Interview:

Music opens doorways to relationships and experiences in a way that nothing else can. It connects us effortlessly to our hearts. Throughout our lifetimes and across cultures it serves as a vehicle like no other accompanying us along our many life cycles and changes. It can be primal, like our sense of smell and can remind us instantly of other times, people, and events. Music is experiential, forging the most intimate of lifetime bonds between us. It is at once beautifully earthy and equally wonderfully transcendental. Music can heighten celebration, energise and enhance social and humanitarian events, sanctify ritual, uplift and deepen friendships and has inherently profound transformational properties in relation to the elevation of consciousness itself.

Sometimes I just love to dance and let the music transport me, as it energises and inspires a myriad of moods and contemplations within me. Then as far back as I can remember I have always loved singing. It made me feel a special way. I was given my first guitar at age eleven. I thought I was to be a painter but music kept calling to me and I listened … eventually. I was twentyfive when I decided I wanted to sing in a band. But music is much more than a vocation. My involvement with music as a career has lead me along a unique and fulfilling pathway through life.

It all began for me in a painfully self-conscious period in my midtwenties when the words in my diary would become the lyrics to my songs. These were akin to a personal confidant for a young woman with few intimate friends and ultimately the compositions themselves acted as my creative agents connecting me to my life companions in a way I couldn’t have done through ordinary language alone. Throughout my life these songs have assisted me in pinpointing emotional and spiritual resolutions and forged experiences that have catapulted me head-on into challenges beyond my usual comfort zones. To this day it continues to do so and likewise music continues to serve as my personal spiritual counsel as I travel the road of selfexploration, and deem to understand the higher nature and purpose of this human life.

Music is truly one of humanity’s blessed gifts of creation. Yet music serves equally well as a potent spiritual messenger and midwife as it does accompanying debauched and raucous revelry or in rallying prospects through nationalistic fascist anthems. No judgements – like electricity, music is a neutral force able to be employed for good or otherwise according to one’s intentions.

“Like magnet and metal we are drawn into our own”*.

Importantly I believe music has the capacity to assist us in realising our highest intentions during these times of rapid change on the planet. I would describe music as an energy bridge. I believe we are essentially spiritual beings and I believe in the transformatory power of creation. I believe absolutely in the power of being present in the moment. For here-in lies the opportunity to affect our own conscious evolution as opposed to the Darwinian theory of survival of the fittest and random change. That is, I believe absolutely in our ability to consciously determine and affect our perceptions, experiences, and ultimately our destiny. Through music, song, and lyric, our highest aspirations and illuminations can be communicated via pure resonance. Music can assist our passage through the current pressing global and environmental challenges that we are facing today. But we ourselves are the consciousness bridges. The questions are: Are we ready? Are we willing? As above, so below. What a magnificent journey we are all on.

“See the prism stretching out across the sky, There to remind us of the inner-life, Inter-connections the bonds beyond sight, That keep us together and draw us toward the light …”** Lyric excerpts from “Mercy”* and “Tell It True”**. Used by permission.

“Music can heighten celebration, energise and enhance social and humanitarian events, sanctify ritual, uplift and deepen friendships.”
– Peggy van Zalm, singer-songwriter