Lazy Lester, Slim Harpo and Rediscovering Your Purpose

Everybody’s journey starts somewhere…mine began in a little South Louisiana town called Crowley. Crowley, LA is right in the middle of Cajun country and it’s famous for two things: rice and music. There’s an old recording studio there called Master-Trak Enterprises that was a hotbed of ethnic music going back to the 1950’s, including Cajun, Zydeco, Blues, Country and Swamp Pop. Like many professional studios it wasn’t much to look at on the outside, but Paul Simon and John Fogerty both recorded there. So did Lightnin’ Slim, Lazy Lester and Slim Harpo.

Master-Trak Enterprises in Crowley, LA

When I was a kid, I was lucky enough to get to hang out at MTE once in a while (my then-future Father-in-law was a studio musician there). I remember them showing me how to load the 2″ multi-track tape machine and how to use the patch panel. I remember the Soundcraft mixing console (it seemed HUGE at the time), the Sennheiser MD421 microphones they used to track drums and the storage room full of boxes of Ampex tape. That place just SMELLED like mojo.

I obviously got completely hooked on recording and scraped together enough lunch money to buy my own 4-track cassette recorder. I used to invite my musician friends over and we would write and record demos for days at a time, sleeping on the floor, living on take-out, skipping showers. I would beg for and borrow every piece of gear I could get my hands on for these creative marathons. Remember when the Kurzweil K250 sampling keyboard came out in the 1980’s? MTE had two of them, and somehow I got permission to bring one TO MY HOUSE so my friends and I could track with it. I’ll never understand why they trusted a 16 year-old kid with a $20,000 piece of music equipment, but for some unfathomable reason they did.

It was amazing to grow up in such a music and culture-rich place, and to have access to that studio at such a young age. Ever since then I’ve been writing songs, recording demos, playing guitar and singing as often as I could find the time. Like everyone else, I also grew up, got married, had kids and got swept away into the business of a standard life. I spent at least 25 years dabbling with my original music here and there, mostly as a hobby, but I never took it as seriously as I KNEW I should have, deep inside my heart. It’s so easy for life to circumvent our dreams, right? The busier we get, the more those dreams begin to fade into the background until we barely remember they were even there.

May 2014 – UCH Tomotherapy Cancer Treatment Center

Fast forward to 2012, shortly after my 41st birthday. I was busy with life, family, making a living and binge-watching TV shows on Netflix when, out of the blue, I found out I had prostate cancer. I was completely devastated and too numb to express how I felt in words. I ended up having surgery the following year, and then radiation treatment a year after that, when the cancer stubbornly returned. The good news is that I’ve been cancer free since May of 2014; the even better news is that during the process of physical recovery, I actually recovered my LIFE.

The “Cancer Years” made me remember why I’ve always loved music so much, and that it was one of the reasons I was put here on the Earth. I rediscovered my purpose and realized that each of us only has a limited amount of time to make that purpose happen. One of my favorite quotes of all time is by Natalie Babbitt:

“Do not fear death, but rather the unlived life…” – Natalie Babbitt

It took a cancer diagnosis for me to finally remember the life I had never lived…the magic I was destined to create and share that had been dormant for decades too long. Another one of my favorite quotes by Marianne Williamson explains exactly what I learned, using better language than I could ever muster on my own:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” – Marianne Williamson

Once in a while someone asks me why a middle-aged guy would want to start a mid-life music career. Conventional wisdom says I’m too old, that the time I could be successful as an artist has long passed. My answer is that success for me means fulfilling my purpose…living out my unlived life. I want to spend the next 30 years creating music that inspires people to fight for their deeper purpose, showing them by my own example that we can all find the courage to let that glory within us loose into the world. I don’t care if I ever hear my songs on the radio, ever get signed to a major record label or ever play at the Hollywood Bowl. If I can kick a hole into people’s fears with my music and help deflate the bubble of desperation so many people live in, so that more and more of us can grow into the lives we were meant to live, I’ll die a happy man. My latest EP “Truth & Magic” is the culmination of that desire.

So what is it for you? What’s your “unlived life”…that deep passion that keeps you awake at night…that thing you both love and dread so much that it almost drives you mad? What would happen if you started to share that thing with the rest of us? How would it change YOU? How would it change THE WORLD? I would love to hear about what happens when you find the courage to try. Let’s talk in the comments below!