When we got home from our three day visit to meet my new dad for the first time, I called him to say we arrived safely. It made me smile to hear his quintessential dad-like response, “I’m glad you called, because I would have worried.”

Then he asked, “Do you want to hear something?”

“If it’s going to make me cry, then no,” I answered. There was a disappointed silence.

“OK,” I sighed, wishing I hadn’t hurt his feelings, “I want to hear it.”

He put the phone down and started playing the guitar. He sang to me the words to the poem I had written him that morning, and, of course, I cried.

It was during that first fateful conversation we had on the phone on May 14th that he had said to me, “We should write a song together.” It gave me butterflies to hear those words. It was something I had dreamt about, and hearing him say it made me feel like I was still dreaming. Now here it was, another dream come true.

“We need to work on it,” he said. And I promised to do so.

He had played the song in common time (four beats per measure), and my immediate thought was that it should be in waltz time (three beats per measure). But he’s the musician, I guessed he knew what he was doing. I didn’t say anything about the timing.

The next time we discussed the song, he said, “What do you think about doing it in waltz time?”

Oh, yeah! I thought, this writing together thing is gonna be GOOD!

Facing My Fears

Dad came down last week to do a performance for the kindergarten classes at my niece Tiana’s school. It was unlike any music program I have ever seen, captivating for both the children and the adults. At times the amount of energy he created in that classroom made the teachers look at eachother in a panic, but at just the right moment my dad would reign it back in and they would all sigh in relief. The kids enjoyed being part of the show, and the songs he chose were designed to engage their minds and bodies, build their self-esteem, and teach life lessons not found in any school textbook. It was a completely new concept to me to use music in that way.

The rest of the weekend my dad kept gently nudging me to sing with him. He wanted to work on our song and the songs we had promised to do at my next congregation picnic, and I kept making excuses to him and to myself: I was too tired, didn’t feel good, etc. Finally I admitted to him the real reason: I was afraid of disappointing him, that he would find out that I am no good at singing or songwriting, and that I had no desire to perform.

“Tell me about that,” he said. Then he waited.

Hmmm….He was not giving me an out. I had to think hard. I thought back to the most recent musical opportunity I had had.

Our congregation had a talent show in May. Mostly it consisted of a Bible drama about Moses, but after that some of the kids and even the adults got up and did some performances. Tiana sang Twinkle Twinkle Star while Huntyr played the keyboard. Roger sang a country song he wrote. Alan did an elaborate stand-up routine of impersonations that amazed us all (who knew?!). Rex’s band played some rock songs, and three-year-old Rocco got up on stage with his little toy guitar and played his heart out with Thad, the two of them back-to-back just like the Rolling Stones. It was a lot of fun to see everybody let their hair down.

But I didn’t participate. I was surprised at myself, as were a lot of my friends. Several of them came up to me afterward and asked, “Why weren’t you up there?” They used to know me as the first to jump at a chance to entertain an audience, but as I sat watching the stage, all I could think was, I’m so glad I’m not up there! I had come to the disappointing realization that I have lost my confidence.

Now my dad was forcing me to answer the question, why? And I had to dig deep.

How I Found My Confidence and Then Lost It Again

My first experiences with performing were a complete thrill. It was about 1996 when my friend Rex suggested starting a band, and I had agreed to sing backup, why, I don’t know. I guess it just sounded like fun. The only problem was that in order to sing backup, you must have Someone to Back Up. The rest of the band came over, set up their amps, etc., and started to play while the microphone just sat up there on the stand with no one behind it.

“Go ahead,” Rex urged me, and so reluctantly I took the mic and, by default, the position of Lead Singer.

We played on Friday nights, and I never had so much fun in all my life. We played an eclectic mix of rock music: Jimmy Hendrix, Katrina and the Waves, Bush, Greenday, Radiohead. The music was so loud I could barely hear myself, which was just as well; I didn’t have much confidence in the way I sounded anyway. But it gave me a freedom I never felt before and started me down the road to entertaining.

Eventually I went on to start another band with my friends Ethan Vega, his wife Renata, our friend Jerry Robinson and bassist Seth Koslik. Ethan was a phenomenal guitarist, so much so that after a show he did one night, someone in the audience came up to him and handed him an electric guitar.

“I want you to have this,” the guy told Ethan. “Because someday you’re going to be famous, and I want to be able to say that Ethan Vega played my guitar.”

We started getting together two or three times a week to practice. We wrote all our own material, a combination of jazz, ska and alternative rock. Renata and I wrote all the lyrics, and the guys worked on the music. Everyone brought something to the table, and musically we had great chemistry. Eventually we started playing for small gatherings and parties for our friends. One night we played at a restaurant in downtown Long Beach, and the owner offered us our own night on a weekly basis. Because of a schedule conflict, we had to turn him down.

Seth worked as an intern at a radio station. He was offered a chance for us to open for Save Ferris, my favorite ska/reggae band. It was an exciting thought, but we discussed the offer, and all agreed this music thing was getting a little out of hand. None of us had ever seriously considered doing this as a career.

We did, however, want to make sure we didn’t lose all our hard work and so decided to record it. A friend of ours, John Devino, had a recording studio and agreed to record us. We were planning to do the whole thing live in one shot, but John stopped us.

“This is really good stuff,” he said. “I think you guys could make some money with this. I would like to record it track by track, get a vocal coach to work with Rosie and Renata, and see if we can market this with some connections I have overseas. But you guys have to be committed. Whatever happens, keep the band together.”

By the second session, the band fell apart.

For years afterward I tried to put another band together, but nothing could match the chemistry of the one we had. Jerry and I continued to write music together, occasionally we performed, but it just wasn’t the same. Ethan and I got together a few times, but something had happened that had sucked the creativity out of us; I guess it was just Life. I lost track of everyone but Jerry, and eventually I left off playing music altogether.

A few years ago when our congregation had its first talent show, I decided to play a song I had written with Ethan. I didn’t know Ethan’s whereabouts, so Rex’s band agreed to play with me. We only rehearsed once. When I got up in front of the audience and started to sing, I realized we had made the serious mistake of not doing a sound check. I panicked when I realized I could not hear myself. I immediately forgot the words to the song and flubbed my way through it while I nervously banged my tambourine on my leg so hard that I was black and blue afterward. I don’t even think I was banging it in time with the music.

That was my first experience with losing my confidence. There were others to follow, equally unpleasant.

It has now been a long time since I have performed for anyone and even longer since I’ve had the desire to do so. But now my father is confronting me with the Sad Fact that I have given up the one thing I love doing more than anything else in the world, and he is forcing me to reconsider.

I saw a PBS reality series recently in which a group of people agreed to live as though they were a New World colony back in the 1600’s. They lived in harsh conditions for three months and struggled to survive. Emotionally the experience took a heavy toll, and many of the participants got depressed. You might think that the most important persons in the colony were the ones who had the most practical survival skills, hunting, fishing, farming, etc. But there were some artists in the colony as well, and one night they put on a play they had written. They played music, and everyone laughed and had a great time. The next day the spirits of the entire community were lifted so much that they felt renewed strength to go on.

What that show taught me was that survival is not just dependent upon having our basic necessities met. It is also dependent on our feeling that life is worth living. God created us all differently for that reason. Some of us are practical, some of us are meant to make life fun, but all of us are needed.

I have often been baffled by the requests my friends make for me to sing. I don’t sing particularly well, but for some reason others seem to enjoy it, and for that reason I have often humored them. I realize that somehow this is a gift I can give that makes life more enjoyable. And the more enjoyable life is, the more reason we have to want to live it, right? This obstacle I face of having lost my confidence is an obstacle to giving that gift to others. So somehow I have to get it back, and I know just the guy to help me do it!

My dad is not only a gifted entertainer, but he has the gift of making others feel that they can do it, too. Besides regaining my confidence to create and perform, I want to be able to make people feel like that. There are so many people out there that hold back just like I have been doing, maybe someone like you.

Tell me about that.

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