Rand Bishop
// author, music producer & publisherRAND BISHOP is an author, music producer, publisher, and Grammy-nominated songwriter from Nashville, Tennessee. His book “My List: 24 Reflections On Life’s Priorities” (2003), co-authored with Tim James and featuring a foreword by country musician Toby Keith, is available from McGraw-Hill, and “Makin’ Stuff Up: Secrets Of Songcraft And Survival In The Music-Biz” (2008) is available from Weightless Cargo Press. Rand Bishop is also BMI Award-winning and Million-play songwriter with over two-hundred recordings to his credit, by such artists as The Beach Boys, Cheap Trick, Heart, Indigo Girls, and Vanilla Fudge among many others. Rand Bishop has fulfilled almost every role in the creative end of the music business, including A&R talent-development executive, music producer, recording artist, recording engineer, and studio vocalist. He continues to pursue a career as a writer, publisher, talent-development consultant, and music producer.
Website: www.randbishop.com
Photo: Rand Bishop
Interview:
Music resonates in the heart, motivates the feet, swings the hips, turns smiles, lumps throats, and un-dams tears. Music is physical, visceral, sensual, inspirational, spiritual – and most of all, emotional. Music uplifts, comforts, touches, discovers anger, and sets it free. Music is healing, revealing, hilarious, and infuriating.
Music communicates where language alone cannot, speaking a universal tongue, transcending all boundaries, racial divides, class distinctions, and cultural identities. Music gets to every truth in the human condition and is as important an ingredient to our chemical make-up as water and carbon. Music is precious, yet disposable and more than abundant. Music is ever-present in our most profound moments and offers us a passageway back to our most significant landmarks.
Those who create music are equipped, nourished, and inspired by a God of infinite creativity, the One of which everything and everyone is a part, the unified Force encompassing All. Music wafts on the breeze, flows in streams, sings in thought and conversation, and displays its overwhelming beauty in every color and texture of nature. Composers and poets hear its rhythms and melodies in each mundane and miraculous experience of life. Musical souls thrive to sort out and reassemble these available components into new configurations – time, and time, and time again – enriching the whole.
Nimble fingers, dexterous lips, powerful diaphragms, and sonorous throats give wings and fuel to music’s flight. For those who choose to fully develop and display their native musical gifts, life’s pathway can lead to joyous triumphs and heartbreaking pitfalls. There are no guarantees along this road – only that disrespecting this Godly calling, leaving these tools unused will certainly deprive the bearer, and humanity at large, of something unique, personal, blessed, and essential.
To be born with genius and inspiration is not to be taken for granted. To magnify and share one’s God-given talents is a divine mission. Music is a continuous litany of prayer, the essence of Spirit, and a heavenly instrument of love, passion, truth, joy, pain, humor, and beauty. Music is God speaking through us, to us, about us, and for us. Music brings us closer to and makes us ever so much more like our Creator.
“Music is ever-present in our most profound moments and offers us a passageway back to our most significant landmarks.”
– Rand Bishop, author of “Makin’ Stuff Up: Secrets Of Songcraft And Survival In The Music-Biz”
