This message is for all my dreamer friends from across the sea…..For
Holland and Germany, for the REAL people there who have reached out to
me, who have somehow understood and cared so deeply for the music, for
the words, for it all….who wanted to share some nights of music….I
thought I could come right now. So many of you reached out and tried to make it happen…SO much work and creativity…Nikki and Frank and Sabine and so many amazing friends….I am so grateful for that…the dreamers did just that, but more on that later….
I thought the world was telling me this was the time. But it is not.
Truth is I’m not ready. Money, the timing with the making of the record
and also the hope that I can come next year with what I hope will be a brilliant new
creation to open new doors, new songs that matter and the kind of support one needs (business speak)
to come do it right….
This is a tough letter to write. I have lost a lot of nights sleep
consumed with my guilt and weight of disappointment I have not been able
to make this happen.
I hope you will understand. I hope you will continue to listen and
contribute to the work, to share with your friends and spread the word,
because Europe is in my heart. It always has been.
Did you know I was an exchange student in Denmark when I was 16?
Or that I backpacked the whole of the continent when I was 20 for over three months. Two
defining experiences that literally changed my life. My time there gave me
something in my heart I carry with me every day in the way I see the world and myself in it. I never would have found ART and the unending desire
to accept and figure out the world as we all see it without my travels. Thanks Mom and Dad…thanks drunk driver that almost killed me and my best friend but didn’t and we got 10,000 bucks for it to pay for the trip…
Sometimes I dream too big….don’t you? Sometimes I get ahead of myself
and reach higher than the seeds I have planted have grown…I guess if
you set an idea in motion, if you picture it and put it out there, and
the world begins to conspire and peoples hearts and imaginations are
captured, well, there is no dream too big. This is what we are meant to
think…this is what we deserve to believe and to manifest.
But dreams, like love, like Mothers….they have no destination, they
are concepts and reality all at once; they grow, they nurture your
secret self…they are everything. Some may say you must make specific
your dreams, but I have always believed that dreams are an instinct, a
collection of feelings and thoughts and the intangible “soul” of who you
are speaking a language you can not see, but simply feel…and work
towards. Because the “dream” has to be lived in every moment of chasing
it…its your life…
I’m here, across the sea, living the dream the best I can. With your help
and patience, I’ll get there…I will….in a way I never could have
imagined.
Met with one of my favorite film director/artists today about the possibility of making a video for the new album..!!!!!…..
and for some reason in my montage of unedited thoughts that leap from my mouth I mentioned the image of a hole in the ground…with me in it. Now, there were a million other things mentioned and I have no idea why I said that cause it makes no real sense…it certainly didn’t in the moment…it was a passing word, a random image that has been circling my mind…a moment no one else at the meeting probably remembers…but I do.
And now I think about myself in that hole in the ground, and the dirt around me and the roots and stones sprinkling the walls of my captive safe place, in the earth….and I wonder…as I often do…
why does that feel like the most truthful thing I have said in a long while? Why have I expressed how I see myself as this man deep within the earth, surrounded by the ground and urging himself to WANT to climb out? I think about what it is to make that climb, how every grab and pull at the walls of your open captive hole both drown you and bury you further and bring you one stop closer to the light. The dirt crumbles…I can feel it in my face. I can taste it.
What is it about the earth for me? Why am I here in this city? This city of so little dirt? Why are my shoes on right now? hmmmmmm…
When I blurted this ” ..yeah, like I’m in a hole in the ground…..” (thankfully I believe I made some truly cohesive and inspired thoughts and impressions)…I think I was climbing in my mind. I think I’m always climbing in my mind. I hope I’m always climbing in my mind. I like the way the dirt feels. I like the light. I like the coolness of being under. I like the smell of it. I like how people could be all around me and if I didn’t make a sound maybe they wouldn’t notice I was down there…and yet if I did, if I shouted and pulled, the earth would move and they would look down and see me….see only me….and like always, the arms, the hands, the faces pressed to the earth to reach as far as they could would come for me.
Tonight I get on a plane and fly not across the sea.
Tonight barely feels real…
Tonight I go to fly for only an hour, maybe above the California Aqueduct,
or zigzagging along the coast as it becomes more jagged the further north
you push….only long enough to look through my “new album notebook” which
is like my obsessive ever present blanky these days, who’s evolving
content’s smell is so obviously mine; maybe even make a connecting thought
or two…and then, in the dark of the night, I will let it all go, all the
intricacies of my own inner life; I will land and my Mom will pick me up
and once we get to Cotati…it’s real.
My sister is going to get married….
Katie’s wedding to Muiris is here. A week in the forest. A week of all
the people who made her, coming together, in one spot, to simply witness
the dreams and joy of she who no one would dare say is not the most
beautiful person they have ever known. Oh and Muiris…yeah, I approve…a
rare man to fill the role HE creates. He is charming and passionate and
independent thinking. He is a caregiver, a protector, and WANTS BABIES.
Most important, I sense that he is complicated, like all of us…and he is
not afraid to show his light and his dark, though his spirit like hers is
bright…so bright…
That’s all I can say….I’ll leave the rest for them, for my words at
their wedding….
Just wanted to share…wish them luck…time to let go of little “k-fart”
introduce myself to
Mrs. Katie Griffin
Such a funny thing about life…
it’s every day, you know? every day.
There is nothing you can take, nothing you can hide behind, nothing to make that not real in some way. And sometimes it’s messy, and sometimes you wonder WHY? And maybe, you’re like me and when the perfect storm of a lot of tough LIFE hits you, your mind goes wild as your body shuts down. It’s like overload, it’s like a small glimpse into madness…It’s like how we still randomly find ourselves awakening from the night in the fetal position.
And I see the sky my favorite shade of midnight blue, and I hear my friend laugh from behind the door, and I look at those I love, frozen stills on my walls, my constants…my hearts. And I feel guilty…because I can’t be THAT every day.
And my body, so weak as my brain never settles and somehow, every time, I search for one single understanding to miraculously pull my brain and spirit and body as it never eventually fails to find me. I look for it though I tell myself, “maybe this time the light will not find you again” And I am ugly inside.
So I go to that place. This place where my peace of mind will find me and my body can heal itslef again as the tunnel doors crack. I write it down. I put it out here just thinking…if I feel like this? If I am living every day..must everyone else too?
You can find your dreams. You can find and share true love. You can be a giving person with purpose. You can be rich…and yet there is something within we all must face alone I guess….just sometimes.
Maybe it’s the universes mysterious way of balance. Maybe we just get lost sometimes.
Maybe it doesn’t have to mean we’re crazy, or that we can’t give and have what we yearn for, what we deserve…maybe it’s kind of what makes it all worth it.
For now, Josh plays me this country song…I don’t know the name…or wait, maybe it’s Christian Rock (which I not so secretly love sometimes) and the line says…
:” And they say the road to heaven might leads us back through hell,
but we’re holding on for more than stories to tell.
Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow,
we will win this fight and bury this sorrow.”
It’s called Google Jake, and the band is Wide Awake
Ok, I’m waiting now…come on ME! Get up!…..GET UP!
I remember when I was alone for all that time.
I remember the years I spoke to no one.
…and I think back to that time composing the songs that would become Alive and Screaming, with the window open and my bare feet sliding on the floor, and the hazy gaze of the midnight black around me. And it hurt so beautifully.
I sit here now in my little house with my little family and I wonder how I got here. I remember the day of my “L.A. freedom party” when I gave up my waiter job, apartment, city, sanity…and I was a traveling poet and a student of life like I always told my Mom I wanted to be, for over a year…a gypsy, singing my way from edge to edge of the country, from peoples floors to a movie star’s home…I learned a lot. About myself, about people…about struggle and how to live with no ground, no comfort, nothing but my raw exposed self.
I think of all the dreamers I met. I think about how cool it is that people invite me into their homes, into your darkest secrets and greatest joys.
There are days now when the prophet feels as if it IS mine. And the purpose has grown so much deeper than the music, but instead has given me an ability to find and speak my heart as it evolves every day. It has given me YOU.
The “Jake Walden Dreamers family”, as eclectic and sometimes dramatic and weird as we are….we love each other. I have learned so much about love and the power of believing in others….hoping for them…hoping for you as you hope for me…every day, in every way, as love should be.
So here I am, at the moment where after 2 years of touring the album, two years of too many hours a day on the computer, of every day trying to create something, traveling the country and meeting, as my dream has always been, the strangest of the strangers…
It’s time I found THAT place again. It takes everything. And for this season, for the creation of something truly of value and depth and uniqueness and honesty and purity and love and LIGHT, for this season I have to go…
I have to make this album, to write it, arrange it, fund it, envision every layer of it, record it, LIVE IT!!
I wrote a song once called “For Someone”. I didn’t know why or for whom it was given to me for at the time. Today I do. I know love, in all its raw, in all its glory, as I always hoped for.
Listen carefully to “Alive and Screaming”, tell your friends as so many have graciously done before. Spread the word and explore the website, download the album or give it to a friend as a gift…it all makes a difference, it adds up…you plant a thousand seeds and eventually one will grow…and once that one does, somehow as life works so too will the rest. No one wants to be first and yet no one wants to be last to the proverbial party.
Know that somewhere as the wind is blowing this summer on an L.A. evening, your friend Jake is putting his everything, including the piece of you that YOU let him see into a new record of THIS time…. and after all the waiting, the wondering and worry and hope, “A and S’s little brother will be born… and I’ll come home again, to this place we have all created. This little world I have gotten to be a part of… and then with your help I will come to your part of the world, face to face, and sing for you, with you…for you…and hopefully we will all look at each other with wonder…and smile.
It all matters… and it all hurts… and it all, every piece of what it is to BE, blows my mind every day…. Maybe, sometimes it’s not supposed to make sense, or maybe it is.
Beyond the success of what may come my way, all that has come so far…. in the end it is about the music, the unexpected connection, the occasional fumbling moments of clarity, the longing and the ache, the raw and the glory…. and most of all, the comfort in daring to question the questions that speak to us.
Come to a concert. Let me see your eyes as I sing, and maybe I’ll let you see mine…and for a moment, well, you just never know….you just never know… the only thing I know…. you know?? There is so much more to come…
“…of course the pitfall of choosing someone for safety is that we come to resent them…over time…a little.
But Love loves it all.
But Love has to see it.
Love can’t be left in the dark…”
and nobody, nothing is perfect…
even the most beautiful of life’s creations has its flaws.
In some way I think the flaws are what we end up loving most of all. Love is
blind…ok, yes….but love is also blinding…and its easy to let
yourself get caught up in the minor bullshit, the false disappointments of
the reality that you aren’t in love with YOURSELF but ANOTHER PERSON…and
thank God for that…
If we aren’t careful we can miss our moments,
Yes, it’s strange to share this confession…it’s strange to share the struggles, especially when you know the whole story, from personal time with her…it’s strange to wonder if someone would judge…but, in the end, as only she could articulate, I believe this to be universally important to immerse ourselves in for a moment…I believe in her…I accept her as she has accepted me…I root for her and look up to her….
We all have pieces of this story within ours, as with most stories extreme and OTHERS, like a tapestry…like everything…
Peace, be you, Jake
