My story. My song...and my prayer for life, forever.

"Angel Out There"

...this is a song I wrote when I was nineteen years old. I remember I was lying on the floor in some disheveled bedroom that had been converted into a low rent, in-home recording studio. It was late that night, my head had collapsed into both of my hands and I felt my mind imploding inside of my bleached blond head. I was pensive and thinking to myself...will I ever make it? I had written at least fifty songs by the time I was nineteen. I wrote and recorded my first original song during the summer of '97, just before 9th grade. I was fourteen. I even managed to give Garth Brooks a copy of my demo a year later, in 1998. Garth was in Phoenix playing baseball during spring training, I lived in Phoenix. I had two original songs on a demo back then, I was so proud of myself and I was on this incredible and confident, victorious high. I was ready to rock the world! It's funny looking back, I was so incredibly ambitious as a kid, it blows me away when I think about it. Sometimes I think I was stronger then. I was untouched. I was free. No one had truly hurt me...yet. 

So, for years I pitched all my songs to hundreds of A&R's at record companies in all the major cities only to be left rejected by every single one of them. I was fifteen years old and crying like a baby in my bed because record companies didn't like me. That's how I saw it, and that happened regularly. I guess I took my music very personal. It's an interesting form of induced stress for a fifteen year old kid; major record label, career rejection. It was all part of the process though. Fortunately, I never turned to the dark side. I never did drugs and I never really hated anyone. I just spent a lot of time with myself. I guess I was pretty lonely, deep down. I moved every single year of my life starting in kindergarten...ending in....never. I went to seventeen schools. I didn't have any friends, and when I was fortunate enough to make one or two, I didn't get too attached to them. I knew I was just going to say good-bye to that person at some point...and I did. I never really knew how bad good-bye could actually hurt until much later in my life. I truly and honestly felt like the only thing I could ever really hold onto, the only thing that would never leave me was my music--my dream. And in a way, I think I still feel this way.

So, "Angel Out There"... 

...I'm lying on the floor in tourist town Florida, bored, nineteen years old, still relentlessly ambitious and up against my undying faith in myself and my constant fear all at once. It was a catch-22, it always has been, this funny thing called Life. I knew I had to runaway, far far away. I had to leave dodge, and God there were so many dodges! So many towns and so many homes, and yet I felt hindered and bounded. I felt restless! How does that happen? I guess constant movement was all I ever knew. Stillness has never really been my second nature by any means, though it is a beautiful thing. So that night, years ago, my young and tired body retired onto the dirty floor and I began contemplating moving to LA. I was in my head, desperately trying to find my heart and I had a pile of half written lyrics on wrinkled notebook paper scattered before me. I remember feeling so young and yet so old while my thoughts drifted that night. I was forcefully pushed up against the rest of my life and all the choices I would have to make regarding the rest of my life at a very early age--I'm talking six years old. So, by the time I was nineteen I felt way beyond my years. I had a dream, a gigantic dream. I've always wanted to help save the world, or change the world or at least contribute to the bettering of the world...one song at a time. This vision took hold of my spirit, my mind and my heart long ago. I defeated the debilitating emotions that had set in that night, that night I threw my body to the floor. The doubts that begged and pleaded to hold me back that day, that day I was so young and yet so old...didn't. 

And, I started to pray.

And then I wrote this song.

"Angel Out There"

I'm alone tonight

Talking to a dark sky

Where am I?

This is all that I want

Somebody talk to me

Let me know everything is okay

This is all that I want

This all that I need 

Angel out there...can you hear me calling for you?

All my tears, I begin to taste

Lighting strikes and the wind blows me out of my place

And everything is okay

You see, the truth will take you under her wing

She's a poet in a broken dream

Softly speaking to my heart

She's speaking to me

And this is all that I want 

This is all that I need

Angel out there...can you hear me

Calling for you?

Amen.