The Tower represents abrupt, cataclysmic destruction or revelation, when all you are and all you know, suddenly collapses. Crawling through the rubble, you are urged to reexamine your beliefs and relationships - the very foundation of your existence - so that you may begin anew, to rebuild and reconnect.
ELUSIVE ADAPTATION
SONG RELEASE STORY
June 28, 2024
Life is hard to predict. The most careful planners often get it wrong. Or do they? It's all a matter of perspective. Elusive as it may seem, life also requires adaptation.
I had always wanted to be a songwriter but I kept getting held back by health issues. Everyone who listened to my demos said, "Why aren't you doing more with your music?" The question left me perplexed. I was writing good songs, but I was barely surviving each day. I couldn't catch a break long enough to put a business plan together. I had to settle for being a hobbyist, which I loathed because it never felt accurate. I hadn't chose music. Music chose me.
In 2009, I felt like my soul was dying. I needed to figure this out. I joined a small songwriting group and met people who taught me how to make, sell and promote my own music. From January 2010 to December 2013, I fought like hell to make something of myself. I worked day and night, played gigs, and recorded at a local studio. It was during this time that I met Brian Daly and we worked on an EP called "Adaptation." It was meant to represent my adjustment to the conditions of my life - finding a way to create my songs despite living in a body built wrong. The most relevant track for the album was an adaptation of Eminem's "Lose Yourself." But I couldn't reach the original songwriters to secure their approval. I didn't have a large enough network.
You see, anyone can release a cover of someone else's song. It's perfectly legal to do so if you pay royalties of your earnings to the original songwriter/s. But if you change the lyrics or the arrangement, your version is no longer a cover. It's an adaptation. That requires special approval before release.
This key song didn't make the cut, but the others were still strong, in particular a song called "It All Comes Down,” written in August of 2011. So I persisted, thinking I could handle working two careers - one to pay for making music, and one to make the music. I released the album on my birthday and threw a small CD release party. We still played CDs back then.
During those years, I was so centered on my music that I lost sight of important values and sold my soul to the devil. I made selfish decisions and neglected the people closest to me. I turned inside out and I had to quit. So, I threw it all away. At the advice of a therapist in January 2014, I closed my music business and took down all my recordings.
Somewhere between then and now, I re-entered the indie artist scene. I had figured out my true calling: to create The Music Tarot. It took me nearly seven years to recover from that earlier attempt. I assumed I would write all new songs for my life's calling, completely separating my old self from the new.
But the tricky thing about the past and the present is that they are intertwined and cannot be completely severed. They are stacked together. Things that happened before are never really done and gone. Life is not as black and white as I was raised to believe.
Writing for The Music Tarot began in 2019, and production began in 2021. In 2022, I found myself thinking about that Adaptation EP. Were any of those tracks tarot songs in disguise? "Nah, that would make a mess of my new works!" I thought. I didn't want to muddy the waters of my shiny new project with songs created during my damaged years. Still, the thought pulled at me. I decided to use the process I had come to rely upon and allow my intuition to guide me. I would wait and see. If I felt the lure of claircognizance, I would be certain. Only then would I consider allowing the Adaptation tracks into The Music Tarot.
The beckoning came in March 2024, two years later. But it wasn't "It All Comes Down" that tapped me on the shoulder. It was The Fool, disguised as a song called, "Science and Medicine." That darn Fool had been eluding me since 2019 when I first began writing the tarot. And suddenly I knew why. He had already been written! In July 2012 as a matter of fact.
Once I realized with absolute certainty I had been writing tarot songs during my earlier years, I carefully re-examined the Adaptation songs. Sure enough, there were four tarot tracks hiding in that EP. Four! It All Comes Down practically screamed at me, "I am The Tower, do you not see?!"
When I told Brian the news, he was pleasantly surprised. Fortunately he is an excellent archivist. He still had the original tracks. Of course, we would need to refresh them and bring them into our new vision. The vocals all required re-singing, and some of the lyrics were wrong. But the essence was there. Brian updated the arrangement, transitions, and added a much richer texture. I set out to find the correct lyrics.
By restoring the tracks, I had an opportunity to revisit old wounds and turn them into the kind of beauty only possible through true healing. Final production occurred in April and May 2024, and everything came together better than I could have imagined. The pulse of the major chord progression hits hard as soon as it begins. Suddenly, the sound shifts to an unsettling minor chord, representing the collapse. The lyrics describe how life survives, pain escapes, love adjusts and wrecked connects. Why. Change. When.
The story behind creating It All Comes Down / The Tower is a literal tale about the card's meaning. When I created the track the first time, my dreams came crashing down. When I created it anew, my life had been rebuilt. Gone was the appalling heartache, sadness and loss of dignity that had been the horrid taste of despair. The elation of awakening to a new idea ripe for picking had me dancing on air. The revelation of connecting these two very different, very distinct time points created a new tapestry to my story. I think the cards themselves tell it best. It is the tarot after all.