David Young – The Music and Spiritual Experience!
1. Why did you title your album Love Wins?
I’ve had many, many relationships over the course of my lifetime. Let’s just say we each have a destiny: Some spend their whole adult lives with one person and some spend shorter amounts of time with many people.
Every relationship has strong points and weak points and when you look back at all of them, whether they were for two days, two weeks, two months, two years or twenty years – they were all temporary.
Relationships bring us happiness but when they end, it’s always painful, and there can sometimes be bitterness for one reason or another; but years later when we look back, what we choose to remember is the love we shared with that person because that was the best part of the relationship. So, when you look at it from this angle, “love wins.”
2. How did you decide to collaborate on the album with Tony Levin on bass and Jerry Marotta on drums?
Tony Levin is one of the three greatest bass players in the world, along with John Paul Jones and Tony Franklin (who played on five of my albums.)
Back in January, I met Tony at a book-signing event and we traded books. At the time, I had just finished the first mixes of Love Wins. I had played all the guitars and bass on the tracks. So I asked Tony Levin if he’d like to play on two songs and replace my bass parts and he ended up playing on three albums of material that we recorded at Dreamland Recording Studios in Woodstock, NY with Jerry.
I had seen Jerry play a couple of years earlier and had his number.
Tony and Jerry have played together in bands and on projects. They live in the same region and they really have an incredible musical chemistry.
I overdubbed them playing their parts on the original 10 songs at Dreamland in three days with Ariel Sharif engineering. Ariel did such a fine job and gave such valuable input that I gave him Co-Producer credit on the album.
Then we recorded another ten songs, three tracks a day, with us playing live. My vocal was performed live as I played acoustic guitar in a booth. Jerry had two drum setups; a drum kit in one room and a percussion setup with large Native American drums and congas, djembes in the live room across from where Tony was playing the electric acoustic upright bass. He’d play the drum set live with us and then overdub the percussion or vice versa.
First, I’d go over the songs with Tony playing along first and Jerry listening, then we did two takes of the song. We overdubbed the background vocals after and added Tony’s brother, Pete Levin, on organ and piano.
This is how I wanted to make the album – with human beings in the same room in the same city in the same country. File sharing was necessary during Covid but I like human interaction and it was fun for all of us.
3. Your album has a heavy Beatles influence, and I found out that you have also written a book about George Harrison. Would you like to comment on that?
I was a Led Zeppelin, Who, Bad Co, Humble Pie, Montrose and Jethro Tull fan because I was a lead guitarist first. I knew every chord and every word on every one of their albums.
I was not a Beatles fan. I was a little too young to be a Beatles fan.
Truth be known, the only Beatles song I ever played in a cover band was “Come Together,” and that was only because Aerosmith had done a version of it. I was a flashy lead guitarist who played lots of fast notes with a crunchy sound.
The Beatles were just not on my radar back in the 80’s when I was playing hard rock and eventually heavy metal.
Around 2008, while I was living and recording in Minneapolis, I started to feel an energy in the studio and I didn’t know who it was or what it was. I didn’t believe in channeling, not a bit, but once in awhile, this presence would give me an idea – and I knew it wasn’t my idea – and it was always a very good idea that I knew I had not thought of myself.
I didn’t think about it too much and would continue producing the track.
Then in 2010, my longest relationship of nine years ended and it was a very difficult time. Now, that presence seemed to be with me more and more, comforting me, though I had no idea who it was.
When I left Minneapolis with my life in my SUV to move back to New York, I was devastated and began listening to an album I had been given for Christmas called Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles as I drove, and there was something about “Within You Without You,” the George Harrison song, that I had to hear again and again for 2-3 hours every day the entire three weeks as I drove back east.
When I got to Long Island, to an old friend’s house that I hadn’t seen in 35 years, The Concert For Bangladesh DVD was sitting on his TV. It was so odd that I had been listening to that song so much for the first time in my life so I asked to watch the concert film from 1971 and for the first time, I got to see and really appreciate what a spiritual guy George was/is. I had been meditating and on the spiritual path since I was 22 and it was easy to recognize that he was a spiritual man. As a guitarist, he wasn’t about lots of fast notes. He was about sharing a message.
Three months later, through a bizarre set of circumstances, I met a woman who, on our third date, told me that George Harrison used to babysit her. I couldn’t believe it! She explained that her mom and dad went to the same yoga ashram in Tuscon, AZ as the Beatles. (Remember: Jojo left his home in Tuscon, AZ…) and after her mom and dad split up she ran into George and a few months later they fell in love. Then George moved them to his estate at Friars Park in England.
This is the very beginning of my book Channeling Harrison that was published in 2014. I am currently making the audio book with a musical soundtrack under my narration created with Clifford Carter, keyboard player with James Taylor and Art Garfunkel for 12 years.
This could be the reason why you hear a flavor of the Beatles on Love Wins.
4. What was the main inspiration for the lyrics of your album?
Songs come through us. I am a psychic. I’ve done 400 client readings since 2015, and in each session, I write a mantra or a song for the client as a positive musical affirmation for them to meditate on and build into their consciousness.
Some of the songs on Love Wins were written for a client.
When I made the album I was going through a time of healing at the same time the world was healing from the pandemic and I wanted the songs to be about something positive; healing or uplifting in some way. Everyone, including myself, needed hope. At my concerts and meditation events, my music and my paintings combine to give people an experience immersed in my sound and surrounded by my colors of light. It’s all beautiful energy that makes people feel connected to their soul.
Love Wins is an album that talks about issues like life after death, equality, spiritual experiences, survival, and making something beautiful out of this thing called life. It combines acoustic instruments and some electric instruments with Celtic tones, and American classic acoustic rock in an easy to listen to bohemian style with intriguing, insightful lyrics.
5. Do you consider music an element of the healing process? If so, from which perspective?
Musicians write to express our feelings. That’s healing for the songwriter. Our own medicine becomes the medicine other people need and can benefit from.
6. Would you like to discuss with us your workshop, A Portal Between Heaven and Earth?
I teach people how to tap into their higher intelligence, their soul, and to experience the eternal part of themselves. Once they are tapped into that, then they can experience the eternal part of their loved ones who are now in the land of eternity aka heaven. Then once they are connected and their eyes are closed, I serenade them with my flutes, and when I play two recorders at one time in harmony it creates a tri-harmonic tone, a special frequency. People who have had near death experiences that come to my events say that frequency that I create is the same tone and frequency they experienced in heaven during their NDE.
7. Please let us know about the content of your book, The True Story of Jesus and his Wife Mary Magdalena.
In 2016, while living in Miami with a woman who was a psychic, she channeled directions for me to make 50 paintings that were as large as 5’, 6’, 7’ or 8’.
A year after I made these paintings, she was told we were supposed to go to the south of France to the region where Mary Magdalena lived, where the famed Basilica of Sainte Mary Magdalena and the cave of Mary Magdalena are located. When I got to the cave and its mountain in St. Maximin, I realized I had painted it numerous times from different angles the previous year! The DaVinci code is more than just a movie! Those 50 paintings are in my 2019 coffee table book, The True Story of Jesus and his Wife Mary Magdalena (also available as an audio book.)
Between 2014 and 2019 1,500 attendees at my meditation events shared experiences with Jesus, his wife Mary Magdalena or Mother Mary. Not one person was told any scripture. Another 1,500 attendees shared experiences with Buddha, Krishna, Moses, Quan Yin, Isis the Egyptian goddess, or one of the archangels, and 6,000 people shared that they reconnected with one of their loved ones. On earth, people are taught to separate all of the ascended masters but the truth is that They are all connected as one team, the Heavenly Team is what They like to be called actually.
8. Do you use music and books as equivalent mediums to deliver a specific message to the public?
Yes I do. We all have a semi limited time here on earth and the goal is to touch people in as positive way as possible. Books transfer information. Music transfers spiritual vibration. Art shows God’s energy in light.
9. Would you like to discuss with us your work in painting?
I was a musician first. When I was younger, since I couldn’t draw, so I never even thought of painting. Then after many years of playing my flutes and selling my CDs at art festivals, where I would look at paintings all day, I decided to give it a try, and since at the time I was dating a woman who painted, I eventually decided to give it a try.
Art has form, design, texture, foreground and background, so creating artwork is just like producing music. When you improvise music, you find new things, just as it is with art; improvising helps to develop new techniques.
10. What about your next music plans?
I am currently working with Clifford Carter (keyboard player with James Taylor, Art Garfunkel, Cyndi Lauper) creating the soundtrack music for the audio book for my 2014 release, Channeling Harrison.
To pre-order David Young’s “Love Wins”: https://checkout.square.site/buy/PP3HHGNJLEXPVC3WEX364CED
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