Sneak Peek #1: Be My Home

  FREE MP3 DOWNLOAD DONATE TO THE ART-MAKING This was the first song that began the upcoming collection of tunes that will comprise my 13th album release. I was challenged to write a pop song, which (to me) means memorable melodies and singable choruses. Good pop music is hard to write–seriously! From there, I wrote a whole album’s worth of…   …read more.

Free Single: Sleep

  FREE MP3 DOWNLOAD DONATE TO THE ART-MAKING This was the first song I wrote after first becoming a parent. Echo was just a few months old and I was so tired–CONSTANTLY–that I couldn’t think about anything else except sleep. The rhymes in this piece are simple and predictable because they’re the product of a sleep-deprived brain that couldn’t think…   …read more.

Free Single: Balloon

  FREE MP3 DOWNLOAD DONATE TO THE ART-MAKING “The most substantial songs [on the album] are… innocently foreshadowed in the kiddy song “Balloon”, whose lesson is that it is all too easy to be careless and watch something joyful and treasured slip from your grasp, never to be recovered.” — Gerry Lipnowski, Montreal (early preview write-up) Echo wrote this song,…   …read more.

Free Single: Love Needs No Dictionary

  FREE MP3 DOWNLOAD DONATE TO THE ART-MAKING It hasn’t been easy to be in a cross-cultural relationship that is always operating in my non-native language, but rather than complain about it all the time (as I started to feel my blogs were doing), I’m proud to have captured the beauty of its beginnings in this song’s lyrics. The track…   …read more.

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Support the Music-Making

Donations help music continue to be made. Your donations support the music-maker who then continues to make music. Any donation of $20 or more will get you any full album of your choice in both digital and physical versions. What’s more, Ember will arrange everything with you personally.

The Philosophy

Before 1910, with the production of the first vinyl record, music was a live experience, not a physical product sold as a commodity. But then, everything changed. Music became something that could be bought and sold.

Over a century, fans who formerly were pure supporters of the artist whose visits to their towns brought them an experience of joy, slowly began to value the songs and the albums more so than the people who made them. To possess the object—the record, cassette, CD, mp3—was the main goal, not to support the making of that magic in the first place.

So, it makes sense that when music first became free via online downloads, most people didn’t think twice about downloading it; it had long ceased to be about the people who made the art. Free stuff is fun! We had become consumers of music, not patrons of its production.

But what is music really worth? To me, besides family, it’s worth more than anything else in the world. I would give up on almost everything else in my life before I would give up music. Music is magic. It’s priceless. Money is just money.

And as a fan, if I love an artist, I can’t assign a price either. Their songs are worth so much more to me than $0.99 or $1.29. Their songs are inside of me, rattling my spirit. Music keeps my cells awake.

So now you know what music is worth to me.

The question is, what’s it worth to *YOU*?