My Life's Musical Journey... Beyond The Clouds - Background
I set myself a goal of producing an album that would be good enough for a CD and then have it signed to a record company. I reckoned it would take me two years, so I carved a path in my mind that nobody was going to cross, closed the front door and got on with it.
Failure was never an option and all obstacles would be overcome.
Those two years turned out to be some of the hardest times I had ever experienced. I practiced for up to twelve hours a day for all that time, arranging, recording and listening to my compositions until I was finally satisfied with my creation. I would have heard it fifty times at least before I changed the order of some tracks and that is what went to mastering and replication.
I had held garage sales to raise the funds for blank tapes and the like and one day I sold my bed, so I slept on the floor for eighteen months! I sent demo tapes off to two record companies. Lo and behold they both came back wanting to license the album. I signed with the larger of the two labels and the title was decided upon... 'Beyond The Clouds'
Precisely two years since I had set my goal, on January 29th 1995, I received my initial quota of fifty CDs. I was unable to play it though, as I did not possess a CD player!
Since childhood, nobody had ever listened to me. When I had tried to express myself, I got tied up in such a knot that the person I was talking to got fed up with waiting and came in with their point of view, stunning me into silence again. Therefore how I had felt for all those years was still buried deep within my soul, remaining unresolved.
When I commenced this album I found that, at last, those feelings were surfacing and were being translated into harmony and melody on my keyboard. That profoundly affected me as, after the completion of each track, I experienced a feeling of well being, as if, one by one, my emotional conflicts were being miraculously healed.
