To Start Here’s a little TL;DR:

If you do happen to check out this album, and the music resonates with or moves you, I’d love feedback for what I can improve, sharing it with other people you think it could also resonate with or bring comfort to.

As the title says Everyone Welcome! Which I truly mean. It's not meant to be New Age, Humanistic, Pagen. Nothing like that. It has little nods to different philosophies, but fundamentally I want music to exist in the world that can truly connect everyone. Even if I'm not the one to do it I at least am trying,

Be the change you want to see in the world

Even just knowing it helped one other person feel seen or heard, would make everything worth it.

I’m also open to future collaborators, singers, instrumentalists, or fellow creators who feel this vibe and highly needed niche in the world. Either by helping me with my work, helping you with yours, making something together, featuring each other and mutual promotion, or even making our own small community to share ideas, advice, and resources.

They are also free to stream pay what you want to download on my BandCamp

Album Info and Inspo:

I just released the demo version of my concept album "Everyone Welcome: Secular Worship - For Weary Souls." It’s 7 songs (with more coming soon hopefully!), streaming now on Spotify, Bandcamp (pay-what-you-want), and YouTube. It should be available on all the major streaming platforms soon. 🥳🎶

It ranges in genres from ambient, indie singer-songwriter, traditional praise, ballad, ska punk, metal, rap, electronic, and a few others I'm working on.

“The Genuine Heart of Sadness” It’s one of the tracks I’m most proud of, and I really wanted to share it here since I couldn’t include it in the album. One of the works that I feel showcases the potential of the project when I have access to the right tools.

It’s on SoundCloud. I can't commercialize it because I used the free version of Suno. I wrote the lyrics entirely on my own from my own experiences meditating in my Atheist era, for health reasons, but like Alice down the rabbit hole I ended up entering this altered mental state even before having a name for it.

It references a Buddhist name for what I believe is a universal experience or altered state of consciousness that any human mind can enter under the right conditions. Many of my songs do little nods like that to different belief systems, that I hope can be either be taken literally by believers or as a parable to those with other faiths or (lack thereof). I also help it fosters a sense of connection, the underlying revealing the underlying thread I believe truly unites humanity.

Heart and Soul Of This Project

The heart of this project? I want to create music. Music that reaches across belief systems, traditions, and world views. Music that helps people connect and find community. I also want to create something that shows how much more alike we all are rather than different.

Themes like awe in nature, the internal guiding moral compass and personal responsibility and intrusive thoughts, instead of "sin" flow through the album. So do other universal concepts like selfless, carefree generosity, spiritual mystery, and the hidden sacredness in small acts, and reliance on community. Deities and strictly defined religious concepts are avoided but concepts and parables flow through, in the attempt to not make anyone feel alienated.

AI Assisted Work Disclaimer:

This project is deeply personal. I wrote 99% of the lyrics myself and my word processors spellcheck, and some contextual editing with the help of language models for tings like spelling and grammar mistakes. Other than "Stardust". The outro to "Reigniting the World" was a “happy little accident”, as Bob Ross would say. I meant to have an instrumental outro, but accidentally had automated lyrics enabled and I personally love how it summarizes and adds to the song.

I collaborate with AI tools as my virtual studio band. Not to replace the human element, but to bring these ideas to life. It’s feels like a similar process to when I could afford to hire human collaborators but I can’t anymore, sadly. The tweaking, the back and forth, the demo sharing etc.

"Do whatever you can, with whatever you have, wherever you are" -Winston Churchill

And that's exactly what I am doing now. I have a fire in my heart and am using whatever is available to me to let it out and warm up myself and hopefully others.

Behind the scenes were long nights of editing, 5 paragraph essays of prompt engineering /srs.

It can also take 20+ iterations of the same song and prompt tweaking to get something that feels like it finally meets my vision enough to even begin remixing and stitching together the best parts of the iterations. Not to mention my heart, soul, vision, concepts, and inner fire I bring to the table. If you want to know more about my process I'd love to talk more about it.

If AI's not your thing, I totally understand. We are in a liminal, ethically ambiguous state for many reasons and it's a highly controversial and polarizing topic for many reasons. The world is going through a lot of growing pains right now over this. I simply ask for kindness and mutual understanding in the way these opinions are expressed.

In Conclusion:

Thank you for creating and supporting this kind of space in the UU subreddit, and the UU community in general. It really helped open my heart to my own spiritual side and lead me down a more agnostic or Gnostic trail rather than my previous atheist state.(Which I still respect and this project is for you too) If anyone knows of any more active spaces like this, or similar churches/belief systems I would love to hear about them. I live in Spain and unfortunately they failed in getting UU approved as an official religion here.

If this kind of music feels like something the world needs more of, a stream, share, or kind word means the world to me. To help me share the heart and soul I am trying to share with the world. I genuinely, thank you for your time. ☮

This demo is just the beginning. If I can find the right support, tools, and/or collaborators, there’s so much more I want to create and to see created by others to be put out into the world in this niche. If this music concept lights a fire in you like it did for me and catches on and spreads, let’s keep “Reigniting the World” together!

I did it for myself mostly because I'm always looking for music like this for my collection, but I thought the community might like having them all in one place too so I made it public. 😁