​Your Love Story
   Music is always an important part of every story.  Your wedding is a celebration of  your love story, the pages past and the ones yet to come,  so your music should accompany that. Was there a song playing in the background somewhere on your first date? Are there songs that you shared with each other when you first met? What songs have you realized together that you both really like? What songs do you associate with your love? Start writing down that list and hold on to it. As you start to plan the soundtrack to your night's itinerary, notice where each song might fit best. It is important to place the right song at the right time to maximize the emotional support music offers to each moment.

Cocktail Hour Music
   Often you can use the musicians from your ceremony for this time before dinner.  A string quartet  makes for nice mingling music and a singer/songwriter is a great way to entertain guests. They often come with their own love song based repertoire to blend in with your requests. 

Dinner
   Dinner music is about creating a comfortable ambiance, a soft background soundtrack for social conversations.  Find some mellow (but not boring) music and create your own playlist, or have your live musicians or DJ provide this light dinner music.  Often this music fades in and out with various stories being told and speeches being made in honor of the newly married couple.

First Dance
   This song should have a special meaning to you as a couple, and be a slower, sweet and intimate song. Perhaps you will have danced to it many times before and have choreographed your moves.

Reception
   If you can find one that can deliver the right music for your reception’s dancing and celebration, a live band is always a great option.  Your other option is recorded music, either you or a family member can have that run a playlist through the PA or you can hire a DJ.  DJs arrive on the scene to create a solid beat to keep all the guests moving but the dance floor tunes don’t have to be an hour-long mega-mix, you can pull together your own playlist that the DJ can be inspired from.  A week before the ceremony you can jot down a list of your ‘must play’ songs, or even your ‘must not play’ songs.   A DJ will only need about 7 tracks here to get an idea of the vibe you’re going for. ​

Here is a collection of some unique songs for working out, running and fitness motivation. 

     For someone raised in and around Boston I have always had a strange calling to explore California.  With previous visits to San Francisco, I had enlisted a swift take, a first impression that wasn’t so lasting as much as confusing.  I am not sure if it was merely being dipped into the whirlpool color bath of the city too fast without steeping in the culture or just a result of particularly muddled convergences of place and time. I did however get tickled with a charm that stuck to my shoes like wet leaves from the park that you find when you get home.  So, I was by no means deterred from returning to the city when I was given an opportunity to assist photographer Joseph Linaschke on a job.  The locations for his shoot were around the North Beach district. I took it upon myself research the area ahead of time.  I booked a room at hotel that appealed to my personal customary taste and jotted a few notes about restaurants near the hotel.  I read that the area had a particular orientation to Italian culture which perked my interest and had me saying to myself The North End in Boston is Little Italy too and I started to listen deeper to the language that writers were using about the area.  After all, I was using the same set of ears and sensory processing I used for listening to music and perhaps with this awareness I could hear the the genuine tones of my destination’s history.
   I often feel like listening to an music album from start to finish is like travelling from one point to another and eventually reaching a physical destination in addition to the obvious emotional and artistic developments.  As if, after progressing through the songs, the listener has taken great strides to be transported.   While travelling in a car provides the opportunity to listen to long stretches of music it also resets our hearing when we step out of the car in a new place. Cracking open the doorway in a parking garage near Pier 35 in San Francisco’s North Beach district was as potent to hear as the first notes that emerge from the crackling fuzz of a record player. 
  As I ventured into the residential area I noticed the sound shift from the bright echoless open air of the bayside to a muffled hum softly bouncing around in the tightly packed dwellings.  Here this heartwarming homestead reverberation sounded safe and yet carried a mysteriously hushed pulse that undeniably pushed through the pavement like willful grass growing up through the cracks.  It is this familiar longing in such vividly voiced areas that makes me curious about hearing into the past.  The stories of disappeared days that are told by sounds sustained in the landscape might lack detailed reports but the personification of beats and melodies can inspire the imagination to create the characters and set the stage.  I felt a particular familiarity with the sounds as they mirrored the North End of Boston.  Why would I want to even explore this cryptic musical language?  Will it tell me something just simply fascinating or perhaps deliver an important message?  

   I carried these questions up a steep street where elements of the audio mix seemed to peel away like flakes of old paint and tumble back down the hill.  I stopped halfway up the way to the Coit Tower to look at the view behind me and a lovely couple approached me looking up past me smiling as if to say, without words, we hear it too.. it’s up here.   What was it? I continued climbing and reached the lawn at the tower.  I sat on the wall that bordered the lawn and hung my gaze upon the spreading horizon out over the bay.  There it was, like a giant salad bowl of noise, filled halfway with every single layer of the city’s sound and halfway with an impenetrable silence that hovers over the hill like a lofty blanket.  I closed my eyes, dug into this silence and heard a vulnerable dreamlike orchestra.  Out of the sound field, like little crackling fire sparks, came some quick notes of gentle animal footsteps on leaves nearby.  I opened my eyes to see a coyote, ears forward,  staring back at me.  In one easy move It’s ears turned outward and it’s eyes looking deep into mine softened with kindness.  It seemed to say, hello, I am the Coit Coyote, thanks for listening, have a nice day, before it danced back through the tall grass under the Cypress trees. 
   As I descended the hill, which seemed so steep that even sound itself couldn’t defy the gravitational pull of the incline, I felt like I had won a prize.  I had endured a self-motivated scavenger hunt to discover a secret sound that commonly goes unnoticed to the inhabitants of it’s location and I was determined to find this sound in other places in North Beach.  Motivated more by hunger, and less for the prospect of my mission, I went to Molinari’s Deli, where the transparent sound was quite delightfully buried in the patron’s excited voices as they ordered from the menu. Here the sandwich makers laugh and sing while they work.  It is a place where sounds of celebrating family and food merge in music so me and my sandwich moved on to the hotel. The most special home on the hunt for the hidden sound of my fascination was at The Historic San Remo Hotel that I stayed at. Standing in the plant lined foyer, with coyote like ears I could swear I heard the faint haunting of romantic voices and laughter.  And in my room as I played guitar I could hear sympathetic tones glisten like treasure in the dark gray fog cover that had suddenly hung like curtains in the sky. 

early morning
I am hollow,
a silence still not yet filled with sounds or sights
just a running blur or a smiling champ to greet the day.

​the uncharted hours expand the day’s lungs with crisp air 
while the kick drum of my running shoes on the forest trail set the beat for a sprint in the park
then fountain and creek 
breeze and birds,
the simple symphony awakens.

thoughts come and go like leaves riding the creek water 
some falling into hollow pockets with a bubbling voice 
trapped and swirled in the puddling pools before they drop down the next cascade
and soon my own hollowness is inhabited with a memory so thick it coats my heart like fresh paint:

 when I was a kid 
 during the fall, in New England 
 when leaves swirled around in the air 
 time would slow down like I was dropped inside a snow globe 
 or sealed in a strong and secure sound envelope 
 where I would play, quite seriously, a game
 where I would try to catch a falling leaf before it reached the ground,
 if I caught the leaf it was good luck,
 I would celebrate this victory like I won an Olympic event 
 and howl at the sky.

so on this morning’s familiar trail run
my empty boat of a heart starts to rock on the waves of this memory,
I hear a shift in my hollow breath 
I feel the morning air hint at the familiar scent and temperature of fall’s arrival
and time slows the sound against the tempo of my racing heart,

suddenly a large yellow leaf falls in front of me and wraps around my face like a feisty starfish, 
I stop in my tracks 
I remove the leaf from my face 
tears flood my eyes like the creek’s puddling pools backed up with late summer fallen leaves,
I take in my surroundings through a kaleidoscope of teardrop lenses 
first to see if anyone witnessed the leaf attack, 
no, I was alone,
secondly,  to catch my breath
marveling at the fact that I am standing under a memorable tree,
standing in a memory
sparks shot through my body.

two months prior to this moment 
I sat under this tree with you
feeling grateful to be in your presence
a big yellow leaf fell towards us, 
I picked it up and twirled it in my hands 
we smiled and talked and then 
time stopped.
I have carried that moment with me through the months of being without you
it is a memory that shines in the hollow’s shadows 
the memory stops me in my tracks like a big yellow leaf in the face

now, as I collapse below the tree, I imagine you there with me 
as the salty sting of sweat and tears mix 
these memories collide
as I clear my eyes and look up into the hollowed out crest 
I mutter thanks and help me to the tree
and there
in the silent core
I see an owl shutter its’ feathers 
turn a dreamy eye toward me 
then tuck its’ head back in.
It is then when I hear the sound to fill my hollow day like a radio wave 
from the tree I receive the medicine code
the owl makes it clear:

you can trust discovering these moments, 
the sounds that echo in hollow places,
like you trust the changes in the seasons

after all, the owl had seen it all:
the leaf + the smiles
 a trail runner fascinated with what love sounds like, 
another leaf + the memory pools
and the ever forward motions to reside in gratitude for the creative way it all comes together.

   Magnetic West: Can you give an example of how music or sound has triggered an emotion in your life?

   Levick: For me, sound and emotion is more of a music thing, and as you get older you know you get a little more detached from your emotions or I guess you learn to control them and not be  slave to them - they go too far…but, I would say that music used to be a very emotional experience for me.  I used to be able to put on Angie by the Stones or Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, and that would take me through a whole palette of emotions.  I would say, now the closest I come is, every now and then you get that perfect mix and you’ve listened to it in your car and then your boom box, then the other car, and it sounds great everywhere and that makes me feel really good. Sometimes live music will do it, like a good show. Sometimes your having one of those great shows, you’re not thinking too much and just cruising along…people are hanging on every word, you’re connecting…
         
   Magnetic West: what about the same idea in convergence with media? Is there a convergence that stands out?

   Levick: like, Say Anything, with the Peter Gabriel song?  I always wonder how much they manipulate you with the music in these shows, like what would happen if they stripped all the music, would you still feel what they want you to feel just from the acting? It’s hard to know because they don’t ever do that, 

   Magnetic West: well, what would be your guess on that?

   Levick: my guess is they’re totally manipulating you, and there’s nothing wrong with it, I mean, I’m sure people do movies without music and if they’re able to move you without the aid of music, then more power to them. It’s interesting because I’ve been licensing since 2004 and it took 10 years to learn what they’re really looking for is a mood.  What they want is a song that is categorically one mood, you know, they don’t want anything ambivalent.  That’s what I’ve been trying to keep in mind when I write for these shows.  So, you can have the coolest track in the world and it wouldn’t work for TV, you’d almost have to dumb it down to this is sad . 

  Magnetic West: yea, pinpoint the mood

  Levick:  pinpoint the mood

  Magnetic West:   any specific songs, like you mentioned the Peter Gabriel tune in Say Anything?

  Levick:   yea, In Your Eyes in that movie….well, the best thing is, lately, since Bowie died ( I’m a huge Bowie fan ) they’ve been using him a lot, and there’s something about hearing a song that you grew up with in a movie that makes it ten times more powerful…I don’t think it makes you like the song more, it makes you like the movie more…

  Magnetic West: I know you’ve licensed your music to shows like Shameless, which is one of my favorite shows, is there any of your tracks that standout in their convergence with media ? 

  Levick:   There’s one song they put on Sons of Anarchy that I’m really proud of.,. I got a call for something completely different, they wanted a back porch blues thing, just guitar and vocal, so I called Jeff Pevar and said “ just play one guitar or two and send it to me ” and the whole thing went down in an hour, and I got it and threw a vocal on it, and I remember thinking,  this would be really cool on Sons of Anarchy and a month later it was on Sons of Anarchy…it didn’t get on the show we did it for but you know I don’t deal directly with a lot of the shows so I never know,  a lot of times I find out later what it was on, like way later, like six months later.

  Magnetic West: like on statement?

 Levick: yea, but I’ve started thinking more about what shows I’m writing for…like Shameless, they ask for my stuff, and I don’t have a whole lot of time to write songs that I’m not really commissioned to write but sometimes I’ll sit down and go, let’s write something that I can send to that show. 

  Magnetic West: so around 2004 you started focusing on writing for film / tv , how that get started?

  Levick: It was a really weird convergence, I had kind of a late start, I mean , I’ve always been playing music, but I spent my teenage years and part of my twenties just partying so I feel like I’m ten years behind everyone else in terms of where my life should be and my career…

  Magnetic West: I’ve always felt like that too, in my twenties I lived in Hawaii…

  Levick: you can’t get anything done in Hawaii.

 Magnetic West: just hanging on the beach …

  Levick:  but back then you’re not thinking that it was a waste of time, just, this is great!   So, I started getting into serious bands in my mid - twenties, and what happened was,  my last band ended in 2001 and I was thinking this is the last time I’m doing this music industry thing. I had just had a kid in ’98 and we were still doing these tours, SXSW and coastal tours, but it was getting harder and harder to be  gone.  What actually happened was, our first album was put out by this indie label called Pinch Hit that got us on commercial radio, and it charted in some places, it wasn’t great, it never turned into money , but it was nice, and they gave me an advance for the solo album after the band broke up.   Instead of going to a studio I decided to buy a Mac and a pre-amp and a mic and basically I spent a year on two songs, just learning how do it, just tweaking and tweaking those two songs.  When I was done with that, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time and had friend who worked for this company that asked me to do a couple songs and I was able to bang them out, and I had a partner that I was writing with from the band I was in, we did it together and they liked it, so we just started doing CDs for all these music libraries.  When my daughter was going into first grade, we wanted to leave LA because we didn’t like the school systems and my wife had some family in Southern Oregon. So, we moved to Grants Pass and there was nothing to do there. I didn’t know anybody and we lived there for 3 years and in those 3 years I got my catalogue from 20 songs to like 200 songs because all I did was write.