2012 Politics Radio Show: Part 2 of 2!

Wednesday 10/29/08

At last, the long-awaited follow-up to David’s original 2012 Politics online radio show! An in-depth look at where we are and where we’re going!

 

 

CHANGE IS IN THE AIR

What do you think 2012 really means? If you still think ‘nothing,’ but have not closed your mind to the alternatives, then it’s probably worth your while to listen to these radio shows and dig more into the content on this website.

As we’ve been discussing in the 2012 Politics article series, the crop circle phenomenon has now reached an undeniable milestone: the exact planetary alignment of December 21, 2012 has now been revealed in a crop formation.

Even more interestingly, the 2012 formation was changed after its initial appearance, suggesting that some very powerful event involving the Sun will occur at this time.

 

 

Other formations, detailed in 2012 Politics Part 2 and Part 3, suggested the Circlemakers are well aware of the work we’re putting out on this website and gave us an “official endorsement.” An infinity-loop design I placed into a graphic for Richard Hoagland’s website appeared in the English crops the very next morning, and a formation from the day before duplicated the orbital diagrams featured in the same article.

Considering all the evidence — the best of which is still found in the Science of Peace MP3 Series, the upcoming CONVERGENCE film / DVD combo and our public events — it is very obvious that this is not going to be “just another day.”

 

LOTS OF CHANGES FOR THE POSITIVE, NO MATTER WHAT

It’s a shame that so many people get hooked on “doom and gloom” as we move through this process, but it is understandable. This is not meant to be an easy time in our history. We are going through the “birth pains” that allow us to wake up from our “sleepwalking”, where we have been turning against each other for so long, and instead realize the Oneness we all share. 

Even if you don’t ‘buy’ the idea of a spontaneous energetic shift, one cannot deny that what we’re going through as a planetary society right now is truly extraordinary. This election has brought up all the major prejudices we have been through as a society. These are the very issues that have most effectively kept us polarized against each other, and therefore not seeing our Oneness.

By transcending these issues, it raises the possibility that many more people will be ready for the energetic shift into ‘fourth-density’ that our planet is now going through:

Sexism and Equal Rights for Women: Hillary Clinton’s candidacy broke the male-dominated political world on the Democratic side, and now even the Neocons — the ultimate symbol of the patriarchy — have followed suit by bringing in Sarah Palin.

Knocking either Hillary or Palin for being a woman has become totally inappropriate. The focus has been on their experience and qualifications for public office.

Racial Intolerance: Barack Hussein Obama is half-Caucasian and half-African, with a Muslim-sounding name that reminds people of the two biggest bogeymen of the Neocons stage-managed War On Terror: Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

It is nothing short of astonishing that so many traditionally intolerant members of our society are letting go of their prejudices and voting for the candidate who is better for the country, rather than out of instinctive, xenophobic fear of a race or a purported religion. 

The scars of the Civil War still remain in the division between the “red” and “blue” states, which in the 2000 and 2004 elections was practically an identical map to how the Civil War went down with the states that were a part of the US at the time.

The South, of course, was the side that was fighting (in part) for the right to keep the slave trade alive. Now we have an election where a half-African man is actually winning the election in these very same states. This is of unspeakably vast importance in the opening of the hearts within the Heartland.

Colin Powell’s recent statements about anti-Muslim prejudice are just the beginning of a healing process that will very likely continue — and expand — if Obama takes the presidency.

Plots to assassinate Obama, and / or racially-motivated acts of hate, have had the very strong effect of exposing the ugliness and discomfort of racism, so that more and more people can choose NOT to think and act this way.

Religious Extremism: Sarah Palin’s nomination was so blatant in its attempt to pander to the extreme religious right that even the Evangelical Christians themselves are awakening to the shortcomings of “clinging to guns or religion.” Surprising numbers of them are changing their minds and actually waking up to how their extremist views have been manipulated to win elections. 

Similarly, the people are now seeing the similarities between all different forms of religious extremism, whether Christian or Islamic. No one wants war — we are all wishing for greater peace and stability as a society.

The more we look at the relationship between government corruption, racism, us-versus-them thinking and religion, the more we realize that these great spiritual teachers would never have wanted us to turn against one another. 

Generational Prejudice: Is it right to be prejudiced against people because of their age? With McCain being 72 years old, all these issues have been stirred up as well.

It has clearly been established that we should not be biased against McCain because of his age. Those attacks are simply not appropriate. It’s not about his age — it’s about whether he has the competence and vision to lead his country. 

This is a valuable step, considering how many of us forget about elderly relatives once they are moved into ‘assisted living’ as if they are no longer thinking, feeling people who need our guidance and support.

Classism and Economic Segregation: The wealthiest members of our society have been able to turn us against each other, manipulating all the above prejudices as well as the basic concepts of “Republican” versus “Democrat,” but now the game has changed.

More than ever, the spotlight is being turned on the entrenched power structures. The scope of the public uprising over the 700-billion-dollar bailout is unprecedented in any modern history. The fatcats have already received the “kill shot,” and are now on the run, spilling blood as they go.

We shouldn’t gloat over their defeat, but rather be grateful that the public ignorance they have taken advantage of for so long is finally eliminating — and along with it comes freedom and a much greater prosperity in the long run. 

 

It is truly astonishing to watch these changes taking place. All the elements we need to ‘wake up’ as a society have been brought to our attention by this election, and for that very reason it is a singularly powerful and amazing renaissance in social and collective consciousness — perfectly in alignment with what ancient prophecies said would be occurring during this time of our history.  

 

EXCELLENT PROGRESS ON ‘WANDERER AWAKENING’

On the personal level I’m going through my own renaissance. I’ve never worked this hard in my entire life and it never seems to stop, but I did at least manage to watch three out of four DVDs I rented while I was home in LA for a week. I also was sick almost the entire time from sheer exhaustion, including a constant need for sleep, body aches and stomach upset.

I flew back to Texas on Monday morning, hopefully finishing all the vocal-music portions of “Wanderer Awakening” before I head off to my Mexican Riviera cruise on November 8-15th. I had only recovered from my stress illness the afternoon before I left. 

 

 

I must say I’m thrilled with how this is turning out. A few stray hecklers have expressed doubts about whether I would sound any good as a lead singer, and that’s fine. They will be surprised.

No band or musical style appeals to everyone, but the people I’ve played our in-progress demos for already have turned to me in amazement and said, “This is YOU singing, David?” Yes, it is. Soon enough, everyone will be able to form their own informed opinion. 

I do have ‘perfect pitch,’ i.e. the ability to sing a note from a given song without hearing anything to start me off, and have it be at the right pitch and key for that part of the song. I also have good breath control and can do various rates of vibrato, sound like lots of different singers, emulate various singing styles, et cetera.

We have everything from hard rock and ‘screaming metal’ to blues and ‘blue-eyed soul,’ and hit an Eagles sound in several songs thanks to our lush background vocals. Larry’s advanced chord changes and harmonic / melodic song structures definitely give us the feel of the great 70s records, which I’m thrilled about. 

 

 

A friend of mine who heard some of the earliest demos, before I really hit my stride as a vocalist, heard the most recent stuff on this last trip and she was blown away at the difference. There really are very few acts out there these days that are hitting this kind of production value. 

Nonetheless, I have still had to go through a major “learning curve” to be able to handle the professional studio-level work required to do this album. By no means did I just walk in and “nail it” from the beginning, and Larry’s professional standards are such that he will not settle for anything other than the best out of me.

 

THE LEARNING CURVE

The most difficult idiosyncrasy I have had to tackle in my natural singing performance is a propensity for “fall-offs,” which are very slight downturns in pitch at the end of notes, especially those that sustain before diving down to a suddenly lower pitch.

Most people would never notice such things, but professionals do — and when you have reverb on your voice, fall-offs disrupt the purity of the pitch as it echoes out after you’ve sung the note. 

 

 

My second-biggest challenge has been simply running out of air and feeling like I’m hyperventilating when I’m doing take after take on individual sections within a song, which all professional singers, no matter how good, must go through at machine-gun pace in the studio — sometimes for hours at a time.

It is exhausting work and you start getting light-headed. This is NOT the kind of buzz you want to have when you’re trying to remember an extremely complex set of variables for the delivery and nuances of each line.

Working with a skilled producer as a vocalist, as I am doing with Larry, means you may have to remember 7, 10 or more different very specific things you have to do for one single line, and execute all of them flawlessly each time, while also remembering new ones that get thrown at you to try out as you keep going. 

In addition to remembering all these exact variables — breathiness, pitches, vibrato, rhythm, sustain, pitch scoops at the beginning of notes (bending up into the pitch at times), phrasing, et cetera — you have to give each performance the maximum amount of soul, feeling and breath capacity to get those vocal parts up to snuff for each and every take, and it can be brutal and very frustrating. 

If you forget any of them, the music stops. You have two or three seconds to breathe and then you do it again. And again. And again.

 

THE CHALLENGE OF ADJUSTMENT

I had some degree of trouble adjusting to the milieu of studio singing when I first got into it. I had trouble hitting some of my pitches in our earliest songs, particularly the ones that came and went at very fast speed. I soon discovered it was simply because I needed more volume in the headphones so I could hear myself. Once we solved that, I had a much easier time nailing each take.

This has been like learning a whole new career, and I do plan on taking voice lessons to get the most difficult techniques down.

In particular, for the so-called “blue-eyed soul” songs, I’m developing the ‘curlicues’ you hear black singers do at the end of phrases, where they run through a series of notes at fast speed with soul and thick vibrato.

The fastest, most complex ‘curlicues’ are still difficult for me to get my voice to do, without having the pitches bleed into each other and melt together to some degree — but I’m working on it. The trick is giving yourself enough extra air pressure at the beginning of each new note in the sequence so they can be easily differentiated from each other.

 

THE ‘RASP’

Another threshold I had to go through for our hard rock songs was whether or not to use ‘rasp’ in any of my vocals. I was originally completely against the idea, because it can be miserable to reproduce that night after night on the road and can make you very sick.

Your voice naturally rasps when you scream, and without too much practice you can learn to sing that way. Some people have an easier time doing it when they’re drunk, as you’re much less likely to notice how it is disrupting your health.

The ‘rasp’ sound originally comes from blues singers who could not sing without rasping their voices, due to damage from cigarette smoking and hard liquor. Most people don’t naturally have that issue and have to create the sound by how they use their vocal cords.

The problem is that even after one song of doing ‘rasp,’ your histamines start firing off and you feel like you’re catching a cold. Eventually if you do it too much, too many nights in a row, you get nodules growing on your vocal cords and require surgery to have them removed. Many hard rock singers have gone through this, including W. Axl Rose from Guns ‘N Roses. 

Nonetheless, the ‘rasp’ sound is the ONLY way that you can get that quintessential Zeppelin hard-rock sound. I like the results so much that we’re doing it on several songs anyway.

 

 

 

One of the agreements I’ve made with myself is I’m not going to do more than two concerts a week so I can avoid getting sick and / or having throat problems on the road. If you watch Zeppelin videos you’ll see that this vocal style was essentially a studio phenomenon, and Robert Plant was not able to consistently reproduce it in live concert events. 

Another trick is to selectively use the ‘rasp’ on certain notes and drop it on others, and Phil Collins uses that quite a bit in his music. Many singers do not realize that you can turn it on and turn it off selectively at certain points to get a greater emotional effect without causing as much damage to your voice. 

I’ve also seen Phil Collins NOT use his rasp in live performances on songs where he did use it in the studio, and honestly if you’re not listening for the difference you can’t really tell. The focus is on the quality and emotion of the performance. 

 

DETOURED FROM MUSIC FOR MANY YEARS

Some of the guitars used on this project.

Most people who follow my story know that I was raised in a musical family, with my mother teaching keyboards and voice and my father writing about the most popular musicians, and getting me backstage to meet all the stars.

I spent years of my life believing I was heading into a career in music, getting to a professional-level competency as a jazz percussionist over the years (jazz-rock fusion being my favorite style,) but I pursued a degree in psychology as a fallback because I knew music was a starvation-level income in almost all cases.

I grew up living through the humbling poverty of living in a musical family, so that was enough firsthand experience to show me what I did NOT want to repeat in my own life.

I was deeply inspired by Phil Collins’ career, as I first fell in love with his jazz-fusion work in a band called Brand X that he pursued in the late 1970s after Peter Gabriel left Genesis. None of this music ever really caught on, but “Product” is one of my favorite albums of all time. Allegedly you can download tracks from this album for free at this site.

 

 

Phil Collins was the inspiration for me to start learning how to really be a good drummer, and see how I could transcend the typical limitations of hard-rock drumming and bring in jazz influences.

I also saw how he eventually stepped out from behind the drums and became a lead vocalist, and instinctively I felt I was going to follow the same trajectory in my own career. Now, all these years later, that is exactly what has happened. Teddy Pendergrass is another great singer who started out as a drummer before becoming a front-man, and of course Don Henley is the drummer AND the most-loved lead singer in the Eagles.

Despite years and years of work I’d put into developing my own instrument, and composing my own music through various means, I felt as if I had to give up on my aspirations to be a professional musician in 1996 as I really plunged into the UFOlogy and metaphysical studies.

I had a really cool improvisational jazz band I was in with guys I jammed with in college, called Rosendale Jazz Project, but after four or five months we reached a turning-point where they wanted me to fully devote my time and energy to being a drummer in this group.

They told me if I was unwilling to ‘give up’ the metaphysics, I would be out of the band. It was a very hard decision, but I did not feel I needed to limit my bandwidth… and in retrospect I’m very glad I did not. 

 

EARLY EFFORTS

Beginning in 2000, when I bought my first keyboard, my own readings suggested I not get too involved in pursuing music while I was developing this website and the original CONVERGENCE book series. Nonetheless, I still built up an armada of cool musical gear that allowed me to do some great stuff if I ever made the time for it.

One of the only lasting pieces I did write during this time was the background music for the What is My Purpose MP3, (2004), which is now one of our most popular — and most affordable — products.

‘Purpose’ is a psychedelic pleasure palace, borrowing from my favorite ‘trip music’ styles to provide background music for a reading — and if you loved The Science of Peace, you should also add this one to your collection: 

 

 

Now with Wanderer Awakening, we’re combining the psychedelic qualities of “What is My Purpose” in the 24 “interlude pieces” with all my favorite styles of chart-topping popular music realized in 24 vocal songs.

We anticipate that the entire collection, if you listen to it straight through, will neatly fill two CDs worth of space, though it will ONLY be available as a download. Despite the opinions of our customers who want to rewrite reality for their own desires, WE DO NOT SELL ANY PHYSICAL BOOKS OR CDs!!!

The amount of work that is going into this project is incredible, but so are the results… and it may very well become our most-loved project ever. It presents a comprehensive Law of One message about ET souls volunteering to be human and forgetting who they are. It shows you how your Higher Self guides you through the various growth experiences of your life. And the music itself is very cool. 

 

 

This is where I’m spending 90 percent of my time working on the website while in Larry’s studio — directly in front of the Grammys and other awards Larry has won over the years (9 Grammys in total.) They definitely serve as an inspiration when my throat feels all rasped out from doing rock vocals, though we would be amazed if the ‘mainstream’ pays any attention at all, due to our unique subject matter!

I will also have to make decisions as to whether to do musical concerts, public lectures or some combination of the two — but that is, as we’d say, a “happy problem”, particularly because there is enough material in the series to do an entire concert.

Lastly, here’s a photo gallery of shots from our work in the studio. Some of them you’ve seen, and others you have not. We photographed the equipment we’re using for the signal chain of my voice for those who are interested in the tube preamps and such that I’m running through.

 

LINK TO FACEBOOK PHOTO GALLERY

 

 

 FUTURE APPEARANCES

After my upcoming cruise, I then have another brief hiccup of time at home before I leave for the Phoenix conference on the weekend of November 22-24, where my latest, greatest, most hard-hitting scientific evidence for the 2012 case will be publicly aired with a richly illustrated Power Point slideshow.

If there’s any way you can get there, I highly recommend you go. If not, there will be others, but I honestly don’t know how many I will be able to do once the CONVERGENCE film production flies into full swing: 

 

 

Just so you have a sense of my future appearances, I have now agreed to speak at the Conscious Life Expo in Los Angeles this February. I have also been offered the most prized speaker slot at the International UFO Congress in Laughlin, Nevada, which will occur somewhere in late February or early March this year.

At the UFO Congress, I’ve been offered the final slot, on the final day, directly before the big banquet dinner itself. This is yet another sign of how things have changed, as this conference is arguably the biggest event in the UFO field — and I already was given the keynote speaker position at this year’s Exopolitics International and American Society of Dowsers conferences.

I am honored to accept this invitation for the UFO Congress, and will definitely deliver the goods. When I spoke there last year the room erupted into a sustained standing ovation at the end of my talk, as also occurred at the Exopolitics conference and the Dowsers conference.

People get so blown away by what I talk about — particularly those who did not already know about me — that I have a hard time navigating through the hotel because everyone wants to stop me on my way and tell me their life story.

A major part of my own ‘catalyst’ as an evolving spiritual being has been how to handle public appearances and not be ‘eaten alive’ in the process by all the people wanting something more than what they paid to come and see.

I stopped doing ALL conferences for over two years because I was a “people pleaser” and let everyone talk as much as they wanted. I would end up getting sick for weeks when I got home, thus turning me off to the entire concept. Please bear this in mind if you are attending one of my events — my job is to do the talk, and maybe one booksigning / meet-and-greet, but other than that I really do need to have the space and time to think, meditate, prepare and have solitude.

As far as CONVERGENCE goes, we still have two major investors in play, both of whom are getting very, very close to being able to finance our entire budget. We would be honored to work with either of them and are confident that a deal will be reached shortly. The recent economic changes have prolonged events that could have already led to us closing the deal, but it’s just a matter of time. 

 

AND NOW, ON WITH THE SHOW…

What you are about to hear is Part Two of David’s latest radio show / audio blog, recorded a week and a half ago now, giving an overview from this unique moment in our history. A link to Part One is also included in case you don’t already have it.

Enjoy! I probably won’t be back again with a new update until after the election. Let’s make sure we vote so we don’t have an upset on the 5th!

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Since people invariably ask me if I’m reading from prepared written notes, here’s the deal. I sat down for both of these 65-minute-long recordings with NO notes, NO preparation, NO idea of what I was going to talk about beyond a very basic level, and just went free-form.

There are no digital edits to shorten pauses, remove “ums” or “uhs,” et cetera. You will hear it exactly as it came through in real time. All I did between Parts 1 and 2 is hit STOP and then immediately hit RECORD again.

I do go into a type of trance state when I do this, though I’m still very much present with the process. Therefore, I can’t listen back to these recordings without falling asleep, because I get hypnotized by my own voice. That’s a good thing, as the sound of my own voice SHOULD put me in trance if I am going to get a “clean feed”: