to that chapter of my life.

I was singing at churches, youth rallies and conferences in California mostly and I had a friend who was an event promoter and worked at a local radio station. She handed one of my demos to a Word Record recording artist named Roby Duke who she booked for a local concert. Charting on Contemporary Christian radio at that time he was inundated with demos and never had a chance to listen to it - that’s typical. What wasn’t was that somehow it ended up in his wife’s hands. Being pregnant with their son, she was moved by a song I had written for my mom called “Mother’s Touch”. She had Roby call me and that summer I moved to Anaheim to record.

I was down there for about two months and I remember driving home after it was mastered, listening to it in my car. I remember thinking, who is this guy? Acoustic guitar had always been the vehicle for my story telling and here I was listening to a wall of layered, quantized keyboards. I also didn’t recognize my voice. The production was top shelf, but it sounded like someone “vocal bombed” a Roby Duke album and replaced his blue-eyed soul voice with a high, thin Christopher Cross/ Richard Marx imposter voice. Although not the best representation of what audiences would get when I came to perform, it nevertheless opened doors and widened my exposure.

During our recent move. . .

And I just checked into a Motel in Houston to sing at a conference the next day. As always, whenever I arrived at my new destination I would call my wife (before cell phones - I know!). We would talk about the day’s events and some of the colorful characters I’d meet on the road … and in church. I remember at times making the correlation between an undiscovered musician on the road and a carny traveling in a carnival. Somewhere in our conversation I’d interject my favorite line Sean Connery use to randomly drop into his script in different movies, “I should’ve been a farmer”.

She would pass the phone around to our daughters and the crackling phone line just seemed to symbolize what was happening; time and distance was having its way. For Jeanette and I, the concept of 3 weeks on the road were blocks on the calendar. For our little ones, they were small forever moments; not measured by the hands of a clock, but by the ebb and swells of their little hearts. Excited about letting me hear our youngest formulate her first sentence, Jeanette held the phone up to our little one’s mouth. It was only two words, but they were painfully clear, “Dada, home”.

UNFINISHED WORK

Fast forward. . .

3 family dogs, 2 cats, some rodents thrown in there, three bunnies and a pigmy goat, later - my wife and I are now empty nesters. From a family of 7 (we raised humans too), to just the two of us, it seems as though we hopped off a roller coaster asking, “what just happened?”.

At first, when the family was starting, letting go of my pursuit of becoming a recording artist was difficult. But as I stepped from one reality into the next, I was surprised by joy. Given the choice between living out of a suit case, signing records in church foyers only to come back to another lonely hotel room, or, flying kites with my kids, building forts on the living room floor and having date nights with my wife, it was the easiest life transition I’ve ever made. And I would do it again.

But now there are no more kids on our living room floor. The house is quite. The songs that I have continued to write have stockpiled and the motivation to share them grows with each new one I add. I thought by now that I would have grown out of this foolishness. I don’t know, call it foolishness, an inner purpose, or even therapy, but “unfinished work” sounds better around adults.