It was December 2009. I was about to start a Think and Grow Rich class the following month but I was already reading the book. The class was being held at the Center for Spiritual living of North Jersey where I was playing for the services. At one of the services prior to that I had met Anne, a beautiful like minded spiritual aspirant like myself. We ended up hitting it off and became good friends. But in the beginning I was also smitten by her feminine beauty and nature. I remember I used to open Think and Grow Rich to a page and just start reading and one night I read how so many great men were influenced by a woman. That love and romance were emotions capable of driving people to heights of super achievement. This whole chapter was about how the emotion of love brings out and develops the artistic and aesthetic nature of a person. Well that was it for me. I had a muse, I was inspired and on New Year’s Eve. of 2009 I wrote the first song for A New kind of Love; Here You Are. It just came out lyrics and chords all in one shot. It was magical and I was on my way. On New Year’s day 2010 I wrote the second song for the CD which was an up beat instrumental song. The next weekend when I saw my friend Anne and I played her the track she listened intently and said “sounds like Dark Chocolate“. Everything was falling into place.
On my second self titled CD there was an original song of mine called Language of the Heart. I decided I wanted to do a re-mix of it for the new project. The plan was to use the chorus and have a rap on the verses but once I got into it the magic started to happen again and these great lyrics just came through me. And again in one session the title track A New Kind of Love was born. I was on a roll and the songs just started pouring through me. One True Love was one of those songs, it’s so simple yet to quote what Joe Scott the keyboard player who played on the track said after hearing it; “that pretty much says it all. As I was writing the song I just kept thinking how perfect this track would be for Ty Stephens to sing. I had met Ty also at the Center for Spiritual living where he was the choir director. He has such a beautiful quality to his voice and is a master at coming up with background vocals. In fact I learned so much about vocal arranging from him that I ended up using on the tracks that I sang on. So I booked Ty for the session and the night before he was supposed to come I started thinking it would be great if I had another song for him to sing. I had a conversation earlier that week with Dave Chackler of NuGroove records and he was telling me about this new radio channel called the bright network and suggested I check it out for ideas. So I listened to a few of the artists and then sat down at the piano and again the words started to flow and again in one session I wrote Make it your Day. I had my second song for Ty to sing.
Dawn Webb Burnett was a woman I met at the chiropractors office. She was into the healing arts and took an interest in my music. I got a call from her one day with an interesting proposal. She and a colleague of hers were putting together a TV show pilot to submit to the Oprah channel. She explained a little about the basic concept if the show and that it was called From the Heart. Well when I heard that I knew I had the perfect track from my previous CD In Joy. I sent it to her and she agreed but asked me to write some lyrics for it. She gave me some guide lines and I knocked it out in one night and I had a vocal re-mix of Straight from the Heart. And who better to sing it but Ty Stephens. We had a such a blast on that session.
End of part one