PANIC STATE: The Lead Vocalist for DAVE MATTHEWS BAND likes it! They told me in Charlottesville, in 1992 when I wrote it. I was playing through it, in a piano rehearsal room in the U Virginia Music School. DAVE MATTHEWS was trying out different configurations for his band: word was, "Something big is in the works."
Playing through it, tonight, I LOVE it. I'm astounded.
My bass teacher in Florida is a Berkeley School of Music graduate. He said the chord changes were too hard for him. They were for me, too--almost. I can play them now, and soon will make a recording.
When you write a note three bars down from the staff, it can get hard to count. I thought it is an Fb, but it's an Eb, below the third bar line down. It doesn't make me smart or anything: it means it has to be written down. So, you figure out how to write it, and there isn't any other way.
My Music Partner in Charlottesville always respected my musicianship--some other players did, too. But but I didn't realize it, and didn't have a strong profile. I was a Ph.D. Religious Studies Major.
I asked the singer for DAVE MATTHEWS BAND, because I wrote it just before my psychotic hospitalization. I had lost my perspective. I couldn't evaluate anything--was an author's point a solid argument I could rely on to quote? Why does everything look like a cartoon of reality? My close friend told me I'd list my gift for poetry. He'd read my poems at Harvard, and said my poems as a Ph.D. Candidate lost it. Now, 34 years later, I'm astounded. Can a composer say that about their own compositions?
It hurts, which makes me bitter and I can lash out that Edmonton does nor not credit me as someone who can write PANIC STATE.
The Internet world changes what "local" means. I consider a poet in Portugal my brother. An Architect in Transylvania, my sister. I have a colleague who is an Art Professor in Italy who travels and posts photographs of Temples and Statues in India, and orher places in Asia. When PANIC STATE gets a good recording, "locals" on the Internet will give me a listen. Maybe a friend I knew in 1992 in THE DAVE MATTHEWS BAND will hear it, and then it doesn't matter if someone on Edmonton's streets listens, or knows who I am. Edmonton favours its own. I like a lot of Edmonton Players.