In the summer of 2004, I received an email from Aretta Swanson, the mother of two former piano students at Musical Expressions, a school I founded in Naperville, Illinois in 1989. The email spoke of her involvement with a friend and his vision to start a company focused around a “universal flag” he had created that represented oneness and other spiritual truths. She had been getting strong intuitive guidance to contact me for three weeks.
I was immediately inspired by the idea of a flag to represent humanity’s oneness and felt it needed an anthem, “a world anthem” was the phrase that came to mind. I turned to God and remember thinking, “it it’s meant to be, let’s do it.” The next morning I awoke to the song waiting to come through. Still half asleep, it pushed me out of bed to my guitar. Within 30 minutes it was complete. The energy pouring through and around me was intense. I saw it being performed throughout the world. And every time I played it thereafter, I would distinctly hear a different voice singing each phrase.
I called my younger brother Jimmy, a professional musician in LA to help me produce it. A month later, I flew him into Chicago to begin production. We had 12 days. After discussing production options and budgets, we realized that hiring musicians and going into a studio was not creatively or financially feasible. I was used to working with my own equipment, but what I had was limited. Jimmy mentioned the equipment he had stored in LA, which he used to make his last record. I said, “let’s go get it”. I’ll never forget his laid-back “okay” reply. This was late Tuesday night on October 19, 2004. We now had 11 days.
FALL ’04 L.A.
In from Chicago to get gear for first week of production
We left the next day driving 36 straight hours to LA. Got in Friday. Rested and rummaged through storage bins and boxes to find the gear we needed. Got up Saturday and drove straight back to Chicago arriving Monday. Crashed. Woke up Tuesday and went into six days of production until literally rushing Jimmy to the airport Sunday evening. This completed the initial stage of production. Each day an aspect of the song’s production revealed itself. The “we are one vortex”, as I would come to call it had begun...
