This is a trailer for a pilot I did for VH1, called THIS IS MY CHURCH, about the spirituality and community of live music. We shot fans, bands, roadies, live concerts - with Phil Lesh, Warren Haynes, Ben Harper, Blues Traveler, Charlie Hunter and more...it was a big dream of mine to somehow translate the incredible experience I was having at live shows and bring that experience, somehow, to the folks at home. (My family just could NOT understand why I would go see the same band over and over, and why I would actually travel across the country for these shows!)
Unfortunately, the producers at VH1 who had been so enthusiastic about the show and who had encouraged and supported the project, ended up leaving the network in a massive executive shuffle right after I completed the pilot. This is not unusual in Hollywood, nor is the practice of the new staff ditching the projects of the folks who've left. So, nothing ended up happening with it. Sigh...!
However, it keeps coming back to life - seems to be really resonate with folks all over! Who knows what, if anything, will happen with it - you never know!
I am writing this from the heavenly embrace of a rocker on my friend Robin’s porch, looking out over luminous, late-summer fields of Amherst, Mass.
I am working hard and tapping pretty deeply into something sweet, encouraged and nurtured by the amazing, beautiful valley. Before that, I’d retreated for a week of solitude in Brooklyn, which required saying “no” more than I ever have in my whole life put together. The rewards were plentifold.
One thing seems certain, and that is that the mind can not be relied upon; it changes constantly. I learned this while living on hundred-acre Tree Toad Farm, on a dirt road, alone, for a month in the winter. It was the most silence and solitude I’ve ever experiencd, in every way. Trippy. Amazing learning experience, to witness my brain – !
And, scary as the unknown under the bed, it is this silent solitude that houses sweet creativity - dripping at first, like early nectar, then flowing, uncoaxed, into the sacred emptiness. Nature abhors a vacuum, you know. So fear not the abyss of the unknown, because, as T.S. Eliot put it, "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."
