| |
The Connection - Multi-Layered Piano Version
Lisa J Dinga , Anna Huckabee-Tull
St. Louis, MO United States
2007, Mar 17
Annotation: My brother and I shared an incredible connection growing up and after his unexpected death I felt a terrible loss of that relationship. Using an appreciative interview qpproach, a talented songwriter, Anna Huckabee Tull, not only listened to my stories, but also "heard" the voice of Steve. Here is the journey of that song ... The Connection, which values all of the connections we have in our lives, even after death. Enjoy.
The Connection - Story Behind the Song
A brother who has died, and a sister who lives on, CONNECT...through song!
GETTING THE SONG BORN
Originally Lisa commissioned Anna to create a song for her Father for Father's Day. This song - Regained (which also can be heard here on AI Commons.) Anna writes, "The whole time that I was creating the song Regained for Lisa to give to her father on Father's Day, I kept "hearing" snippets of something else, and the more I tuned in to it, the more it became clear to me that what I was hearing was a different song, still in the voice of Steve, but distinct, in that it was a song from Steve TO LISA. I was unsure of what to do about this and so at the time just jotted down the little bits and pieces, and kept going on my assigned project. But in the aftermath of the beautiful success of that first song, I re-contacted Lisa and explained that there was another song floating around me, if she was interested. At the time, she was pretty overwhelmed with the intensity of the Regained experience, and she decided to just sit with it. But a few months later, as the anniversary of Steve's death approached, she contacted me and said, with some trepidation and a lot of bravery, simply: "I am ready." We talked some, and she shared that, while she had felt an intense connection to her brother in life, and in the grieving project of rebuilding his dream-house, as the months wore on she felt less and less able to tap into that powerful link that had existed between them, and she began to feel increasingly guilty that somehow there was more she should have done, or should be doing now. It was a vague feeling but it haunted her a bit, in a way that left her feeling sad and disconnected and numb, and it had become exacerbated by the poignant "loss" of her son's leaving home to go to college. Thus, it was time. She gave me her blessings to head off to the Maine woods where I do some of my best writing, to let this song from brother (deceased) to sister (right here and feeling lost) come through. I went, and it came through in a strikingly pure fashion, such that I knew I really had something as soon as the first words started showing up.
THE EPILOGUE - KIND OF STRANGE, I ADMIT
It would be impossible to share all the otherworldly details about the bringing to life of this song. But I want to attempt to put into words a few things. As I have said on many occasions, I don't know exactly what "channeling" is. But I clearly felt some kind of a presence with me when this song came through. It took a long time to prepare to write the song (months of getting to know Lisa, hours to drive up to Maine, etc.) but it took only minutes to write it, as it came through pretty much "whole cloth." I had several pages of notes about what this song was "supposed to say" or how it was "supposed to develop" but as soon as I was willing to let go of all of my ideas and personal investments in the song, what ultimately came was, to my way of thinking, a much "higher" version of all the things I "thought the song was supposed to do." When the song was done I grabbed a tissue and just cried and cried. And I felt a presence there somehow weeping with me. But they were happy tears. I felt once again a kind of wonder at the idea that maybe there really ARE energies around us that allow us to plug in to something larger. After all, if love never dies, then why wouldn't it be possible to re-connect with it whenever one offered up the simple words, "I am ready." Finally, I have shared the following anecdotally with a few close friends, and so far no one has found me completely off my rocker, so I will make the stretch and share it here. After I had sat with the song for a few minutes I "saw" out of the corner of my eye(/mind) a Christmas tree, and a little boy (2? 3? 4 years old?) running around it in circles and very excited. "Okay, okay, okay!" he was braying in a sing-song excited little way, "We did it! We did it! Okay, show it to her--do it quick, don't wait to make it fancy. It's ready! It's ready now!" while around and around the tree he went, flapping his arms and laughing. I didn't know what I was seeing (and yet I did). In any event, I came back to Cambridge and quickly recorded a simple acoustic guitar version of the song in the studio. This is nothing I normally would do (the process is for me to make a simple cassette version and give it to a client to review and make comments). But this time I marched straight into the studio--without "client approval"--and did as I was told (you can hear that original acoustic version here). I also followed the "instructions" I had gotten from "Steve" to communicate to Lisa that her first hearing of this song was very important, and that she should light a candle, make sure she was alone, and listen on a high-quality CD player (vs. an mp-3 on the computer). Finally, when I talked her through the songwriting experience, and told her about the strange Christmas-tree-and-little-boy awareness I had had, she said, brightly, "Yep, that was him!" I also explained to her that this song is "strange" in that it does not follow the rules of songwriting in many ways (no verse-chorus set-up, and, in fact, it uses a bunch of "made up" chords in an alternate guitar tuning that I had never tried or known about before). Lisa also assured me that, "That's Steve too! Tell him what the rules were and he would always find an alternative way to do it." When Lisa eventually heard that first acoustic version, she was deeply moved, though she shared that it took several listenings, spaced out over time, before she was really able to take in what the song was saying to her. Eventually, though, she reached a point where she began to be ready to share it with others.
Lisa recently wrote Anna and shared, "You have brought tears to my eyes again this morning (but happy ones). I am so thankful you allowed Steve's message to come (even when that wasn't the assignment). Thank you for listening, and caring enough to wait for me to be ready. You are an amazing artist, but more importantly, you have become a friend!"
I'm ready to share this special song with the AI world ... and encourage everyone to listen to "their connections"
Resource Files:
The Connection - Piano Version (mp3 )
|
|
(submitted by Lisa Dinga)
| |
|
