Together We Will Live Forever

One of the greatest concepts I like to mesmerize my mind with these days is the power of collaboration. It's in our nature to work together. We all Love the songs and melodies that we can harmonize along to. A companion to travel with to new lands. A dance partner.

"What I can do, you cannot. What you can do, I cannot. But together we can do something beautiful" -Mother Teresa

A few things we know about collaboration . . .

When Yellow and Blue paints mix, Green is born.

When tectonic plates collide, mountains are formed.

When Outkast and Queen converge:

Since I first began writing songs, I've spent so much time staying in on Friday nights to fill countless pages and gigabytes with new ideas and reverberations. I've stayed up night after night (tonight was definitely one of these instances) to sit in total darkness, just to get the shivers from listening to the way a guitar and voice can sound so hauntingly pure with the lights off. I've spent so long role-playing the part of the lone lab scientist, determined to unlock for myself the secret to creating living/breathing music. After all these years, the answer is the same as it was back when the first song poured from my pen - it's pretty much spontaneous magic and I don't really understand it.

So when two people get together and into existence comes a new creation, it's even more mystifying. To me, collaborating with different writers and musicians is like adding our own ingredients into a cauldron, anxious to find if we'll be feasting on something exotic and delicious, or if we're stuck with some sort undercooked meatloaf that we accidentally made. I've been really lucky in my experiences. Way more often than not it's been fine dining. The coolest part of working with other people is the effect a joint effort has on the writer in me. Playing an acoustic guitar accompanied by a cello spins entirely different wheels than plugging in an electric guitar in a poorly ventilated rehearsal space with a rock band, or pounding the keys of some 80's sci-fi synth to the ass-kicking beat thundering from a subwoofer. There are just way too many "genres" of music to ever think I could settle on just one and feel musically satisfied. That's why I'm so thankful for all the people in my Life, musician or not, for supplying the awesome (and environmentally friendly) fuel required to do what I do, and to be who I am. We're All In This Together.

Some may find it's not the meal they hoped for, some may find it blasphemous, but here are some examples of attention-catching cross-breeding I've recently come across:

Thanks, Youtube and Wikipedia, for providing endless volumes of entertainment and interesting knowledge to enhance the flavor of an otherwise pretty bland body of text.

And Thank You for the constant high-frequency energy you radiate into the atmosphere. Believe me, it's been mixing heavily into my music and my dreams lately. I look forward to the world we'll create together.

Without U I'm just

ryan doglas dilmore