Dear ALO:

The spaces between frames are filled with shadows on walls void of color. That’s when I search for the courage I engender from “State of Friction.” I embrace, “I wanna feel it / I want to face this vacant mood / and if I fall I wanna find a way to fly!” Much of life is spent suspended, but “we’re born to live between tension and release.” There is no easy. That’s why I love your music! For nearly two decades, unwittingly, I prepared to write this essay. I used you boys. It’s true. I used ALO music year after year, album after album, because I needed your beat to help me bloom my new day, especially as I turned fifty. The latest album Frames is a brilliant culmination of each band member’s best SELF. In the end, we become a blank canvas again. 

Born a blank slate, tabula rasa, every look, every touch, or lack thereof, writes the path for the next page, emotions attaching to memory, like the ink on a paper, sometimes bleeding through. Now that books are nearly obsolete, how do we find our SELF? Nowadays, everywhere a person looks there’s a place to connect, but in the world with hand-in-hand screens of someone else’s personal and/or political dream, the lonelier, the less connected everybody seems, especially people with social anxiety like me. No practice conversing, exchanging ideas, too often left a solitary, awkward little mind in the middle of the incessant and busy hands of time, dizzy spinning pointless tales, going nowhere, with the past a hurricane chaser, and the future a dog chain, yanking us into the grave. Creativity starved, we humans crave a guide to a sense of sanity! It’s too easy to choose alone as an acceptable option, no depth, no growth, more anger, more fear, more paralysis of the SELF in a stagnant uninspired life, feeling more like an echo than a human being. 

I’ve used my limited music box of musicians who sing my soul to sway, like Paul Simon, Ani De Franco, Wood Brothers, Bone Thugs, Gorillaz, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Jon Baptist, Beethoven, Motzart…and ALO (Animal Liberation Orchestra). For nearly twenty years, I’ve used ALO’s uplifting lyrics and power jams to get me rolling through life’s most challenging demands, the growing stages that frame the future. Often, I’m weak from my daily battles, but ALO’s song structure, imaginative language and musical pacing affords listeners like me an emotional connection as palpable as a long distance friendship, and at times, this is more satisfying or accessible than reality could ever seem to be. In “Divine Fall” by “giving a hug to the whole wide world,” kindness and wisdom lift drowning souls to float. Whatever the stage of life, each phase hits a crucial stand-off, often between parts of the self. Darkness prevails as past shadows weigh down the spirit, and stuck, the body shows little signs of life at all. Desperate for encouragement from a fellow human who gets your pain, who gives you the gumption to dance again, a frame of understanding the movement of the moment…for fans, that’s what music gives, the ultimate creative gift. Each ALO album represents a different feeling, reflection, and after a deep-dive into the anthology, there’s a creative genius in the writing and musical style that is as infectious as it feels serendipitous.

Writing is a wonderful puzzle, one in which great attention must be paid to the format, or the point gets lost, and the reader forgets about the author. As a rule of writing, a songwriter performs the role of a guide into the search for transcendence after transition throughout all phases of life, an active helping hand out of a swirling abyss. Music heard, not read, requires layers of format. Nearly a single parent in Colorado about a decade ago, I memorized every album I could get my hands on. However, it isn’t until now that I see how imperative an evolving approach is to successful songwriting, however, I enjoy examining the definite structural patterns regularly observed. There’s always a HOOK. The retelling of a nightmare in “All Alone,” or like in “I Love Music” the building of a powerful image, “In the beginning, there was total silence / nothing moving in complete blackness.” The first song off Fly Between the Falls “Spectrum”  catches the listener like a hungry fish with a psychological ponderance, or observation, “Sometimes I feel like myself / Sometimes I feel like somebody else…” Instant audience magic, the key to establishing a cerebral connection, a bond, thereby, encouraging emotional engagement as the chorus depicts the problem, or negative trigger, alongside the realization as a lead to the solution. 

The ebb and flow is eternal, and musicians are a conduit whereby experience expands. Every day is a wave of emotions, old influencing new, and lyrics help our minds to find a buoyant solace of space, but it’s the tools a musician uses that brings the soul to the surface and shows it how to free-float with rhythm as a boat. pacing in a song, the beat, the bait to string people along, is created with rhyme and repetition, for emotional reinforcement, adding an idea striation, building momentum, movement, setting up the importance of the crescendo, the ultimate writer’s high… THE POINT, as the call to action, often dancing. The song “Empty Vessel” is a perfect example of this kind of song structure. Power beginning, a hook everyone can relate to “Feel like I’m trapped and I can’t get out / Heart full of pain, head full of doubt.” Then, an emotional connection solidifies as a problem and solution thesis takes form:

Told myself it’s all in my mind 

Told myself she’s not my kind 

I’m an incomplete vessel

Waiting for the one to fill me up

Waiting for the day to hear you say I love you…

The problem set up is wanting something you can’t have, something you know isn’t right, yet you crave more than anything…that thing still missing: reciprocal love, an infection of shared passion. Then, WHACK! A truth slap, “But you won’t…” Emboldening every connected soul, you stand up for what you want, for your SELF with a powerful statement of action, “So, I’m gonna leave / I do believe I’ve had enough.” Few stanzas have had more of an impact. Intense desire, addictive love, can blur the lines between reality and fantasy in a romantic brain, therefore, guidance gained is a crucial piece toward turning inspiration into positive motivation. In some of my darkest times, when I felt drowning in dirt, lines like these helped me create preventative impulse boundaries, for I’m an idealistic realist, and emotional overload makes a person say and do stupid things. A voice of reason needed, the singer exemplifies a gentle strength in his cadence that imbues the SELF with a sense of kind support, as if seen, the crazy understood, not alone in a world of empty vessels. There’s an actual solace in “I feel the pressure coming on / to the left of right a line has been drawn.” ALO’s musical jam background and lyrical theater teaches me how to construct a SELF-driven foundation, an intrinsic motivation to always fight for the light. I listen, and filling in empty holes, I feel a glow, as the lyrics pause and the guitar takes over, manipulating notes meant to solicit the soul.

Repetition, Rhyme & Reason, Sense & Symbol driven by Sound…Oh, the tools you use to guide the head and the heart through a journey to a musical paradise. Repetition, rhyme hit nails of reason, triggering a sense of understanding, as symbols become clear, and the instruments band together to carry the uplifted feeling home to dance in the SOUL. On Silver Saturdays, ALO delivers this during “Divine Fall.” The guitar, drums, and bass provide the heartbeat, tickled by keys, which all dance with the smooth vocals, building the sound like a freight train about to bust open a portal to another state of mind. Metaphors, planks to shape, producing an ethereal dance of intellectual ideas and imagery. Moreover, impeccable word choice is accessible yet opaque, poignant and open to interpretation, “As we roll through this life our love won’t fade.” By the end of the album, I felt hugged. Each time thereafter when I needed help dealing with life, it felt like I was a part of your process. In the “Dead Still Dance” off Sounds Like This, the use of pronouns heightens the connection, “Bending and shaping the air until it matched up with my thoughts,” shows the battle within the writer’s SELF with loved ones, the world, and transitions, bringing the listener in “marking your soul’s advance,” then to the soulful friend, “The dead still dance! We dance!” The theme, such a tight piece of poetry: We can dance through the storms with acceptance that the pitfalls aren’t the end, but instead a time to rise above “from the dark recesses of your mind / we got a parachute / gonna be alright, just keep on dancing.” It’s like the moment right after an epiphany, when it feels like you found the missing piece to make the puzzle complete, and there’s a transcendence of SPIRIT, thereby, changing the picture of dank darkness to the fresh sunrise of a new day.

The music of ALO and the lyrics on every album have had and still have a powerful effect in the stages of my life, creating an energizing comfort zone. In a way, ALO has been a stranger who feels like a friend, someone who magically says not just what I want to listen to, but what I need to hear. My journey in life, in school, in marriage, in SELF-development, felt lonely at the beginning. Aspects of my SELF battling for control over my physical and mental health. Within a spectrum of PTSD-developed “self-states,” or rather a more simplistic example the Gemini in me, I live between dark, shifting, confusing contradictions. Both Roses and Clover and Fly Between the Falls allowed my young creative SELF to find a way from the head into a practical approach to accepting the flip side, and I began to write, began to want some shine. “Water Song”embodies everything that I love about what music does for my psyche. The HOOK a cleansing picturesque metaphor that represents my first adult home in Arizona: 

Canyons carved out by notions 

Neanderthals wrestling with time 

Mountains of impassible proportions 

That only exists inside our minds.

The cactus flower that blooms fruit is the punchline, “Our purpose is to be just what we are.” It is twenty years in the future, wrinkles are carved, and like back then, the water is at my throat. Just as the song goes on, so is life, but what do we do with our strife? 

Lost, denied, or forgotten, the SPIRIT, the creative soul is dead. So, the question is then: HOW DO WE CONNECT? Music. All phases of life from young to old can be broken into frames, pictures of the past, both relative and irrelevant, and the spaces between are where the most support is needed, for it’s the transition toward the next frame of experience. Flowers wouldn’t unfurl their petals to bloom in spring if it wasn’t for the rain, and so it is for emotional growth. Each song, a chapter in a fabulous book of secrets about the joys and pains of growth, I found myself wondering about the trials of the musician, who has to find everything out for the SELF, in some ways, for the purpose of everybody else. In the essay “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson explains the plight of the scholar as having the goal of imparting great knowledge onto the world, and the pain of it a sacrifice they should relish when he states:

For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is one, who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world’s eye. He is the world’s heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. 

Of course, money is a reward, but surely, it’s not the sole reason you go through the pain and arduous journey of writing, practicing, and performing! Oh, no, no, no. I bet it’s a bit spiritual. Regardless, just in case you lovely musicians don’t already know, the world is THANKFUL!!! You do us all a favor by leading the world from a state of lonely confusion to an elevation of mind, body, and SPIRIT, twirling a cha-cha to a promised land.