A Child of war and violence - autobiography.
I was born on the 18th day of the year 1974. At the moment I was being excreted my mother was present but my father was not.
The early years are a blur. Except the time when I electrocuted myself, I only remember the toilet in our house. The toilet was my punishment for not eating my breakfast. One day my mother had enough, I presume of my father, and left. My father then cried himself to temporary paralysis and I sat by the door waiting for someone. It was 1977.
Over the next two years therapy managed to cure me of my Freudian violence just in time for the 1979 Islamic Revolution. For me it began on the day when a group of soldiers burst into my bedroom to open fire at rebels across the street. I remained under my bed and witnessed my first blood bath. From that day the streets became savage.
In 1980 the Iran and Iraq war seamlessly took over from the revolution. Soon air raids and sirens became routine, fighter planes dropping their bombs over us daily; food rations, lack of water and electricity just part of the normal life. I became a child of war and violence.
In 1983 I played my first piano for the last time and recorded the little songs I knew on cassettes and gave them to loved members of my family as farewell presents. The time had come for my new life to begin. My father and I were unwilling to accept the promise of martyrdom as an acceptable offer for my future.
A long and torturous route led me to the England where my mother had been living. On my second day in England I was taken to a Roman Catholic Military Boarding School where I remained until I graduated at the age of nineteen.
The first Sunday of school Mr. Goodall the music teacher discovered me singing in a corridor and punished me by sending me to the choir. Ironically, I had escaped the fundamentalists of the Middle East and landed myself a position singing Ave Maria for the Pope. Life could not get more bizarre or so I thought.
Rain, Porridge, Rugby; Sister Fenton who had stolen Hitler’s Mustache and forced made me take a bath in another child’s urine; Mr. McCarthy who called me a ‘fucking Ayatollah’ for five consecutive years; Running around the Welsh country side with the British Army at the weekends; Cold showers; Getting caned; Having my ass smacked by grown up male adults who liked to wear slippers at evening time; Heating up the toilet seat for older boys by sitting on it. England was more bizarre than anyone who has not lived there could imagine.
So I found Sanctuary in Music. The day my father bid me farewell he armed me with my first Sony Walkman and my first four albums: Cat Stevens ‘Tea for the Tilerman’, Beatles ‘The Love songs’, Bread ‘The Sound of Bread’, and Simon and Garfunkel ‘Bridge Over troubled Water. These albums became the soundtrack to my life and the pillars on which I fell in love with music, formed my first band, and began to write songs for every experience!
In 1992, after graduating, I got a job in a small recording studio named The Refuge. The agreement was that I engineered sessions and in return I could use the studio at night to record my own demos.
After a year of no sleep, no money and practically no life, I decided on further education. In 1996 I received a Bachelors degree in English Literature. In 1997 I headed to New York City and began working on my music again, funded in part by jobs ranging from singing to cleaning at a jingle house. By 1998 I was back in Europe traveling the continent and writing songs when in London. In 1999 I signed a publishing deal with Rondor Music. Firmly believing this was the last money I would ever see from music I invested the money wisely and put myself through graduate school studying International Business Strategy. I finished school once again in the year 2000.
In 2001 a series of bizarre twists of fate that had been spiraling for about a year brought me to the US with the promise of a record deal and the opportunity to build on a dream. I am still here so things must be going well!
Buddahead: Biography by Lonn Friend
How we come to encounter people who change our lives is a timeless mystery. If we are conscious to our surroundings, these angelic entities begin to appear with great regularity. Buddahead dematerialized before my eyes two weeks ago in a midtown Manhattan office building. I have not been the same since.
Buddahead is graceful in speech and demeanor. When he begins to tell his story, he finds your eyes, penetrates them, and carefully but passionately orates, heart to heart. If he was coming from any other place, I'd of politely spent ten minutes, shook his hand, and made my way. But there is a light about this young man, it radiates, captivates. He is articulate, exotically good-looking, reminds me of Perry Farrell ten years past, olive skin aglow, deep, searching eyes possessing wisdom far beyond his tender years but not enough to belay an obvious insatiable desire to know more. To know everything.
"I learned the piano first," he says. "Living in a fundamentalist country, music was banned. We had an old rickety piano in the house. That's when I started hitting the black and white keys. It felt organic. My dad saw my connection to the instrument and got me a piano teacher.
"I had a Russian teacher in grade school after I moved to London, where I grew up. She was about theory and scales and not music. I wanted to write songs like Elton john and Cat Stevens. So I learned to do it myself. I fell in love with rock n' roll. The Led Zeppelin Box Set with the crop circles on the cover, I bought that. "No quarter" was the track that knocked me on my back. Now I wanted to play guitar so I bought a Squire Stratocaster. There was a guitar teacher in high school who insisted I play chords. I told him I wanted to play solos. I was enamored by Slash's solo in GN'R's "Paradise City" video and BB King's amazing playing in U2's Rattle and Hum."
It wasn't long, however, before Buddahead grew tired of the riff and volume and began to discover the place where his true musical soul resided - in the honeysweet harmonies and bittersweet lyrics of a 70s band long gone. The pop psalms of David Gates, leader of the band Bread, became Buddahead's greatest inspiration. Buddahead picks up his acoustic and begins to play a classic, channeling, and the Gates of heaven open in gentle, tuneful recollection. His eyes close, rapt in misty memory, a returning home for the artist, the young man, en route to Wonderland. This is Buddahead's space. He knows it well and has taken the cues with keen awareness.
"Art Garfunkle singing "Bridge over Troubled Water," or Harry Nilsson on the chorus of "Without You," these are the moments I connect with as an artist. These are my heroes. This is where my songs come from. This is where my voice comes from. These are the giants of music whose names I hope to evoke with my own songs, for without them, I would never have found my own voice."
Buddahead asks me if I'd like to hear him play some of the songs from his album. "There's a song on my record called "Outside," he says, adjusting the tuning pegs on his guitar. Jimmy (Iovine - record company head and the man who personally signed Buddahead to the label) wanted me to hit a high chorus on this song, like Nilsson in 'Without You.' I was thinking about Harry when I wrote it. Jimmy was thinking about Harry when I recorded it." The troubadour commences his strum for captured audience of one.
"Don't know where to begin, always outside looking in/don't know how to begin/always outside looking in/always outside looking in." Buddahead's voice resonates, echoes, and shatters the somnolent silence of the cloistered, glass- enclosed office. You can feel Harry's spirit in the room, his tenor tenderness reaching out through the ether, through the lungs of a student, a prodigy, a fan born with pipes, personality and purpose. He is Freddie Mercurial in operatic scale but his presentation is not theater. It is simple, real, reflections of a life, the discovery of a self, in music manifestation that touches the heart via themes anyone's whose ever been in love, lost or in pain can identify with.
"How does it feel on the inside? How does it feel to know you're alone? How does it look from the outside, when you're leaving home?" Buddahead is unplugged, unafraid, unwilling to let the vibe ebb.
"Along those lines, I have another one," he smiles. I sit in silence, nod my head and let the band play on. "I'm strong but I've lost the way/have faith in me and don't throw me away/cause I could be just like you." The track is called "Strong." It has thickness to it, a dense beauty that comes through on the record. 'Now I'm strong, I'm never turning back/To feeling small/Life is too fast/and all I need is somewhere to stand."
He adopted the stage name, Buddahead, not for its connection to the school of eastern thought (although there is a 'right way' about him) but for a far more benign reason. While living in New York City, he encountered the singer-songwriter, Leona Ness, who got her ya ya's foisting odd nicknames on fellow musos in the community. In some circles, Buddahead means 'pothead' but Buddahead doesn't smoke, or drink, or even use foul language. Inconsistent, you say? When Sting was just getting started, no one chastised him for not perpetuating the image of a bumblebee.
What's in a name pales by what's in a song. Buddahead's music is salve for the soul, harmony for the heart, three minute verse chorus verse waltzes designed for the dance floor of human experience. The themes are archetypal, joy and woe, intertwined to weave a fabric of melody for the spirit divine. Buddahead dreamed of the day he could play his music for people, people like him, people struggling through relationships, survival, and the eternal search for who we are and why the hell we're here. But getting here, for Buddahead, was no easy journey.
Buddahead embraced the mystery of his artistic mission with patience and faith, constantly improving himself. He received a Master's Degree in International Business Studies at a London University not so he could land a high paying job on Wall Street but because student loans and staying in school provided the perfect environment for not having to get a real job. Education fertilized the mind while his songwriting progressed to the level where it was only a matter of time and cosmic circumstance before opportunity presented itself.
It only takes one set of ears protruding from the proper powerful head to go from nowhere to somewhere in this magical industry of music. For Buddahead, those ears belonged to Jimmy Iovine, successful record producer, industry executive and CEO of Universal Music's most profitable division, Interscope/Geffen/A&M. Buddahead won the belief and approval of a genuine, time and tide tested dream maker and immediately awoke to the reality that his moment had come.
Enter producer extraordinaire, Don Gilmore (Linkin Park, Sugar Ray, Eve 6, Lit, Trust Company), the serendipitous union born of a chance meeting at a Christmas party where the two strangers bonded, shared personality and hatched a creative marriage that spawned one of most accomplished, smooth sounding, uplifting debut efforts by a singer/songwriter since the late Jeff Buckley dazzled the world with Grace a decade ago.
"I don't want to be a star," Buddahead says humbly, thumbing another riff off his record. " I am emotionally compelled to write and perform music. I would love to touch people, affect their lives for the better, through my music. I'm not interested in stardom as the Hollywood image machine defines it. I want people to dig me because they first dig my music. I have no problems with being a star if I get to that place on the shoulders of my music but I never want to be forced to play music to retain that star."
Over the course of my long career, I have known, followed, broken bread, shared laughter, tears, creative elation and utter despair with countless artists from every conceivable hue of the Technicolor music spectrum. My instincts are sharp, my diary, formidable. Buddahead, has that special sparkle that elevates him above the rank and file crooner, strummer, forever- on- the -street hustler that will never get a glimpse of the dream. His songs are heart born, his voice, air born, his future, fate born.
When he left me that hot Manhattan summer day, I read him a passage from Henry Miller. He connected with the statement instantly and passionately. I leave you with these words for they explain in one brilliant, beautiful paragraph, exactly who Buddahead is, far better than I could ever hope to.
I am the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.
Lonn Friend New York City August 2002
Buddahead On The Songs On Crossing The Invisible Line
"Strong": I remember staring out of the window of a studio in East London, looking through the thick raindrops and onto the railway tracks that filled the horizon, feeling the weight of all the memories of the shit and happiness of the years gone by. I remember wondering if I had 'lost the way' and if anyone anymore had any 'faith' in me. I wanted to convince everyone that I was still strong and I was going to make it. When I sang this song with a fragile falsetto over the deep bass line, the Bonham like drums and growling guitars I realized that the perception of Strength was nothing more than an illusion.
"Holding me back": It was late at night and everyone had left NRG studios where we were recording the album. I sat by the piano in Studio B as I did every night after the session was over and this song just poured out. Sometimes I search desperately but blindly for a way to express how I am feeling and other times I am guided by instinct and not thought, this was one of those times. The next day I sang what I had to Don [Gilmore] who suggested I should shift the rhythm of the melody to give it more of a two-step feel.
"Chains": Once I was invited to Miles Copeland's medieval Castle in the South of France where every summer an eclectic bunch of songwriters are put into rooms and told to write songs in a few hours. I didn't write anything decent at all. I just can't write that way. But during a break, sitting in one of the gardens hidden behind the main building, transfixed on the beauty of the landscape, trees lit in reds and orange I picked up my guitar and started writing this song.
"When I fall": Early one winter in a state of confused melancholy I went to Amsterdam. For the first and last time in my life I indulged in substance abuse which led to two days and nights of emotional free fall. Finally crumpled on the floor of a 'cheap hotel, with bleary eyes' I searched for a way out of my sense of loss. The light at the end of the tunnel was the one person who made dignity possible for me an old friend. At that moment, in that place, I wrote this song.
"Disappear": I had planned to go on vacation for one week before I was due to start recording the album. The day before I was supposed to leave I found my roommate crying because she had a history of cancer and she had just received some bad test results. Earlier that day I had also found out that my Dad, who had been fighting cancer too, had received some negative test results. That night I couldn't sleep, not with those thoughts in my head. This song is about isolating yourself, and building walls and not wanting to die. I didn't go to the airport the next day, I couldn't. Instead I went into the studio and recorded this song. I had to.
"Take it all away": I remember the day I wrote this song as if it were only yesterday. I had seized my chance at getting a record deal and come to New York city for a series of label meetings. It was a beautiful day except for the wind that was rough. Foaming white clouds filled the sky and behind them was an intensely deep blue sky. I threw 'myself into the city' streets and headed from Broadway and Bleeker towards a record label on 25th and sixth. I remember my head was pounding with memories of a year gone wrong and on top of that the streets were fighting and screaming constantly like Manhattan streets do. I wrote this song as I walked. I seem to write a lot of songs between places.
"Turn Away": Everyone has been here before. The end of a relationship one that has left you almost empty. I felt like an escapee from a past life and all I wanted was to be neglected by everything from that life. It felt a savage need for time and separation, and some space to be selfish in. That was the inspiration behind this song.
"Outside": One day I was sitting in Jimmy Iovine's office and we were listening to a rough mix of 'How Does it feel' when Jimmy got out a copy of the Harry Nielson song 'Without you'. He pointed out the very high vocal harmony in the chorus and suggested I try that for my song. I tried and tried but always ended up sounding like the Chipmunks instead. I felt like I had failed my mentor so I set out to write a song as dramatic and emotionally compelling as 'Without you'. When recording it we brought in Jim Keltner to play the drums. He nailed it in one take and then told me that he had played on the original version of 'Without you'. The song had come full circle.
"How does it feel": This song is basically words that my father said to me the night before I came to America to sign with Interscope records. I had gone to his house to say goodbye. I could see he was full of pride but heavyhearted. He was proud of me for going after my dreams but sad because he knew he would be alone. He sat me down, lit up one cigarette after another, and softly but rapidly gave me all the advice he could. At the end he was apologetic for keeping me up all night. The song begins with his apology. I wrote it while on the plane flying to LA.
"Broken": This song was perhaps the hardest to write. Don Gilmore really believed in this song and he took the hardest stance when it came to the lyrics. After so many weeks in the studio, cut off from almost all normal human society, and constantly searching within for a way to share my thoughts in song and lyric, I had grown firstly extremely self concious, and secondly I had wrinkled up in the pain of all that I had been digging up. With Broken I knew I wanted to write about the heavy sadnees that had been with me from a very young age but unfortunately I had kept a lid on those emotions for so long I didn't have the slightest idea where to start digging. Night after night, after the studio was empty and sombre silence reigned the rooms, I tired and I tired, and I just slipped further into helplessness.
Source: http://www.buddaheadmusic.com/
