Would you raher your life be exactly as you dreamed or unllike anything you’ve ever dreamed?

So stoked to have had the opportunity to collab with
Jackson Whalan on this! It’s a fusion of genres from halftime to hip-hop, a fusion of vibes from mellow to hype, a fusion-powered spacecraft, about to take off! Check it out!

If you have to say something super sensational to sell people something cause it won’t sell itself, maybe you should be selling something else.

I just had the craziest moment. I was like “Who sings that song that goes ‘I can ride my bike with no handlebars?’ It’s on the tip of my tongue. They are so popular I must have heard their name 1000 times I’ve gotta be able to remember this”. I’ve recently been trying to improve my memory so I decided I wouldn’t use google and I was going to remember the name of this band on my own. “Okay - for some reason I want to say Free the Robots but I know it’s not that cause he’s an instrumental hip hop artist. These guys are a band that had a pretty awesome album in the early 2000s and their name starts with an F… the Fleet Foxes? no but close…”

Things were not going well trying to remember the name of this band. I had been listening to a lecture on mindfulness earlier, and I realized that from the perspective of mindfulness, I was in a “trance” over this. I was limiting my mind by attaching...

Hey there, I’ve begun to open up my blog to be scrutinized by the eyes of the world, so I guess I’d better introduce myself. I’m Sam aka 5AM (my music alias). I’m a musician, an artist, and a thinker. I have a unique way of thinking which leads to unique thoughts and often I feel compelled to express those thoughts. My mind likes to manifest in different ways on different days, so as I’ve tried out new mediums I’ve continued to use the tried and true mediums. For a long time, these have been music and art. I used to read a lot as a child, so I believe that hidden in plain sight in my mind is a deeply ingrained penchant for language, music and art themselves being forms of language. My intention with this blog is to channel that more linguistic side of myself. Expect everything from music reviews to made-up words to artwork I enjoy to podcasts I dig and everything in between.

This...

The Zheng is a really beautiful instrument! I’m going to try to analyze some of the sonic aspects of this instrument and figure out what I need to be modulating in my lead synths and bass to get some of these decorative bends and articulations.

The analytical mind is a tool. It’s best to only take the it out when you need it and return it when you’re done with it. Otherwise you get clutter.

The analytical mind loooves to fixate on things, focusing the totality of your conscious mind on a tiny slice of reality. We should strive to minimize this impulse, as it is an obstacle to living fully in the present moment. The balance between analytical ego consciousness and fully present awareness is off kilter in our culture.

If you find it hard to turn off that mental chatter, it’s best to avoid judging yourself for that. If you fixate on the fact that you’re fixating it’s like trying to fight fire with fire ;)

The goal is to return attention to the present as quickly as possible, and the more we “allow”, the sooner we return to the present. This is more like fighting fire with water.

While there are currents of positivity and currents of negativity that cross our path and we sometimes feel subject to these forces, we actually get these critical moments where we can choose to perceive something as fundamentally positive. I sometimes feel these brief moments of ambiguous meaning that occur right before I attach meaning to something. Sometimes if I’m paying attention I can stop myself from attaching meaning and back up one step, to alter my perception of a situation, and thus become the co-creator of my reality. By catching these creative moments more often, we can take a more active role in life itself. It’s a form of alchemy, improvisational music, or doodling in a sketchbook. You perceive something changing or emerging and then you decide to apply your artistic hand to bringing that thing to life. “Whoops I heard a Bb and we were in C, ok, now we’re in F Major!”...