Migrant Soul

My Migrant Soul, A Band History When I was seventeen I read these words… "It’s pretty much the same everywhere you go. You can sense it in the air. From the reserved towns built on the steaming red clay of Georgia – to the toppling ruins and drug scarred streets of Detroit – to the chaotic, bustling, elevated trains of Chicago – to the teeming, angry alienated misery of the Desire projects of New Orleans – to the opulent, reclusive estates of the Hollywood Hills. In the hearts of peopl...

My Migrant Soul, A Band History When I was seventeen I read these words… "It’s pretty much the same everywhere you go. You can sense it in the air. From the reserved towns built on the steaming red clay of Georgia – to the toppling ruins and drug scarred streets of Detroit – to the chaotic, bustling, elevated trains of Chicago – to the teeming, angry alienated misery of the Desire projects of New Orleans – to the opulent, reclusive estates of the Hollywood Hills. In the hearts of people across the country and around the world lies a desperation and emptiness that knows nothing about race, gender, class or language. The heart is the one place from where we can all speak. It aches with the unspeakable hunger and incessant whisper down in its core, that “something” is missing. What it is, is what remains unspeakable." I was sitting in the back of my red pickup truck, holding an album in my lap that I had recently bought. I had removed the album insert and was reading the liner notes. These first seven sentences set off a bell in my head as I read them over and over again. It was here that I first realized that music can speak to that lonely, haunted place, inside each of us. You know the place. It has its own particular voice and needs. It’s that voice that speaks so loudly, saying that things are not the way they are supposed to be, that we are not home yet. You can do your best to ignore the voice (we have created a whole industry in this country to try to escape it), to drown it in drink, sounds, sights, and thrills. But in the late hours of the night, it’s there, calling out, “There has got to be more!” Forget all the religious junk that exists in our culture, all the trappings, all the bad history. Can you honestly say that you feel like things are as they should be? Does the course the world has taken for so long now seem logical? Don’t you hear it, that still, small voice, that seems to say “There’s got to be more… more than the rat race, more than saving for retirement, more than that next high, be it legal or illegal. More, more, there has got to be more!” There is a verse in the Christian scriptures that captures perfectly this feeling I have had deep down in my soul for so long now. It comes from the book of Hebrews, chapter eleven, verse three. “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth.” Often I feel like these men of faith did in this verse. (And not always for the faith part) I feel like I’m a stranger in this world, a migrant soul wandering around a landscape where everything is foreign and unknown, trying to make sense of a world out of focus. In order to keep going, I have to believe that there is a land waiting for me, somewhere beyond the blue, where everything will make sense, where I will be known and will have understanding. But that conversation is for another day… That album, by the way, was “Blister Soul” by the Vigilantes of Love. The liner notes were written by rock critic, Thom Jurek. A few nights before reading the above mentioned quote, I had gone to my first solo concert in the far-away city of Portland, Main, to see the late, great, Rich Mullins. Outside the auditorium there was a representative for the now defunct Fingerprint Records. He was a smooth talker (aren’t all record company folks). When I walked into the auditorium a few minutes later, I had the Vigilantes of Love record and several other CDs in my school backpack, not knowing the significance that one of them would play on the rest of my life. On the long trip home I listened to the VOL album, but didn’t “get it”. It wasn’t the straight forward, plainspoken stuff that I usually listened to, so I took a pass on it for a while. Then, a few days later, sitting in my truck in the back fields of the camp where I worked, I pulled out the album for a friend of mine to listen to. We sat in the back, looked at the stars, and let the music play. I pulled out the CD cover and read away, and that was that. Or, that was the beginning… I have had, since I could remember, a torrid love affair with music. I inherited this love affair from my parents. My father (who passed away when I was two years old) once traded some blue jeans for a stack of records in Argentina, on his way to the Antarctic during a stint in the Coast Guard. He listened to that stack of records over and over again while watching the penguins go by his window as he manned his research station. He loved the song “Daniel” by Elton John so much that my mother gave that name as a middle name to my half brother (born many years later) as a tribute. My grandmother was a concert, radio and nightclub pianist in depression era Miami Beach, playing to the mobsters and bankers on holiday. My sister studied music education in college and my two year old daughter (who was named after a song by the band Caedman’s Call) can sing the chorus of “Old MacDonald” and the first few notes of “Frère Jaques". I met my wife playing music. She was singing back-up in my church’s “band” and I was attempting to play bass guitar. (Just having started playing two weeks before) She was beautiful, and wearing a great green scarf that made her look like a movie star from the 40’s. (Ingrid Bergman comes to mind) That night I could not hit a single note right, I was too busy staring across the circle of musicians. She sings for my band now. Her voice makes the words and notes I write come to haunted, beautiful life. She makes me want to marry her all over again when I listen to her go to work. Our band name is “My Migrant Soul” and we just fulfilled a life-long dream by putting out our first record “An Office Job In A Time Of War.” Our second album "What Do You Want" is coming out this summer and we're really excited about it. Thanks folks. It’s good for migrants to come together, Alex Caldwell (My Migrant Soul)