My album, Peaceful Being, fulfills a lifelong dream of being a composer.

I have been composing and recording music for over 20 years, contributing to my wife Shaina Noll’s albums Songs for the Inner Child, Bread for the Journey, You Can Relax Now, Resting in the Now, and the song A Place For You Here.

I was a sensitive child in a large blue collar Catholic family, the third child out of six, in northeastern Ohio, who was taught to play football and baseball as soon as I could walk.  So, playing baseball and touch football was a constant element in my childhood.  Nonetheless, I was drawn to music and learned to play the trombone so I could play in school bands, which was the only available avenue to learning music that I could see in that world.  As it turned out, I was a talented musician and did well enough to be offered a music scholarship to a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania later on, when I was in high school.  I was also a gifted student, particularly in math and science, and read library books and the encyclopedia to learn everything I could about prehistoric life, dinosaurs, electricity, lightning and thunder, the stars and planets.  I did well enough in school to receive a full scholarship from the Timken company, where my father worked, to attend any college I wanted.  My parents convinced me that I would not be able to earn a decent living through music, so I chose to study physics and mathematics and left music behind, or so I thought.  

Fortunately, I didn’t leave music behind.  Physics did not turn out to be my career and after I left graduate school, I picked up an old wooden recorder laying around the house where I lived and played around with it to learn the fingering so I could play whatever I wanted to play on it.  I carried it around with me all the time and played it whenever I could.  I made a conscious decision to learn to play the recorder without learning the written notes, to learn to play by ear, so I could improvise and have fun playing music for myself.  That was a real breakthrough for me because I had learned to play the trombone by reading written notes as a kid and had difficulty improvising in jazz pieces.  I began playing the recorder in the late sixties when I also learned to meditate, do yoga and focus on my spiritual nature.  I often walked into the wilderness and played my flute in the solitude and peacefulness of nature.  I learned to open my heart and play whatever moved and inspired me in the moment.  Essentially, I learned to play music as my own form of meditation, communing with spirit and nature via the beautiful sounds that came forth during the experience.  And that essentially describes the album, Peaceful Being, where each song expresses a meditation and moment of communion.  I hope the songs convey that stillness and peace to you, as well.  

This is only half the story.  I also want to tell you how helping my wife, Shaina, create a home studio to record her music, to which I contributed vocals and instrumental parts, inspired me to create an album of my own with the songs that I had created over the years.  After deciding to do that, however, it took me 10 years to actually finish and release the album.  I had to work through many creative blocks and fears of failure to be able to arrange and record my songs well, which forced me to look into cultural, familial and religious programming that stood in the way of creative, artistic expression for me.  That’s an important element in my story and I will talk more about it over time in my blog.  If you’re interested, check back for more details as I gradually talk more about these issues in my blog.  

What an incredible adventure creating this album has been considering that I wasn’t aware of any blocks and fears about creative expression until I began recording and arranging my songs.  Creating the album was both an incredible musical adventure as well as a great opportunity to become more conscious and enhance my self acceptance, for which I am grateful.