Bill’s Musings

November 11, 2013

This BLOG has come into being almost on its own insistence. Even I want to know why I have returned more seriously to music and made a record after letting it putter along for so many years. Songwriting has always been something I do, regardless of whether anyone else ever hears it, at least until now. I write songs because I need to. Music and poetry are an essential part of my life, along with politics, law, economics, meditation, Buddhism, Shambhala and the rest of it. It is all interrelated and perhaps interesting. In any event, it was interesting to the FBI. Once I was asked to explain to the Lawyers Guild in Denver, Colorado how I transitioned from being a very radical member of SDS to poetry, meditation, music and the practice of law at a large corporate law firm. Later I was told that the Guild had done a Freedom of Information Act request for information about surveillance…

Album Released

November 5, 2013

In 1979 I attended Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche’s three-month Buddhist seminary at Chateau Lake Louise in Alberta, Canada. One day, he was in the kitchen of his suite making Bandit Soup, one of his special recipes. It’s raw meat dropped into boiling water and seasoned to taste. Other ingredients could be added, but that is its essence. I asked him if it were an old family recipe, and he responded the meat and the water represent earth and humanity and the seasonal flavoring is the heaven principle. Together, they express the brilliance of the Great Eastern Sun. That’s how he was with everything. Philosophy aside, it’s also a meal the highland bandits of Tibet turn to as they quickly move along. But for me it represents the vitality in every twist and turn of fate in our lives. Songwriting for me arises out of that vitality, and I turn regularly to it to express and sometimes to find the melodies of…