The Meaning Behind The Music

Musicians helping the needy are currently being hyped as much as actors in politics... or politicians in Hollywood. Though I've never been rich or famous, it's been normal for my brother and I to volunteer and contribute to charitable causes since our teens. I was fifteen years old when I first traveled to Peru. "Why did I wear sandals?" I wondered as I stepped through the muddy garbage of a slum in Iquitos, Peru. I cringed as my foot slipped from the sandal into the sludge. The brackish sewer water pooled into canals as it drained from the city directly into Belem, a slum of Iquitos. While I shook my foot to rid it of the filth, a group of children were splashing and playing in a ditch nearby. I locked eyes with a boy around five years old. No doubt he was confused by the sight of a "gringo" in his neighborhood. A moment later he winced with pain. Broken glass beneath the surface had cut his foot. The boy washed off the blood, in the same vile water, and resumed his play. My emotions hemorrhaged as I kept moving forward on the path. I don't have a bandage...what good would it do for him in that water? Why must they live in this cursed place? I felt powerless to help and ashamed of my own ease of lifestyle. The thatched roofs on the huts I passed were lined with vultures. I counted more than fifty of their dark forms eying us. Something aroused their interest and half of them took to flight, blackening the sky above and casting shadows to earth. That experience and others like that on summer trips to South and Central America forged a desire in me to live differently. I consider volunteering with non-profits organizations and contributing to what they do an important part of who I am. For me, music is a mission. It conveys the truth, love and hope that's inside me. My songs and rhythms are urged by this identity.  This is why we're doing Alive Wire the way we are.  This is a part of what it means to be "alive."