To all you out there helping me, I salute you. Thank you. There is no such thing as a self made man. Some of us start a little closer finish line, but this race is about how we all can lift each other up.
How we can be each other’s champions.
I have a little Chess game ahead of me. But the moment I forget that even when I am alone doing the solitary work that must be done pull these songs from the ether and hammer them into something that seems like a story and a living soul, I can go nowhere, I am nothing on my own.
But I am ready to be that gentleman that grabs the microphone. When you first touch it when that show begins, when nobody knows your name and you can feel the judgement. You give no f☆cks other than turning that room on like a switch. It’s exhilarating. Not everyone gets to do that drug or even wants to.
You don’t even want to be high because that mic is about to have the sound of your voice pulsating against every centimeter of that room and into everyone’s imagination as you break that crowd like a bronco.
The things I’ve done and said, and made up and confessed to win those rooms. They won’t teach you that in music school, or even business school. It’s part of why I scour books and biographies. I am looking for humanity. Tragedy and humor are the same side of tbe same coin.
There’s a saying about Chaplin and comedy in general. A man falls up and gets back up that’s comedy. He falls and doesn’t get up. That’s tragedy.
As I smoke on this CBD, listening to music, tapping this joint on my driver’s side mirror, looking at a face hardly anyone recognizes, I am thinking about all of you.
It’s been a year. You ask for your dreams to come true. Well I must have met the geanie this year. Regardless of where this all goes, I got some great stories. Don’t ever count me out for dropping a Novel. But a novel feels like such a dated thing. Sometimes you gotta live it.
…and leave behind some good tape.
I would rather write songs anyway. You can’t sing a novel. Not really.
Some of you are going to join me in New Orleans. I am setting my sights on Berlin.
Which is insane because I hardly have more than these songs, confidence, and momentum.
I need help to achieve any of this. It humbles me. Mell Dettmer was telling me about a song about Technology by Clinton Fearon that is going to drop. It’s about the challenge of the old master trying, touchingly so, to adapt to new all this new technology.
Well I feel that. It’s humbling how much we need each other in a world that tries to train us to rely on nonone, like a self check out.
There are no apps that can replace the fact a singer is usless without friends that will buy tickets, drink drinks, and share their space and time.
Not Sinatra. Especially not Sinatra.
I haven’t been singing LIVE much. I am giving myself a form of withdrawls. I forced myself to stop writing a song a day, to finish some of these songs.
And I gambled. Nobody knows how much we all have to gamble. It’s a dangerous game to choose between intuition and fear.
I think I am going back to Kingston. I am going to New Orleans. Everything I ever really prayed for and stopped praying for, and working towards (like anybody else really) might happen.
But all I really wanted was to do what I’m doing. I sang in London because Ras Jones let me. I sang for Sly & Robbie because Anthony Cameron let me. I’ll sing at The Maple Leaf because Eric Struthers is going to let me.
I am so excited I can hardly I can hardly even say it, that I am going to write these songs and finish writing them with all of these amazing human beings. Hell if I could write with a clever giraffe or an alien I would. But none of it is nothing if you can’t stand in front of an audience and prove it.
I am dying to sing ‘Free Your Mind’ to three thousand people the way it was meant to be played.
But those aren’t big problems. We got big problems. I just need those people in front of me, or I ain’t got nuthin’.
I am going to step in that gym now and I’m going to keep this magic spell.
Because as Eva said with her mouth literally agape when she saw me at KEXP,
“You don’t even look like the same person.”
As we walked towards the control woman I laughed and said in a perfect accent,
“What if I am not me, what if I’m just my cousin Jimmy from the Bronx.”
Jimmy actually lives in Hawthorne, California.
I’ll see some of you on the mountain top of Stevens, I’ll see some of you in New Orleans. Before this month is through you might see me in Kingston. Maybe not. Because this whole thing is about how you slide a punch and counter like any front man should, as he rides every moment like he could get KO’d or finally knock everyone the f☆ck out before the final note.
Humbly signed,
Your friend that appreciates all your help all these years.
When I’m gone all I can promise you is some publishing and a really cool soundtrack.
The suggestion by Eric Struthers that we could cut a LIVE album at The Maple Leaf May 11th in New Orleans, is the sort of challenge that I love. It’s the challenge that I need.
To have a musical document alongside some of the baddest cats in New Orleans, as I cross that symbolic threshold that is 40, is a chance to open a gift that I have to be ready to accept.
That’s like your final test. Your Doctoral exam. Proof for the ages, that once upon a time, you were a highly professional man.
I had a transformative moment chatting with Eric outside a coffee shop on a grey fall day in Fremont, after I gave him a little tour through Nectar Lounge.
I asked him for his sage advice on what I should do after The Staxx Brothers and with everything I could still do with what I had left from that beautiful machine I left running for 20 years. An endeavor focusing everything I had on taking national, had failed but has left me a treasure of albums and still unrecorded songs.
I told Eric my idea for The Soul United All-stars. He saw the light in such a path through the open road; where good omens and bad await, and mix with the fortunes of taking such an apparition to stages where great men and women will come to my aid and assist me.
Now for a musician New Orleans is like Mecca, or Jerusalem, or like only New Orleans itself. It is hollowed ground.
There are old spirits and there are floods. So many stories have been mixed up in this Mississippi mud.
The Maple Leaf is one of its holiest of holy sites to be seen. A living relic of the blues, and booze, where funk and soul and jazz still cruise.
I went to Jamaica and I saw the Bush Doctor, and what a surprise. The Rastas said that I was he, and I decided to be who I always wanted to be.
I pulled off the magic trick to look like somebody else I used to be. But this next trick I have four months to complete is one I must achieve from within.
Changing how you look is easy. That’s just a make over, counting calories, stop eating poison. But the universe is within. The greatest nemesis is my friend and my nemisis is me. To accept all this help, I must help myself.
To have both happiness and self dicipline. To maintain boundless creativity and find a better routine. To finish things where there are no finish lines. But rather places to catch your breath. But if I train for this properly, I’ll never need to. I will become a part of that spirit of New Orleans for one creole night.
Just melt into that music, as those top flight players make it their own.
…and today, as I look at those Cascade Mountains through this living room window, this new journey begins.
Eric paused at the coffee shop and then cut through my ideas like a high priest of R & B, he said to me,
“You’re playing with the big boys now.”
I have to cut a live record that sticks on this Wikipedia page so hard, nobody can take it down.
– Musician and writer Davin Michael Stedman has many ventures, such as the AMAZING blog, 100milesofmusic.com. Davin’s new song has become a global earworm and Caribbean dancehall hit. Listen here on Reggaeville: DAVIN MICHAEL STEDMAN & ANTHONY RED ROSE – FREE YOUR MIND FEAT. SLY & ROBBIE WITH LENKY MARSDEN. The video is now available on Youtube. His single with British band Sherlock Soul is available here.
