Album Notes

The name "Jopoa" means Grandma in my dialect and this musical odyssey was inspired by my incredible 25 year journey with the tiny 98 year old spiritual being shown on the cover of the CD. Jopoa came into my life to teach me about transcendent love and she left this life to teach me about letting go. My songwriting arose out of my need to find a way to keep her spirit alive when I knew her death was imminent. Her departure was the seed that gave birth to this first and all successive CD's to follow.

Released on July 31, 2004, the second anniversary of Jopoa's death, this CD marks the beginning of my quest to share her love with others to remind us that our fundamental nature is loving kindness. The cover art reflects the global scope of this project; the translation of the CD title into many languages shows that this music is intended to reach across all cultural boundaries.

These songs are messages of awareness put to music. The music acts as a tool to increase the effectiveness of the message...a beautiful melody helps the message to resonate much more strongly with our emotional center and this makes it much more likely to be remembered. The songs emphasize that each one of us is responsible for removing our own obscurities. It is through our own blindness that we constantly manufacture the illusory duality of friends and enemies and the continual attachment, aversion and suffering this brings. It is only when ordinary people of all cultures begin to view each other as members of the same global family that the illusion of friends and enemies will begin to dissolve and along with it, all the subsequent suffering it brings.

The vision of this project is simple: use music as the vehicle for Jopoa's message of loving kindness and appeal to musicians around the world to help translate and deliver a universal and humanistic message of love to people of every culture. Such music is inherently global in nature.

Grandma's appearance and manifestation in the world continues through this vision. Once the framework of musicians and international collaborators is in place, each new song that is introduced will be like a drop of awareness falling into the vast unchanging sea of our own obscurations and ignorance. Musicians are the key to help spread this message, to make it a universal one by taking the music that begins here and radiating it outwards to their cultures like a ripple on a pond.