I Have Nothing to Offer but Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat

There are so many memorable quotations from Winston Churchill that, were you to honor the spirit and letter of his maxims, your life would be never be — you would never have cause to say you find your existence to be — boring; because the story of his victories and defeats, the episodes of his manic physical stamina and the chapters of his depressive darkness, a onetime exile within Parliament and an enemy of the enablers of appeasement — an opponent against those who, by waving the white flag of surrender, would raise high the banner of the crooked cross of Nazi hatred and Hitlerian aggression — in a life that is far from uneventful, the great man’s words echo across the veil of years:

Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense.

Think of those words, and recite them whenever that chorus of critics — with its ensemble cast of contrarians and cantankerous foes of hope and ambition — tries to silence you.

Ignore them because, whether the rejection slips arrive like a steady influx of telegrams or the bad news fills your voice mail with apologies and expressions of regret, you must keep moving forward into the light; toward broad, sunlit uplands, where the morning begins with the freedom to create a statement of lasting value — to compose a journal, paint a picture or write a song — and the evening ends with optimism for the morrow.

I am a witness to that sunrise, in Nashville, and a viewer of that orange-red sunset, in Los Angeles.

The light fills my mind, as I spend long hours in the recording studio; it infuses my personality, and suffuses my world of artistry with a sense of resolution.

I will not forfeit my dreams — and you must never sacrifice your desires — to the agents of misanthropy and miserly behavior.

Keep going.

I am making a new album — in Nashville.