The Website of Peter Link

Now today I’m writing lyrics on the same subject – hopefully with a little more content. Here’s one drawn from a previous blog post on Sparks From The Fire. The content, as explained in the post, has been capturing my imagination for months now and it finally all poured out in song form this past two weeks.

Both song and orchestration are now finished and will be presented in Julia Wade’s forthcoming CD, Silk Road, due to be released in early 2012.

A number of you have asked whatever happened to my Inspirational music project called Goin’Home.

Goin’ Home
A Gospel Cantata
On Heaven and Beyond
Additional Music and Lyrics by Peter Link

Yes, there is a light, and yes, there is a tunnel. Turns out it’s an extremely expensive project that has been in the works for nearly two years now. Time and money have, for too long, been the obstacle. Now we’re poised to overcome both.

Here’s a song in demand before its time – if that were possible. If there was ever a time in our nation’s history for a shot of inspiration, it’s now. Leadership seems to be stuck in a very unfortunate place ruled by ego and greed. No matter what your political affiliation or taste, you can’t be liking what’s going down out there in Washington, D.C. It seems like we need some new ideas, some new inspiration perhaps – something beyond the human will. Here’s where Inspirational music can definitely help.

I grew up in a family of four. My older brother, Jim, was five years older than me and led the way in just about everything. I idolized him just as every little brother should. In our family, it was always said that Jim got the brains and Pete got the work ethic. I don’t remember ever thinking much about the “work ethic” part, but I sure wished at the time that I had gotten the “brains” part of the deal.

Every once in a while I just have to stop and be grateful for and appreciate the incredible tools I get to work with creating Inspirational music here in the 21st century. I’ve been working with a software system for about 15 years now that was first developed by a German company named Emagic in the early 1990s called Logic. In 2002, Apple, seeing that Emagic’s Logic had probably the most powerful engine of the various DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) systems, bought Logic from Emagic and has produced this industry leading tool ever since.

OK, I’ll admit it. I hit the wall. A life in Inspirational music is stimulating, intriguing, exciting and yes, even inspiring, and yet there is a point in any endeavor where you just can’t do it 24/7 anymore. Instead of waking up with energy towards the day, you wake up with a groan and a longing to just go back to sleep.

Note: In celebration of my 350th post, I thought I’d circle the bases and go back to the beginning – to my first post 4 years ago – January 26, 2007. This was actually a defining moment for me in the creation of this blog – defining in both its content and style. It’s still one of my favorite posts I’ve ever written. Here’s a re-print of the first post from Sparks From The Fire.

The singer stands at the microphone in a recording studio and performs an inspirational song to a beautiful orchestration. The sound of the voice is picked up by the microphone, run through a cable into a large console which then sends it on to a digital converter which converts all the parameters of the sound of the voice into digital numbers -- a series of zeros and ones, which are then stored in a computer to be later reconverted back into the sound of the voice for further usage.

5:30 PM, Thursday. New York City. I sit at a window bar at Dean and Deluca’s in the NY Times building eating a Greek yogurt and a bag of chips trying to figure out this Inspirational music business and watching the people pour down the street past my perch as they madly scramble towards Port Authority bus terminal trying to get home at end of workday.

People watching. I got it from my dad who used to take us to the St. Louis Cardinal ball games when I was a kid and then sit backwards in his chair and watch the crowd instead of the game. Never much of a baseball fan, he found it more entertainment watching the people. He used to say it was worth every dollar of the ticket.