Balmorhea’s music is what I like to call music for life. It inspires you to move forward, to take action, to be your best, to feel what you feel, and it does it all without words.

I was able to attend their CD release party last Friday for their latest creation, “Constellations,” for which I stood in line behind an enthusiastic fan who jumped up and down saying, “There they are! There they are!” when two band members walked by.

Judging by that fan’s gusto, the show was going to be good and though I may be no music critic, I was moved by their ability to create beauty in this world with their music.

The instrumental group has a post-classical sound that produces music you might most readily associate with movie soundtracks, although it certainly defies categorization. It’s inspiring, moving, emotional and, in a way, unmarked. You can bring whatever you have to the table with Balmorhea and leave with your emotions reflected back at you.

That’s what Michael Muller, functioning manager and guitarist for Balmorhea, told me as I interrupted his daily crossword to talk over a cup of joe. He confirmed my initial impression of the music.

“With the lack of lyrics, it lends itself nicely for the listener to approach it where they are, in whatever emotional state, so that whatever they want it to be, it can be. Some people find totally different things in the music, which is great.”

What I like most about their music is one, it’s beautifully refreshing, and two, you can play it whatever your situation and its appropriate. If you’re going for a drive on radiant Sunday afternoon, if you are cooking a gourmet meal for friends, if you’re sitting in a coffee shop trying to muster some creativity—no matter the situation, the music is fitting.

For Michael, music has become the activity he devotes the most time to, but it is not the only creative outlet he has in his life. Michael has his hands in a lot of cookie jars. He not only performs and manages for Balmorhea, but he also makes his living as a photographer and a novice designer, creating websites and album covers, posters and t-shirts. “I do photography, although graphic design has taken a front seat, and then music in the last two years has become the front runner. I like it all and I can’t imagine giving any of it up.”

Wearing all of these hats is the result of an unclear path upon graduating from Texas A&M. Unsure of what his future would hold, Michael, “applied to work at Mikes’ Bikes, now known as Fat Tire Bike Tours, but I didn’t take the job. I was offered another job at a church in Austin to do their music and graphics, which is how I learned that stuff. I also taught school for two years as a special education assistant and thought about going back to grad school, but at that point I was getting so much photo work on the side that it seemed like the right choice. So I did pursue photography for about three years until now. Currently, I work on music most of the time.”

The type of music he now plays for Balmorhea wasn’t Michael’s first musical love. In fact, you might say that, as a child, the music he remembers enjoying is as far from this entrancing music as you could get.

At the mature age of six, he recalls listening to heavy metal given to him by his next-door neighbor, who was in the ninth grade and used to babysit Michael. “When I was in first grade, I had every Metallica tape. I was into Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath. I don’t know why I got so into it. I would go through all the records at Sam Goody and I would just look through things and listen. I guess I just gravitated to heavy metal,” he told me shaking his head with a grin.

In truth, the music Michael listened to as a child matched his environment. His family lived in San Diego at the time and he was into beach sports and skateboarding, which tends to bring out the inner punk in everyone at age six, right?

When he moved to Texas, a time in his life, which he described as “total culture shock,” Michael found that most people his age weren’t listening to Metallica. “We moved to Texas when I was nine. Texas people didn’t really skate board and they listened to different music, but I took the best of both worlds. I played the typical Texas sports in high school, baseball and football, but at the same time, I still skateboarded and played guitar.”

Michael had been playing guitar before he left Cali. He told me, “I got a guitar when I was five, but I didn’t get serious about it until I was twelve.” And aside from his unexpected love for baseball, guitar is one thing that really stuck with this traveler.

Perhaps, it was easy to stick with something artistic because Michael’s parents are also creatively inclined. He grew up with clearly communicated support for pursuing artistic endeavors. “My dad plays the guitar, not that much, but he taught me the basics and my mom does artistic things, like she takes watercolor classes. My dad is also really good at sketching and he’s a wordsmith. We don’t have words in our music, though, so I don’t think there’s any correlation,” he told me, chuckling.

He carried those creative influences and his guitar skills to Texas A&M. Now, if you’ve met Michael, you wouldn’t really expect him to have chosen A&M for his glorious college years. As you might imagine, he’s not exactly your typical Aggie, yet some great friends early on, which made it worth his while to tough out College Station.

Looking back at his college career, he put few of those creative skills to work as a Recreation Park and Tourism Sciences major, and when I asked him if he had done anything with the major, he said, “I did an internship for my graduation requirement and that was the extent of using my major.”

But he never let his affinity for music and playing his guitar die and Michael did continue to write music while in college, which eventually inspired him to partner with Rob Lowe (not from such movies as St. Elmo’s Fire), the other founding musician of Balmorhea. “I had a lot of songs, I’d written on my guitar for fun that I’d had for years and Rob had a bunch of songs on piano. We became friends and started realizing that we liked a lot of the same artists and so we started playing together. One day, we just said, ‘hey, we should record this for fun.’ So we made up a few songs.”

Michael’s original intention was not to make music a career, but the momentum created by joining up with Rob kept pushing them forward. “Then we were like, we should make up a band. It was all a blur and happened really fast. All of a sudden we were playing a show downtown and then 5 months later, we were making a CD and got signed to our label, Western Vinyl.”

Additional members have jumped on the bandwagon (pun intended) after Michael and Rob produced their first CD together although they have had trouble hanging onto a drummer. Michael told me, “It was Rob and I initially and we knew that we wanted strings on our next recording. Since that time, I think we’ve completed almost ten projects together. The three string players are permanent. We’ve had four different drummers in the past two years. We’ve used the same recording engineer and he’s also become our live engineer. He knows every intricate, tiny detail and he knows exactly how we work, which is amazing. For this album we added an upright bass and cellist. So the most recent incarnation of Balmorhea is piano, guitar—electric, acoustic and banjo—cello, drums and bass.”

As the band was forming, Michael did bring influences other than Metallica to the table. He unashamedly admitted that he has “every lyric from the album Graceland by Paul Simon memorized. It was in cassette deck of my mom’s car for most of my childhood.”

And his musical tastes have shifted toward his current sound as he’s gotten older. “When I was seventeen, I found a band called Tortoise, which made me start listening to instrumental music. Today I listen to a lot of different things—mostly ambient, experimental kind of stuff. My number one of last year was Tiny Vipers. I also usually love any record from the Type Records label. Everything they put out is my favorite.”

Overall, Balmorhea’s music is informed by modern minimalist composers, which Michael told me included, “Philip Glass, John Cage, and Arvo Pärt, but Max Richter and Johann Johansson also inspire us. They take classical music and add a lot of modern elements to it like folk or rock. We also have a lot of influences like Townes Van Zandt, Gillian Welch, singer/songwriters, and other western sounding acoustic-based music.”

Balmorhea performances can be radically different from your typical concert experience. They appear to be a mini orchestra setting up on stage with so many instruments, some unidentifiable. Venues are often dark and some fans take a snooze during the show, not from boredom, but from relaxation. During the CD release, with a laugh they asked the audience if anyone had fallen asleep.

Michael believes these quirks make their music more accessible. “We have a weird flexibility because we can play at very quiet seated venues with grand pianos or we can play at a tiny, rough, rock club and somehow fit in at both places. Some shows are seated with ushers and some are rock venues where the walls are all black. We played at the Mohawk in December and it was packed. It is a loud place, but the show was so quiet. After we were done, the owner came up to us and told us he’d never heard it like that.”

The group is set to embark on a North American tour in the next few days with a European tour scheduled for the fall. Michael indicated that he really enjoyed touring so I asked him about his favorite show. It was a toss up. “We played in Marfa two summers ago. It was really special because they had us out there for two days and it was a whole experience. They only have around 4 or 5 concerts a year so it was an honor. We also played in New York last June at this really nice seated venue called La Poisson Rouge and it was almost sold out. That was our first show in a huge market and it felt so good to have the whole crowd full. That was also our first ever encore in America.”

“Europe is a whole different story,” Michael remarked. “They’re very into our kind of music in general so every show is a lot more appreciated. My favorite show hands down we played last April in this tiny little town on the Adriatic Sea in Italy. We got lost on our way and they had to come meet us to lead us up into the mountains. We played at this open-air theater at dusk and there was a dinner for the concertgoers beforehand. So everyone got to sit on this hillside and eat dinner. The crowd was sold out and we played and did a couple of encores. After we were done, we were freaking out because we couldn’t believe how awesome the whole experience was.”

While Balmorhea would love to be able to make a living solely through CD sales and live performances, they often compose music for other projects to stay afloat financially. Michael confessed, “It’s difficult to come even close to making a living through record sales unless you are really popular. Any financial success we’ve had has been from creating original music or having our songs licensed for commercials or films. We worked on a feature length French film and it was really fun. It’s really challenging, too. They would call us on a conference call and say, ‘We want it to be intense, but not emotional.’ So balancing our styles with their needs is always a challenge.”

Currently, they are working on a piece for an educational video game. “It sounds weird,” Michael inserted, “but it’s really cool and some A-list celebrities are doing the voices. Each character is from another part of the world and they each have their own theme song. We are supposed to evoke their nationality with their songs, but they are giving us freedom for it to be our music, too. We really enjoy doing projects like that when we are not touring.”

All of this unsolicited success has not left Michael disillusioned about music and he knows his talents. He’s quite good at the music, but he also really enjoys the organizing, booking and managing aspect of the industry. “If I think about my music skills, I’m not trained really. I don’t have the theory and science down behind it. So I gravitate more toward the business side of things and the networking and keeping things organized. I really enjoy it—making contacts and replying to everyone who sends us messages.”

They’ve come a long way from their first record, which Michael told me was “released as a duo of just piano, guitar and some field recordings that we took out in the world.”

“‘All is Wild, All is Silent’ was more acoustic-based, upbeat and rock influenced,” he continued. “Our most recent album, ‘Constellations,’ which is about to come out is much more classical-based with strings and piano as the focus. It’s kind of a step back from the last album because it’s all in minor key, minimal and sparse. I suppose we keep the critics guessing, but at the end of the day, we just play what we like.”

Finally, at the end of the interview, I asked Michael the question I’m sure he dreads hearing. As I was getting up from my chair, I meekly asked, “Oh, one more thing, what does Balmorhea mean?”

With an understanding half smile, he repeated a clearly familiar answer. “It’s the name of a tiny town, about population 500, out west near Marfa. Rob grew up going there as a kid in the summer. It’s this completely stark, bone-dry desert and there’s this forty-foot deep, crystal clear spring fed pool out there.”

Hmmm. Their music certainly feels like water in a dry and barren land.

Visit Michael and friends at: balmorheamusic.com
See also,  mullerfoto.com

Download their music, including their latest CD “Constellations” released yesterday, February 23, on iTunes.

Feature photo courtesy of Tamir Kalifa.

The crowd gathering to hear Balmorhea's new album "Constellations"

Blurry picture I took of Balmorhea in action at their Constellations CD release

Brad Otts reminded me of that blessing when I met him at Progress Coffee one day shortly after Christmas.

We were both fighting the sniffles caused by the germs that our very loving families had passed onto us during the holiday season, but we pressed on pausing every once and a while for a Kleenex break.

So many friends connect Brad and I that it’s pretty amazing we did not meet by chance before our interview.

Many of those friends are the very colleagues that Brad serves through his showroom. Brad is a sales rep for some companies that you may or may not have heard of, but that you should know about—TOMS Shoes, Apolis Activism, Project 7, FEED Projects and Falling Whistles.

Brad told me, “My job can be boiled down to something really simple. I’m a sales rep, but I don’t really feel like a sales rep.” That’s because all of his clients are socially conscious individuals endeavoring to make the world a better place whether through an official nonprofit or through a for profit company founded on a philosophy of social entrepreneurship.

Brad recognizes that with each product he moves, lives change around the world. “I know that with every pair of shoes I sell, a kid across the world gets a pair and with Falling Whistles, there are kids literally dying in the Congo and by me getting this word out we can change that.”

Talk about motivation to sell your products!

After chatting with him for a few minutes, it was clear that Brad has a genuine love for people and it is his willingness to remain open to what may come his way that now allows him to love the world through his job.

You see Brad didn’t go looking for this occupation. He didn’t plan for years ahead and have meaningful internships in college that led him to his job. He wasn’t a business major and he didn’t go to the most prestigious college he could find to guarantee his success in life. He simply moved to New York to follow his passion for music and that’s how it all began.

After graduating from Texas A&M, Brad moved to New York to work at a recording studio in the West Village. The second day he was there, he called up a girl he had met on Friendster (the precursor to Facebook and MySpace) who shared his interest in music. He earnestly informed me that, “I didn’t know anyone up there and so I called her the second day I was there and I invited her to grab a beer in the city. I wasn’t thinking of it being a date. I just didn’t know anyone in the city.”

When they met up, Brad thought, “Whoa, she’s totally smokin’!” and despite the fact that, “she didn’t want to go, but her mom made her,” the non-date went well.

Soon after, the recording studio he planned on working with changed ownership and Brad lost his interest in working with them. So he procured a job at a coffee shop to stay in the area and began demoing products at a Whole Foods store in Manhattan, upon the recommendation of the charming girl he met on Friendster.

Her name is Noelle and she is now his wife of 5 years.

Their whirlwind dating and whirlwind wedding led to a whirlwind pregnancy, which left both soon-to-be parents questioning a life in a small apartment in Brooklyn.

Luckily for the pair, Noelle’s boss had just moved to the Whole Foods headquarters in Austin and he offered her a position there. Hoping for a wide-open place to let their unborn child roam, the pair moved to Texas to begin a new life and a new family.

A bit unsure of what that move would look like for Brad career-wise, with faith he continued doing demos, now at the Whole Foods on Lamar rather than NYC.

It didn’t take long for Brad to crave something more stable so that he could support his growing family, so Noelle suggested that Brad become a sales rep for some of the body care and supplement brands that Whole Foods Market carried in their Whole Body department.

So he literally began cold-calling these companies and asking if they had a rep in Texas. His uncanny initiative, diligence and courage paid off. He became a sales rep after a couple of months of seeking out those opportunities.

Brad wouldn’t tell you that he was completely amenable to the idea of being a sales rep at first. He admitted, “When I tell people I’m a sales rep, a used car salesman immediately comes to mind,” and he wasn’t smitten with selling body care brands either because, “I’m not an esthetician or a hair stylist, so I’m not really a part of that world.” But he did like the selling aspect, and he discovered that he was good at it.

He believed in the products he was selling, but he still wanted something more. He wanted to be passionate about the products. “I just didn’t feel connected to them and I wanted to be passionate about what they were doing.”

One day Brad wondered onto MySpace to look up a friend he hadn’t seen in a while. He followed some breadcrumbs and ended up on Blake Mycoskie’s MySpace page. That’s Blake Mycoskie, creator of TOMS shoes, for the uninitiated.

Now Brad had grown up with the Mycoskie’s in Arlington, Texas and he informed me that, “The Mycoskies in Arlington were like the Rothschilds. Everything they did was successful. Blake grew up with one of my older sisters and I saw his TOMS page. I thought the shoes were cool, but I fell in love with the mission, and I was already working with Whole Foods, so I knew I could get them into Whole Foods and that this was what I was supposed to do. I was the first salesperson that TOMS ever hired and that was almost four years ago.”

Being able to sell a product that affected people around the world was a real selling point for Brad and by and by he was led to other social entrepreneurs who were looking for building a sales program or had heard about him through TOMS.

So he began repping for TOMS—With every pair you purchase, TOMS will give a pair of new shoes to a child in need. One for One—and then for Apolis Activism—which create opportunities for developing economies by connecting them to the global marketplace through seasonal stories and products—and for Project 7—for every purchase of a Project 7 product, the company donates 50 percent of its profits to seven areas of critical need in the world—and for FEED Projects—who feed hungry children through out Africa with the sales of their FEED bags—and for Falling Whistles, whom you should already know, but whose proceeds go to rehabilitate and advocate for war-affected children in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Being part of this world has led Brad to believe that “social entrepreneurship is the future of business and in 10 years if you are a company that’s not doing something better for others, then you will be obsolete. There is no point in creating a successful business and hoarding all the profits for yourself or not working to better others lives that are in need. I hope that other companies are inspired by the companies I rep to find something they’re passionate about supporting and try to help others by doing that. Accept that it’s not about being big; it’s not about being small, but it’s about doing it to the best of your ability and you’re loving people while you’re doing it.”

The beauty of these companies/nonprofits is that most of the products they sell are items you would purchase anyway. “We’re taking pretty normal things in an industry based on vanity—and I’m as guilty of that as anyone else—but I was thinking, how can this be redeemed? So you have companies that are passionate about social change and progress who at the same time see a product that can be sold, but in a sustainable & redeemable way. That’s what redemption is all about whether it’s spiritual or not. It’s about finding something that you’re passionate about and trying to use it to do what you can to love others to best of your ability. I feel like my showroom is an extension of how I can love others, not just these brands, but who and what they represent.

“In a society that’s so full of waste and often unaware of the outcome of its actions, there are simple things that you can do that don’t really inconvenience you. It can be more difficult for some than others, but we live in a very privileged society, so why don’t you do something good for others? My vision is to relay that to as many people as I can.”

Brad doesn’t think of himself as a hero for these companies nor is he self-righteous about his job. Tellingly, he said, “It just happened to be that this is the skill set that I’ve been given. I just get to talk to people and tell them about this mission and I get paid for it.”

But there is also something special about Brad. He has a really powerful philosophy that drives him to be successful, and no matter what his job, he can carry it with him. “My dad was telling me the other day about this writer and speaker named Os Hillman who talks about the ‘9 to 5 window’, who speaks from a Judeo-Christian perspective of living out your ethics and faith in your normal day to day life and doing so in the in workplace—to live it the best you can, ethically and responsibly, and to love others the best that I can while doing so. To do the best I can at my job.”

If you hadn’t guessed yet, Brad has a really tight family and they had a big role in instilling these values in him. “I definitely got the entrepreneurial instincts from my dad and in my practicality, I’m like him as well. Being a middle child, I’m an amalgamation of my mom and my dad. Emotionally, I’m all my mom, which is embarrassing at times, as I cry at practically everything (more on that later) but in a great way,” he told me smiling.

He grew up in Arlington, Texas in a family of four siblings and with parents who, though far from the perfect family, provided “an ideal childhood” for Brad and his brother and sisters.

The love that Brad has for his family was clear immediately after we met. In fact, for most of our time together we talked about his family, his wife and his two kids. He even confessed to me that the reason he was under the weather was because, “my daughter is too stinking cute not to hold when she’s sick.”

Brad’s business practices also reflect those family values. “The sales world has always been a traditional ‘pound the pavement, go to 20 trade shows a year, go see all your retailers on road 6 months a year’ business. I don’t want to be away from my wife and kids, and honestly given our technological capabilities these days through email, phone, video chatting, texting, fax, etc., I feel to utilize these is not responsible use of the resources we have been given, environmentally speaking especially. So I’ll talk with my retailers over the phone or Skype. I’ll iChat them and text them and although some people would see that as impersonal, but I would dare to say that I have better relationships with my retailers than most reps. I still do shows and I’ve met almost all of my retailers now, but really the lack of continual face-to-face contact forces you to be personal from the get go.”

I believe that insight is the key to Brad’s success. He recognizes the importance of relationships and loving and serving those around him. It spills over from the workplace to all other parts of Brad’s life, especially into his hospitality. “I love to cook, I love to host. I love making beer. I like raising chickens, if I had been born 50 years ago, I would have been a farmer. That’s definitely a dream, to live outside of Austin in 20 years and be totally sustainable. I guess I just love that simple lifestyle and having things that last.”

With his incredible care for others and the inheritance of his mother’s emotional genes come consequences, and Brad admitted to me, “I cry at everything. I’m not just saying this. I literally cry at everything. I cry at The Biggest Loser for God’s sake. I love the show Glee. Unashamedly, I love Glee and I love flash mob dancing. So I love those things and I’ve always been a pretty emotional guy, and I usually cry when I watch those. You know that wedding video that was on YouTube where the whole wedding party dances? I cry when I watch that. It’s the culmination of everything that is beautiful. They are dancing because they want to bring joy to others and they are in community and, well, I cry at everything now. I’m like a 13 year old going through puberty.”

The last few years for Brad have been a whirlwind, but he has taken that opportunity to learn and he shared some of his wisdom gained with me. “If there’s anything I’ve figured out. No one really ever knows where you’re going. You just get there and people just assume that you knew where you were going. I’ve been with TOMS since day one and people would laugh if they could see how disorganized we were at the beginning. We just go and figure things out. That’s the beauty of it. We don’t have it all figured out. You’d get bored of it if you did and you’d move onto the next thing, at least I would. If you don’t know what you’re doing and where you’re going, you’ll always be learning. It’s an adventure. It’s kind of a rush to be on the cusp of figuring something out.

“I’ve boiled things down to 3 or 4 tenets in life. Live a balanced life, love others, have faith and serve people as much as you can.”

I believe Brad’s actions speak as loud as his words.

Keep your eyes peeled for Brad’s new website coming soon to an internet near you.

Photos courtesy of Mike Muller.

Visit Brad’s peeps:

TOMS shoes
Apolis Activism
Project 7
FEED projects
Falling Whistles

Brad and his fabulous employees, Courtney and Autumn

Wife Noelle and baby girl Madeline Rose

Brad and son Cash

While trying to track down Sean, I found myself on the phone with this old friend who I hadn’t seen in about 7 years. Finding out that Jon and Sean worked together seemed, well to be honest, ludicrous given what I knew about Jon’s personality and the very little I knew about Sean.

You see, Jon is cut right out of country club tartan cloth. Don’t get me wrong; he’s hilarious, but corporate, if you will. And Sean is a nomad in the truest sense of the word. So you see the contradiction that my brain refused to reconcile.

I have to say that upon seeing them together and hearing their story, my initial reaction was not altogether incorrect. The two are very much opposites, but for the last year their lives have so intertwined to create one of the most ambitious and compassionate organizations around.

That organization is called Falling Whistles and its mission is to end the genocide that has been raging in Congo for the last ten years.

We situated ourselves at an outdoor table eager to enjoy a radiantly sunshiny day. The pair had just returned to Austin the previous evening after an engagement, what Sean likes to call a “speakeasy”, at Texas A&M in College Station, TX.

“What’s a speakeasy?” I asked, curiously, but also somewhat carelessly.

Sean launched into the philosophy behind their informational meetings. He told me, “A hundred years ago, speakeasies were a platform used to defy a law that was unjust. So we pull people together who have read our story for a very detailed discussion of why half the world is free and why the other half is unfree, what that has to do with Congo, what that has to do with us in our daily lives. The goal is really pushing people to analyze their role in this thing we call reality to ask themselves, ‘can we shape it? Can we shift it?’”

Receiving such a profound answer for a seemingly superficial question signaled the depth of character in Sean that consistently reappeared throughout the interview.

That depth explains the impulse, or might I say the pulse, behind Falling Whistles, which is Sean’s experience in Congo from about 2 years ago. My retelling will do it little justice and I encourage you to go to their website to read all of his story, but for what it’s worth, this is what Sean relayed to me as we basked in the warm Texas sun:

I was with Tom’s Shoes. We had sold 50,000 shoes, which was a big victory, and we were really excited about it. So we got to go give 50,000 shoes to kids. The value of Tom’s is that it essentially provides amazing moments of connection for people who would normally never connect and I got to be a part of it.

From there I just wanted to get lost. I wanted to find a true place. I ended up with Invisible Children and helped them shoot a short film in Northern Uganda. I spent time in refugee camps seeing things like vocational skills training and savings and investment programs that not only give these refugees the skills to make money, but also teaches them how to use that money to lift up their community. They will take what they learn and grow a business and other people will come up alongside them as entrepreneurs. With this training it can be a totally different place in 5 years.

I had heard that Congo was the biggest war in the world, but I didn’t really know what that meant. Six million dead, how’s that possible? We haven’t even heard of it. So the idea was to go in and learn all I could and get out as fast as I could. On the fifth day we discovered this illegal military encampment, which was a prison for children. There are moments when everything just becomes very, very clear. That was the moment.

This can’t happen.

Not allowed.

We exposed the prison to the UN, the kids got pulled out and the prison ultimately got shut down. That night the boys told us about the whistle blowers, the kids who are too small to carry a gun who were being sent to the front lines. That night, balling, I wrote this blog, Falling Whistles, and sent it out to friends and family and they sent it around the world. The next morning my inbox was full with people asking, ‘What can we do?’ And all I could say was, ‘I don’t know. I just got here. I don’t understand.’

Fueled by his desire to understand how he could be part of healing Congo, Sean stayed around the region for another month meeting with anyone who would talk to him about what was really going on. He recalled, “I interviewed crazy people—rebel leaders and war lords—people I never thought I’d spend time with.”

He returned to the US broken in every conceivable way. “I was broke, jobless, homeless and living on couches. I didn’t know what to do. I’d just be crying and go into these fits at night.”

Then a wise and encouraging friend, “put a whistle around my neck and said, ‘No matter where this takes you, keep those boys in your heart.’” Little did Sean know that this symbol he carried around his neck would change what the world knows about Congo.

The whistle was so unique that people began to ask him why he was wearing it. He realized that wearing the whistle allowed him to be a voice for those too young to fight for themselves in Congo.

“We realized how important it is to be a whistleblower, how vital it is to speak up against things you don’t have solutions for and you don’t have answers to. We don’t know how this ends, but we know that we are not going to be silent.”

So Sean and some friends began selling whistles out of their pockets for other people to wear around their neck. It is a simple concept. By wearing the necklace, supporters will be asked about Congo and the Falling Whistles story can spread exponentially.

People around Sean who believed in the cause climbed aboard fairly quickly without knowing what was in store or where they were going. They just made sacrifices knowing that eventually their loss would be a child’s gain in Congo.

“My buddy slept out of his attic; Jon sold his company; Dave hitchhiked from Texas to New York for a couple of months to sell whistles and raise awareness. We had a couple of guys ride their bikes for three months from Florida to San Diego.”

Interested to know how Jon go involved, I turned to him for input.

Jon had met Sean at a wedding about three years prior to his affiliation with Falling Whistles. When they reconnected, Jon was at crossroads with his job and had decided to take some time off. He told me, “I had been working in Houston for about three years and I was at a point where I could take the next step in my job, but that if I did, I would be in it for life. I want to do that and I’m going to do that, but I realized that if I wanted to do something different then this was the time. It’s rare to have that kind of freedom so I decided I wanted to go and volunteer for a nonprofit.”

The first person he contacted to find a place to volunteer was Sean. “I knew he was involved with Toms and Invisible Children so I told him this is where I’m at. Do you know of anything that I could get involved in?”

As fate would have it, Sean was just beginning to get an organized Falling Whistles off the ground. So he replied, “I’m starting this new thing, Falling Whistles, and I need somebody to help me run the office, why don’t you come help me do that?”

Jon dove in headfirst. “I went to the Sudan two or three days after we talked. Then I came back, flew out to LA and talked to them, came back to Texas and everything worked out perfectly. I was able to sell my business and sublease my place within a month and I headed out to LA.”

If such tenacity and willingness seem uncanny, the cause and the message are undeniably compelling. Sean and Jon bragged on Dave Lewis another compatriot who jumped on board without hesitation. “Dave graduated from Columbia with an engineering degree and just spoke to people and got the word out by hitchhiking from Texas to New York. He didn’t have a jacket in the winter in Philly. He didn’t have good shoes either and this guy took him to Kmart and bought him both. He got picked up by ex-convicts and death metal stoner kids.”

That’s great! How inspiring! But despite the fact that I was already convinced of their sincerity to help the Congolese people, reality set in and I asked, “ok, so how do you end the biggest war in the world? Where do you even begin?”

Sean explained, “There’s an emergency need for rehabilitation in these kids. It’s a humanitarian need, but also a strategic need. To bring stability to the region, you have to stop cycles of violence and provide young people the tools to go on and lead functional lives. One hundred percent of sales is going for that right now.”

Jon tackled the logistics of making this happen. Sean said that Jon, “gives feet to wings” because he lets Sean supply the vision, the energy and the compassion while he “gets things done.”

Jon filled me in on his work. “It took ten months, we really started in October/November of last year and we didn’t put our first dollar on the ground until September 3rd of this year. We wanted to fund the people that are already there rather than come in and create a new structure, so I was communicating with local Congolese organizations and initiatives. We had to find people who were passionate about change, but who didn’t have the funding to do it, and equip them. There’s a lot of transparency and accountability issues that come in when you are just giving money to Congo. The negotiation to mold the proposal down to what was feasible for everyone took a while.”

Jon continued, “So now we are funding a school over there that teaches them about human rights. The fact that it even exists is already teaching them that, but we want to develop curriculum that is even more proactive. We’re feeding them, paying their tuition and giving them vocational training so they can be reintegrated into their societies and make money for their families while also teaching them to be financially responsible.”

Sean added, “I think there’s an element of deep trauma in these kids who have been affected by the war. You’re giving them a tool and a craft to survive, and both of those things are returning their personalities, making them functional human beings. It’s important to teach them how to be whistle blowers and how to advocate for peace. So it’s a steep learning curve, but Jon has done a great job shepherding it. There were a lot of people who said it was impossible a year ago.”

So that’s the first step, but Sean and Falling Whistles have their expectations set much higher than funding the school. Sean outlined his plan going forward. “We can’t allow genocide in the 21st century. The end of that is that we need more whistleblowers demanding that we not unnecessarily kill human beings. What we discovered about the war is that there is a mineral called coltan that is funding and fueling the war. It’s in cell phones and laptops so we are very connected to the war. It’s not metaphysical. It’s very physical. I’m talking about real life connection to real life death and exploitation on a mass level.”

The good news is that the second step is somewhat underway. “Within the mineral fight, there are two fights we have to win. Right now the state department is trying to get a map drawn of all the different mines in Congo and who’s connected how–what minerals is coming out of where, what company is involved, what rebel group is involved and to try to uncover what now is all smoke and mirrors. So that’s going to be a big push this spring—getting our leaders in Congress to find the money to get that map drawn.”

The third and perhaps most daunting step will be to use that map to curtail the exportation of coltan out of Congo. “With the map we’ll be able to go to multi-national corporations and ask them to expose their supply chains. Is the mineral smuggled into Rwanda? does it go to Australia and gets put onto the white market? I don’t want to demonize them. I want to create such a cultural presence that we are able to say, “come sit down with us.”

That’s a tall order, but with the relentless spirit that exudes from Sean, it is clear that he won’t stop until he sees it through.

You might think that this mission cannot be any more meaningful, but Sean sees an even larger significance to his work with Falling Whistles. He confessed, “I’m calling this moment in history ‘The Great Shattering.’ Part of what seems to be happening is that our paradigm is being ripped apart as we have access to new forms of communication and new realities. There’s a great shattering happening across our generation and it’s resulted in an enormous amount of confusion and a lack of clarity about what’s to be done. I think what will define us is how we decide to put those pieces together. The reason we work so hard is because there is genocide and its needs an immediate end, but there’s also a small window where we can teach people how to put that shattered paradigm back together to create one that makes more sense with the information we have. I think the new paradigm is very grounded in our oldest ideals that all men are created equal, all men are free. And my role as a free man in a free society is to use that which is most fundamental to my freedom, my speech, in order to gain it for others, which is why whistle blowing is so vital.”

So this motley pair will continue to fight the good fight for the exploited in Congo with Jon helping from Austin and Sean heading up the office in Los Angeles. I expect great things from both of them as they move forward.

Sean left me with a nugget of wisdom that I will not soon forget. It’s a belief that sustains Sean as he faces incredible obstacles. “It’s almost always painfully ordinary people—under resourced, under supported, less than influential—who have just drawn a line in the sand and said this is not ok and in taking a stand have become great. They’re called whistleblowers.”

Go to the Falling Whistles website now to read more and to find out how you can help: www.fallingwhistles.com

And remember that you can become a Whistle Blower as well by sending around this article or the link to Falling Whistles to your friends.

My friend, who e-introduced us, told me is often called “The Coffee Guy”, which made me think he took the art of good coffee very seriously.

All nervousness subsided once he walked into the open air café and met me with a big hug. I was immediately comfortable. Robby is one of those people that you feel like you’ve known forever if you’ve known him for 5 minutes.

If you can’t tell by now, Robby owns a coffee business, Pilot House Coffee, with an admittedly unique twist. He delivers coffee to your door on his Yamaha scooter and it’s not your run-of-the-mill coffee either. It’s freshly roasted the morning you receive your delivery.

I was surprised to find that instead of being offended that I wanted to meet at the locale of what I assumed was a business competitor, Robby was excited to be there, which I believe speaks to his graciousness. He is friends with many coffee people in Austin and just happens to be friends with the owner of Medici’s. He immediately complemented them for their great ‘foam art’ and told me I had to see it to believe it.

So we ordered our coffee and he was right, they have great foam art. We carried said art upstairs to enjoy the exposed brick walls and the bustling solitude of Medici’s.

Robby dove right into his business venture and the niche he is creating for himself. He was really quick to point out that he’s been successful because of the encouragement he has received from people around him. Partly, that is true, but what I found was someone who was committed to his craft and resourceful without reservation.

So how did Robby’s plan take shape to offer a uniquely “Austin” option for coffee?

Well, Austin is his hometown. He grew up in an environment that encouraged and championed art, expression and innovation, as we all know Austin tends to do. We’re all just trying to “Keep it weird,” right?

But there’s much more inspiration in his story than just growing up Austin.

For example, you’d be interested to know that despite this creative influence that had nurtured Robby for as long as he could remember, when it came time to decide his collegiate fate, he chose to attend the Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD, a school known more for its unforgiveable structure than its creativity.

Robby confessed, “My dad always wanted me to go there. He didn’t have a chance to go, but he had always gone to football camps there. When I was little, he’d dress me up in navy stuff and tell me about how great the academy was.”

Upon arriving in Annapolis, he found life at the academy to be a little more ascetic than what he had bargained for and because “I am more of a creative type, I just didn’t fit in there. A certain type of person goes to the Academy. And they are great people—really smart—but they are a different kind of person.”

It was not for a lack of fun that Robby and the academy did not mesh well. “I did fine with academics and I had fun playing soccer, but after two years at the academy, I had the courage to step away from my parent’s expectations.”

Robby made the tough decision to leave the academy. “It was a hard decision because I really wanted to honor my parents, especially my dad, but it just wasn’t my path.”

He returned to Austin without much of a plan, but was content to be away from the academy and he could be patient about navigating a new course.

After taking a semester off and then a few classes at ACC, Robby found a new passion. He stopped in at a local coffee shop one day and noticed a big contraption in a room off to the side of the mouth-watering pastry display.

He approached the guy operating what he later found out to be the coffee roaster and, “asked the guy what it was. We became friends and he invited me to come roast with him. So we’d hang out late and go roast and taste coffee at like 3 am.”

“Eventually I started roasting coffee in a little popcorn popper that I bought. That was fun and then I started going crazy about it. I never collected things or had a hobby when I was younger, but I really got into coffee. So much so that I had a friend, who is a chemical engineer, weld a roaster from blueprints we found online. I have pages and pages of notes from changing one roasting variable at a time. I probably roasted 300 lbs of coffee in a year.”

The funny thing about Robby is that in spite of his newfound coffee obsession, he never intended to own a coffee business. As his obsession with coffee grew, he formulated a new plan for his education. He wanted to finish up his BA at Northwestern College in Minnesota and going on to graduate school for counseling.

So back to the cold he went expecting to finish his degree in Global Civilizations, but a twist of fate brought two then strangers across Robby’s path in the same week that encouraged him to start a coffee business. They both had a similar vision for his success and Robby thought the message was too consistent to be coincedence.

So he took a leap of faith. “I went home the next day and dropped my classes and started developing my marketing materials.”

What followed for Robby were trials and tests of all kinds, and he admitted that he started the business with a virtual blindfold. “I didn’t necessarily do things in a wise way. I sold my car for money and I moved into a shed. I lived in this house with these guys and I thought maybe I could save money if I moved into the shed and roasted in another shed. I finished it out—put in windows, raised it off the ground, put in a nice glass door, put in carpet. I got all my supplies for free by going to construction sites and asking for leftover supplies.”

He did begin roasting coffee in the wee little shed next to his “home” shed, but he continued to encounter a few pitfalls. His dedication and hard work, however, did not waver in the face of very uncertain odds. The early days of Pilot House Coffee and the small income he earned were supplemented with random jobs here and there.

Robby told me, “I made it work. I did that for a year and most of that process was just learning how to have a business, how to do my books and a little about marketing. I had to develop my website and create a business identity.”

Since those initial plans took form, the overall concept for the business hasn’t changed much, but he recently added a uniquely Austin touch. “I decided to deliver the coffee on a scooter. It would be such an Austin thing.”

I was impressed so far. I mean, who lives in a shed so that they can start a coffee business? Who keeps going despite the hardship?

I thought there must have been something deeper behind his vision for his company than freshly roasted coffee. Curious to get to the heart of Robby’s business, I asked, “Ok, besides the scooter, what are you really offering?”

“I see myself as the milkman but for coffee. There’s a good reason for that. The reason we had milkmen back then is because you didn’t have a way to keep the milk fresh. So you had to deliver fresh milk if you were going to have it.”

“True,” I said, “but what about grinding your beans in the store? You know, what most of think of as gourmet coffee?”

“Most people don’t know that coffee has an extremely short shelf-life. Two weeks after it’s roasted, coffee loses about ¾ of its flavor compounds. When coffee is fresh, it has more flavor compounds than wine. Most people have never tasted fresh coffee. When coffee became a large commodity, they couldn’t keep it fresh on the shelf. So what they did is they started over roasting the coffee and calling it ‘French roast.’ All that really is is burnt coffee; chemically it charcoal.”

So what’s the difference to the lay coffee drinker?

Robby argued, “You can get a lightly roasted Ethiopian coffee and it tastes like a lemon. Some coffees out of Kenya taste like blueberries. It’s amazing. You’d never expect the flavors it can have. I don’t know why this isn’t common knowledge because most Americans drink coffee everyday. They just don’t know much about it. So I roast it in the morning and I deliver it that afternoon to keep those unique flavor compounds in tact. You get it hours later and I deliver it on my scooter.”

I was also curious to know how he’d come up with the name, and as it turns out, he didn’t leave the naval academy without absorbing some of its life and culture. You might even say, it foreshadowed his current situation.

He explained, “A pilothouse is the room on a large ship where they navigate and steer the ship, where the captain has the wheel. I was on a large ship off the east coast to gain some naval experience. My assignment was to be in the pilothouse from midnight to 6 AM and we were just all cranking down coffee and it was terrible coffee. The lighthouse logo is based on a view I had from that pilothouse.”

The idea for the lighthouse logo came from a source of unexpected support that Robby found in a friend he made while delivering his goods. “My marketing guy is great. He was one of my first customers in Hyde Park. He told me to brand myself as ‘the Coffee Guy.’”

With the marketing advice and encouragement and support from family and friends added to Robby’s relentless efforts, his business has grown 7 times its size in the last 6 months.

Beyond the here and now, Robby has a vision for changing the coffee industry altogether. His dedication and desire to become an expert has lent Robby insight into the coffee industry and its shortcomings. Ultimately, Robby would like to change the way that the industry operates by taking better care of his suppliers.

“Long term I’d like to work with coffee growers directly. Coffee growers are terribly exploited. Coffee is probably the second largest commodity in the world in terms of production, but the coffee growers are among the poorest in the world. The average coffee price the growers receive is about 11 cents a pounds. I buy it for $2.50 a pound, but a coffee shop can make over $100 bucks on that one pound of coffee while the growers get 11 cents. They have to take out loans every year to sew their crop. Fair trade bumps it up another 20 or 30 cents, but there’s room for $1.00. That alone could transform their entire local economy.”

Robby is realistic about the possibility of this becoming a worldwide movement. “The problem with that is—it’s a set system. A lot of these people are being manipulated and I’m sure in a lot of cases paramilitary groups are adding to the problem. Long term I’d love to fly down and pick up the beans myself.”

In the meantime, Robby is giving part of his profits to Hope House Orphanage in Gulu, Uganda. “I’m giving 10% of my profits to a charity in Africa. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s what I can do for now.”

So for all you coffee lovers out there, get ready for this real coffee to rock your world and maybe change the world, too.

Buy some coffee from Robby: www.pilothousecoffee.com

Photo courtesy of Esther Havens!!

I know that Chris has made a lot of sacrifices to get to where he is today. His work ethic is unparalleled and his focus relentless. He undoubtedly breaks the stereotypes of the trophy generation by pursuing his passion with unceasing effort.

Not only is he a leader on the field, batting .321 with nine homers and 31 doubles in 128 games, scoring 84 runs and driving in 47, but he is also a leader off the field as his character and commitment set a high bar for professional athletes.

Looking forward to more greatness to come from Chris!

Way to go Buddy! So Proud!

Photo by: Tom Mihalek

This article was difficult for me to write. Taylor Nichols is a friend whom I really admire, and writing his story challenged me as a person. For those of you who know me well, the similarities between the paths that both of our lives have taken is eerily similar, but I hope that, like me, you find in Taylor the inspiration to do what you know you were made to do.

Taylor Nichols, an 8th grade teacher at KIPP Austin College Prep, and I have been acquaintances for a long time. So when I asked him for an interview, it was really just coffee for acquaintances crossing the border into friendship.

You should know that Taylor is a more handsome, fit version of Chris Kattan, after whom he has been given the affectionate name of ‘Peepers’ by many of his close friends. He is one of the most honorable and inspiring people I know and yet also one of the humblest. He had just finished his workout when he met me at Dominican Joe’s Coffee on South Congress.

For anyone who is far outside of the world of education, KIPP schools are public charter schools that insist that their students be college ready when they graduate high school.

I know you are asking yourself, “Isn’t that the goal of any school?”

Well, yes, but KIPP schools make it happen and they often make it happen for underserved kids who generally come from low-income families and school districts and for the majority of whom attending college is not even on their radar.

It’s a revolutionary approach to education that is solving many problems that a decade ago seemed impossible to crack.

The path to KIPP for Taylor was not an easy one, nor was it straight and narrow, a commonality that he shares with many of his students.

Taylor was privileged enough to grow up in a school district in Houston where public education was just as good as any private school and that has had a big impact on his life. “I had an extremely good public education. I attended Memorial in Houston, which is basically a public private school. What that means is that you never question going to college.”

It was in middle and high school in Houston that Taylor began to become really competitive about his academic performance. “As the whole thing gets momentum, you start thinking ‘ok, I can do well in school.’ Then you realize, ‘I’m going to try to do really well in school,’ and you get competitive about it.”

Now there is something to be said for a little healthy competition, but this level of competition proved stressful at times and was only compounded by the onset of chronic migraines. He told me, “You know everyone’s gpa and you fight and that was basically my education. So by the time I got to Princeton it was definitely different.”

Taylor went to Princeton and it was a breath of fresh air compared to what he went through in high school. Partly, though, Taylor realized that he had to take some of the self-imposed stress out of school and make learning his priority, not his grades. “Princeton was the perfect match because it offered a superb environment for growth and it was such a privilege to be surrounded by enormously talented students.”

Upon arriving, he was in awe of the interesting people surrounding him. “You are very impressed by your neighbors, you try to find out every person’s thing. Were they a perfect SAT score? An athlete? What was it that got them in?”

Naturally, toward the end of the best four years of his life, Taylor began thinking about what he wanted to do. The woman who founded Teach For America had attended Princeton and Taylor’s senior thesis made him more aware of the program. “So when I was typing my thesis, I thought, ‘this is what I want to do.’ I had taught a lot in Newark during my time there.”

“That being said,” Taylor revealed, “two days before I had gotten into the University of Texas law school. So I was fighting two forces. I would argue that teach for America was not mainstream at the time. It was still very radical not to go work for a bank or not to go to law school.”

Adding to Taylor’s decision was the fact that he almost didn’t get into UT law. “To be honest with you,” Taylor confessed, “I was scheduled for the December LSAT and I was an outpatient at the Princeton hospital because of migraines three days before the exam. I called UT and asked to take the February LSAT.”

Such an exception is rare and Taylor felt like he “just couldn’t turn down UT law.

I decided I could no longer entertain this option of Teach for America because it was off the track.”

So to law school he went, but his time there was not quite what he envisioned. “It just felt unnatural,” he told me. He remembered a conversation with a fellow student about his uncertainty of being there, and he recalled, “That’s a strange conversation to have with someone there because everyone is on track. They know what they want to do. They want to do litigation or tax law.”

He was dismayed to discover that he had been thrown back into the world of rigorous academic competition that he had so happily escaped once he’d arrived in New Jersey. At UT he found the course work challenging and the students very driven. So Taylor devoted a good portion of his time outside of his legal studies to teaching law to local middle and high school students through a program called Streetlaw.

In hindsight Taylor realized, “Not enjoying law school came with a lack of success. I detached from the mainstream and began experimenting with alternative ways to use my legal education. I knew that I wanted to graduate and that there was value in doing so, but the benefits were not always so clear as I went through it.”

One of his more particularly apathetic moments, he recalled, “we had a food drive and the teacher said that if you bring a can of food and you get called on, no big deal. So I get called on, ‘Mr. Nichols!’”

“And I don’t look up. And I’m not trying to be funny. So I’m sitting there and, ‘Mr. Nichols, what do you think about this contract?’

“And I held up my can and said, ‘Green beans.’ And I put it down and don’t break stride. Just, ‘Green beans,’ because I did not want to talk. So everybody busted out laughing and said, ‘who yells green beans?’ If a canned food drive meant I didn’t have to talk about contracts, I took it seriously.”

Although Taylor had the support of his parents and no pressure from home to finish his law degree, his parents didn’t really believe that Taylor might choose a path other than legal practice upon graduation. Eventually his parents realized that being a lawyer might not be best for Taylor.

“My final year I realized that I wanted to graduate and begin putting my education to work whether in the legal realm or not. With the migraines, my parents concern, and that constant unnatural feeling, I began to understand the law field is really not the route to go. At this point, it’s not honorable then to take the teaching route, but really it was necessary. I knew that I would be better at something that I really enjoyed doing. It just made sense.”

The transition from law school to education was a bit frustrating at first, but then he found a program called Texas Teaching Fellows that he felt was a good fit. Once again he was faced with a difficult decision. “I flat out made the decision not to take the bar. And I thought, ‘once you do this, there’s no going back.’ It was cathartic at times. I remember sitting by the UT pool thinking, ‘people are in bar class; I’m sitting by the pool. This is nice.’ That feeling goes away very soon when you are really starting from scratch.”

After he went through this rapid-paced class to get his teacher’s certification, he had to find someone who would hire him for a provisional year. In that provisional year, he found, “I didn’t know much about trends in teaching. Kids that can’t add and subtract in third grade; kids that didn’t speak the language—all this was new to me. Some girl asked me how to solve a simple math problem. 23-18 and I forgot how to borrow. I just looked at her and said ‘5.’

And she looked at me and said, ‘why is it 5?’

And I said, ‘I don’t know, it’s just 5, it’s 5.’ That was a wake up call. You don’t have the tools that they need. So you get the certificate and it’s all a really humbling experience.”

“The common belief,” Taylor claimed, “is that any smart person can teach. That’s a total joke. I would argue that anybody can teach, to some extent, but it takes something more to do it well and then to really reach out to those struggling students.”

After two years of teaching kids at Del Valle, Taylor applied to KIPP. “It’s a huge commitment. Kids are there from 7:15 am to 5 pm and they don’t necessarily live close by. So a lot of kids’ school day is from 6 to 6 with the bus ride. Plus they go every other Saturday and three weeks in summer. The true mission is to get them to college. They show us the statistics every year. In Austin last year, roughly 10% of minorities who graduated from high school were ready for college.”

So what exactly is a KIPP school like? Well, it’s a public school that kids choose to attend. If a sibling of a KIPP student wants in, they’re in and the parents have to be 100% on board, too. Teacher, student and parent sit down before school begins and sign a contract together. The kids receive two and a half healthy meals a day. They are taught character (mainly respect for self, others and the world around them) as well as state mandated curriculum. Every year they more than ace the TAKS test and these students experience college becoming a reality.

But Taylor insists, “That doesn’t tell the whole story because I’m one of the oldest teachers at our school. Teach for America feeds in a lot of teachers. We’re young; we’re vibrant and there’s energy there. It moves like a well-oiled machine. It’s kind of crazy.”

For Taylor, “It was a very hard first year because I was learning the KIPP language and working long days and doing it over and over and over again. But as a teacher, I’ve never gotten as much education in my life—in class, from my principal, from my assistant principal. They are both amazing leaders and teachers.”

Just to set the record straight Taylor made sure I understood that “the idea is not to put public schools out of business. It’s really to try best practices until the results are so apparent that others will use them too. We are definitely not counter to the public school system by any stretch.”

The most interesting teaching method for me is the system of rewards that reinforces good behavior. Each day the students have the opportunity to earn fake dollars to track their behavior. If their behavior is consistently good and the median dollars earned is high, then by the time they reach the 8th grade, they get to go on a trip to visit colleges in the Northeast.

Taylor helped lead the 8th grade trip this year and it was one of the most rewarding experiences he’s ever had. “It was awesome because the kids were out of school and we got to watch them when the guard comes down, literally love learning for no other reason than that it is fun and seeing how well-behaved they were. We were at the statue of liberty and they were eating junk food and we got really upset because they were eating food they aren’t supposed to eat. You’d have thought somebody had killed somebody. And we realized we’re playing in a different ball game because this line next to us was a school group and somebody hit somebody else in the head and a minor riot would ensue. They looked like them by all accounts, but their behavior was a thousand times better.”

Taylor’s proudest moment may have been when he got to lead the visit the group made to Princeton, not only because it is his alma mater, but because he could see he inspiration the students gained from their time there. “They were seeing very powerful things. They were seeing a guy at Princeton telling them that it costs $50,000 to go a year and looking them in the eye and telling them, ‘if your parents make under X amount, you are going for free.’ I looked at them and told them, ‘It’s free. If you get in, they are telling you to come.’”

“Whether Princeton sunk in, whether Tufts sank in, it’s on their radar. And the high school does SAT prep and Spanish for AP credit. KIPP puts their life on a track.”

What I most admire about Taylor is that he could do whatever he wanted. He has two degrees from very prestigious institutions and he could be making a lot of money. But he is so compelled to follow his passion to serve these kids, that it feels necessary. And while he would never tell me this, he is good at what he does. He is good at helping others find their path.

Taylor Nichols

By: Josh Hansard
When I first heard about President Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the only word I could force out was ‘How’. This also happens to be the view of everyone I’ve been talking with about it, Obama supporter or no. Why? How? What does the Nobel Committee base this on?

Although these are legitimate questions, what about these: Is the Nobel Prize a legitimate award that can be given at will to people who speak eloquently? Does it actually take action to get the award, or has ‘star power’ infiltrated this system as well? Obama became a nominee just 2 (!) weeks after becoming president.

Some good news is that Obama himself was surprised by this decision, and considers it a ‘call to action’. But wasn’t it supposed to take action of some sort to obtain the award in the first place? The Nobel Committee cited Obama’s “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” and even called it an early vote of confidence in the President and his plans. But that is the problem isn’t it? They are just plans. Even die hard Obama supporters have to admit that his whole campaign of Hope and Change, intangible ideas, hasn’t produced any fruit yet. In fact he just sent more troops to Iraq to fight in the war! That’s the complete opposite of the Nobel idea, isn’t it?

So one has to question the Nobel Prize itself. According to Alfred Nobel, who coincidentally invented dynamite, the prize was to be given “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Well if that is the case, then what about Jimmy Carter, or Yasser Arafat? The small strides in peace they made have not materialized in measurable results. Peace in the Middle East, the achievement which afforded these two their award, is still unrealized. What about Henry Kissinger? He was awarded the prize for helping with a ceasefire in Vietnam but at the same time accused of war crimes including illegally bombing a neutral Cambodia!

If you are baffled by Obama’s award as most of America is, I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it. The reality is that the award is nothing more than something that is given to a person selected by a group of individuals, who each are elected themselves by other people. People are flawed, and that’s the sad truth. Nobody, including Obama or the Nobel Committee, or even Alfred Nobel himself, is perfect. If Obama can pull through and follow up all of his articulate speech on peace and change, etc., then that would be great. But in my opinion, he already has enough on his plate trying to live up to his campaign. If I were him, I might be a little ticked that this group of Europeans just raised the bar on my legacy and my responsibilities, ten-fold.

As for the Nobel Committee, I would consider re-thinking the criteria, or at least paying closer attention to it, so that the world does not regard the Peace Prize with the same irrelevancy as a toy in a kid’s meal.

It was clear from the moment he walked into the interview that he was made for country music. His scraggly beard and light blue eyes remind you of real-life cowboys like Ty Murray and the late Lane Frost. His deep voice startled me at first, but I quickly realized it made perfect sense. He has one of those classic deep country voices like George Strait or Garth Brooks.

Most of all though, it was his endearing charm that reminded me of those quiet cowboy types—so self-confident that they say only what’s needed rather than filling awkward silences with meaningless jabber.

At any rate, I went ahead and conjured my most oblivious voice and asked why Paul chose Texas country as his musical genre.

“I guess that even though I grew up in the middle of a city my friends and I always listened to country music and wore boots and drove big trucks around,“ he told me, hinting at the ease with which he fell into this musical style.

It also didn’t hurt that he spent much of his childhood at his family’s ranch in Bellville, TX, the locale where his parents now permanently reside.

But the reasons for his choice run deeper than his friend’s influence and as I kept digging, I found that Paul has the ability to play several genres.

It was at age 12 that he began playing guitar, shortly after he had confiscated his sister’s guitar, which she had received as a Christmas gift. His dad played in a Motown Band and once we got into it, he realized that he actually has a very musical family, which he seemed surprised by as he told me, “My uncle plays as well and he was a fulltime country singer, formerly an opera singer. He went to Carnegie Mellon and he’s got a great voice. His wife was a country singer. My other aunt is married to a jazz pianist that’s traveled the world. My cousin is a drummer, in high school, and is touring around the state. None of us were really raised in a musical household except that my dad would play the occasional show.”

In his early guitar picking days, he experimented with other genres and went through “phases” as he calls them. “I started listening to country music when I was still really young, but then I went through some phases. When I started playing guitar, it seemed like a good time to start listening to new music. I played in some rock and punk bands. We went through a bunch of those kinds of bands. Then I got into jazz in ninth grade and eventually learned the bass so that I could get into High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston.”

His performing arts high school, which has turned out the likes of some remotely famous people you might know such as Beyonce and Jason Moran, provided a particularly formative experience for Paul. “It was awesome. I learned tons about music. I feel like I learned more there than I did in college. Probably because I was around a bunch of guys that went on full scholarship to Julliard, are friends with Wynton Marsalis, and who have played at the Lincoln Center and toured the world.”

Paul’s performance experiences haven’t been quite as fancy as his classmates, but it was performing that drew him to the world of professional musicians. “Our first gig was at this place called ‘The Abyss’ in Houston. The place is just like the name implies. It was condemned a few months after we played there, but I made about $20 and from then on I knew that it was the coolest thing that I could make money from playing guitar.”

With his mind made up Paul went onto study music production in college. He majored in sound recording technology which encouraged his love for producing music, a love that allowed his attraction to music to come full circle as he just produced his sister’s first album.

He also came by his production talent at an early age. “I produced both of my own albums because growing up I always played the drums, the bass, the guitar and I sang. And I had a four-track recorder so I’d record each part and put the stuff together and be my own band for a while. In college I spent most of my time in the studio. So I hope I’m qualified to produce and I’m also producing two other things. I love to put instruments together and make songs.”

It was also during college that Paul formed his current band. They are an eclectic bunch with talents and tastes ranging from choral composition to genuine Texas fiddling. “The bass player’s first love is hard core funk—George Clinton, P-funk. The drummer’s first love is hard rock. Van Halen is his favorite band. Taylor is classically trained and Paul is the only one who originally played country music, but I think it makes for an interesting band.”

Paul described them for me while we talked:

“Taylor Davis is the piano player. I’ve known him the longest. He’s the music director at a church in Houston, and he’s also a published composer. He’s sold like 250,000 pieces of his choir music, and he’s scored a couple of independent movies. He’s really talented in his own right.

Drummer, Luke Richards and bass player Daniel Rhodes, I both met at Texas State in the jazz department. So that adds an interesting element because they are funk jazz guys playing in a country band. It just adds other influences into our music.

Paul Bruner is our fiddle player. His wife came to all our shows and she told us her boyfriend played fiddle and that he’s really good. I didn’t believe her, but then he played with us and he is really good. Now we are best friends.”

Once he found this harmonious group, he became even more serious about making it professionally, throwing caution to the wind and to the idea of a more stable job. Paul admitted, “I always knew my career was going to be something with music, but I guess there’s a point when I dropped out of college to pursue music that I realized this is the real deal. But I already knew and I didn’t second guess my decision.”

That self-assurance comes from his genuine love for all aspects of music making. This love became clear when I asked Paul what part of making music he could never give up. After much indecision, he replied, “I don’t know if producing or the artist part of it is more fun. I guess the songwriting because that’s where it all starts.”

He admitted that most of the songs he writes at least begin with something that has happened to him, but often there is some fiction thrown in with that truth. “I think a lot of people’s songs start out as true stories. My first albums were. Well, I guess I made up a few of the songs. A lot of them are at least related to personal experiences. One of the songs on my last album was based on experience, but I just turned it into a more interesting story.”

His favorite types of songs—sad, slow ballads—are almost always true because “I don’t think I’d make up a sad song, or at least a sad relationship song. Definitely my slower, emotional songs are usually the truth. I do like to make up songs where people die at the end. Tragic songs I guess you could say.”

Most of all he likes songs that tell a story, which is what really drew him to work within the Texas Country genre. “I’ve always appreciated music that’s a lot about the lyrics and that tells stories. And a lot of country music doesn’t do that, especially a lot of current Nashville stuff. But a lot of Texas stuff is really authentic music. Its not usually changed much by labels and it’s actually the artists writing the songs. I also really like the whole southwest America, Texas, Mexico stuff and that music tells stories about cowboys. I also like instrumentation—country guitars always fascinated me. It’s a combination of the songs and the instruments. So basically the music is what I like,” he said with a laugh.

When you hear Paul’s music, you may hear elements of TX Country greats like Robert Early Keen and college roommate, Lyle Lovett, whose music has been very influential on Paul. He also digs Allison Kraus and the older work of Pat Green.

His dream is to have a career that follows in their footsteps and he envisions his greatest performance as “playing a sold out show at Gruene Hall. I’d be completely happy being Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett. They can tour the country and have big, sold out shows, but they aren’t like big mega stars. They could probably come in here and we wouldn’t even recognize them. Well, maybe not Lyle Lovett because of the hair, but,” he smiled.

He’s had a taste of that kind of fame, although he definitely didn’t see it coming. “We just played in France this July for 15,000 people. They treated us like rock stars and we did autograph signings over an hour. It was pretty nuts. It was a blast.”

While Paul has recently been double-crossed by his booking agent (a tragedy like those any real cowboy would face), he still counts himself as blessed to be able to make a living doing what he loves. Currently, he manages all aspects of his band including their booking and maintaining their website while producing their albums and writing their music.

He counts himself equally blessed to have a family that really supports him in the pursuit of his passion. “Everyday I just love the fact that I can control my own destiny and work on what I want to do and be really productive. I love being able to travel and play guitar and drink beer for a living.”

The last thing I asked Paul was if he believed we were made only to do one thing in life. He told me, “I don’t think I believe in predetermination or anything, and I also think that if I wanted to, I could go do something else. But for me it’s the only thing I could possibly ever dream of doing.”

So to all you truck-driving, boot-wearin’ cowboys and cowgirls out there: do what you dream.

And thanks for the wisdom, Cowboy.

Visit Paul at: www.pauleason.com

Paul Eason Band in Europe

Cowboy Paul

The two have been on a serious life roller coaster ride for the last year, and I’m sure that if you’d have asked Greg a year and a half ago what he’d be doing today, there would have been no way he would have predicted his current situation.

Greg (and Jake) just finished up and submitted his new short film, Guest Room, to the Doorpost Short Film competition, which ended two weeks ago. They took home the Filmmaker’s Choice award for best representing the spirit of the doorpost in their work and character and are approaching the one-year anniversary of the launch of One Spark.

Greg is the oh-so-capable writer and director for One Spark Films, but when I heard about Greg, I was initially intrigued by his passion and work with non-profits, including the non-profit that he was starting with some very talented people.

We met up at Spider House so I could get the scoop. I knew Greg immediately, mainly because he walked in alone and was searching the dive patrons for a girl he had never met. But I also recognized him as he tick-tocked into the bar on a cool September night because our previous correspondence had revealed a warm, heartfelt person whose interior is appropriately matched by his resemblance to a teddy bear.

We dove right into discussing his project. Waking the World, the provisional name of his non-profit (all will be set in stone within a few months), is a non-profit resource for other non-profits. That’s a lot of non-profit, but seriously, Greg told me the premise behind Waking the World is “essentially, to offer affordable financial strategy and media production to non-profits as a non-profit.”

It’s a revolutionary service that strives to bring together talented, passionate individuals who believe that collectively they can “make the biggest impact on the world by using their expertise to help non-profits rather than doing non-profit work unrelated to their individual strengths.”

Waking the World is the product of years of both intentional and unintentional choices that Greg made regarding his career and his character. It all started the day Greg was born. Just kidding. We won’t go back that far, but Greg’s childhood, especially his education, significantly shaped his outlook on life.

Greg grew up in Ft. Worth, Texas. He was always a stubborn kid with a one-track mind. He recalled one episode before soccer practice when, “My dad told me to get dressed so I went into my room, but I came back out asking for some string so that I could tie my fake gun to the back of my bike to make a rocket ship. I did this four times with less and less patient redirection from my dad until I finally donned my practice clothes.”

While Greg’s dad did not think it was so hilarious then, this story has now become his token dinner party anecdote and Greg likes to think of it as evidence of his level of commitment—dedicated despite all distractions. He jumps in headfirst and full steam ahead when he has his mind made up.

Laughing, he also recalled his dreams of entering the medical field. “I was convinced that I would be a doctor someday so I literally operated on my stuffed animals. I cut open my Garfield, stuffed something into him, and sewed him back up.”

That dedication was reinforced through his school, Trinity Valley, and more specifically through his head master from whom Greg learned valuable life lessons at an early age. His head master, a Hungary native, emigrated to America and started a school in his attic that later became Trinity Valley. His example showed Greg that hard work and dedication lead to success.

Greg’s head master also encouraged individualism and encouraged his students to think for themselves. Greg recalled the story that his head master told every senior class. “He grew up in Hungary and his father was part of the Nazi-resistance party. His father took them to a Nazi rally to quote, ‘Show them what evil looked like.’ As they were at the rally, my head master said he remembers watching his father the whole time. His father became so caught up in the moment, in the charisma of the speaker and the emotions of the crowd that at the end of the rally, his father, a resistance leader, stood up, arm raised high shouting, ‘Heil Hitler!’ He went on to tell us to change the world in one’s or two’s retaining the pieces of ourselves that make us who we are.”

It is the combination of his commitment and individualism that forces him to be very intentional about the big life choices, like college and his career. When it came time to decide on college, Greg’s commitment was to athletics and his one-track mind was focused on playing rugby. To that end, he decided to attend Texas A&M.

Greg honestly thought that he would end up playing professional rugby for his career. It wasn’t unreasonable. His high school rugby team won the National Championship. So Greg spent two summers “playing with semi-professional teams in New Zealand and Australia and dedicated a lot of time improving his rugby skills.”

For his major, he selected the ever practical and stable business accounting. He had always loved film and was drawn to its art, but he always thought of its practice as something unattainable, “It was the silver screen. It was out of my reach and the odds of making a living were not necessarily promising, and besides, I was going to play rugby.”

But something wasn’t right and Greg felt it. He uncovered one piece of the puzzle when he went down to Nuevo Laredo with his rugby team to do some service work. He fell in love with the people and the kids in the orphanage where they worked. “They wrecked me,” he admitted.

From then on he knew that he had a passion to serve non-profits so he “started a non-profit shortly after called the Full Hearts Foundation, that exists to provide educational opportunities and lasting relationships with children living in poverty in Nuevo Laredo.”

Because of his demonstrated passion for non-profits, he was invited to join a dinner party, one intentionally fateful night, with a group of very driven, talented people who were gathering at the home of a dear friend. With great foresight, this friend, Rachel Toppert, purposefully brought these people together to see what would happen if a brilliant and talented group put their brains together over a wonderful four-course meal.

The result of the night and several dinners to follow was the beginning of Waking the World. While they were not quite sure how the non-profit would function, the group believed that they could have the biggest impact on the world by using their specific gifts to help non-profits.

Greg explained it to me like this: “I could go down to central America and help a group build a house, but as soon as I try to nail a board, it would break in two. I’m just not handy. I could get the job done, but it wouldn’t be the greatest use of my time or talent. But give me a video camera and I can use my expertise to create a film that will make the world more aware of that organization. Using my specific talent—that’s how I can really change the world.”

It’s not exactly rocket science, but the potential for real impact multiplies significantly when you place people in non-profit work that suits their natural abilities. Remember that at this point Greg’s love and talent for film are still just starry-eyed dreams, but all this talk about natural ability got Greg thinking about his career path.

Greg began to realize that maybe he wasn’t so sure about pursuing his accounting major. He remained committed to that path for the year, but was internally conflicted about his future. So he “went down to Australia to spend the summer reading, writing and finding myself. I know it sounds cliché, but I was literally by myself all day long; I’d have long conversations with myself.”

While there he was instinctively drawn to the film industry and worked on various sets throughout the summer. “I didn’t care what I was doing—running up and down stairs, handing out snickers bars—I just had so much energy being on set. And it made me feel alive.”

Despite this confirmed love for film and great amounts of uncertainty, Greg returned to College Station intending to finish up his senior year of rugby and his accounting degree. While playing a rugby match, Greg wrecked his ankle. He didn’t have the heart to rehab the ankle because he knew that his plan to play rugby professionally was no longer his dream.

On top of this huge shift in perspective, he was met with another striking realization. During one of his exams in his Financial Reporting class, he retold, “I stopped for a minute to rest my eyes. I was doing just fine on the exam, but as I sat there I became aware of the pencils tapping around the room in unison. And it got louder and louder and louder. I had to get out so I turned in my test and walked out the door. I cried in the parking lot, called my father, and was done with accounting from that day forward, just 6 hours short of my degree.”

Greg recognizes this decision as another turning point. With no prospects to play rugby and a clear aversion to accounting, he knew his actions had committed him to pursuing a film career. But just as you would expect from someone as dedicated as Greg, he dove right in, changed his major to marketing, and applied to NYU for film school.

Upon graduation from A&M, he and his friends bought an old 1973 Cortez Bus (that was a former traveling puppet show) and decided to drive it south to Guatemala, or as far as it would go, while helping out nonprofits and missions in the towns they passed through.

Greg learned a valuable lesson that might sound familiar to you if you’ve seen his latest film, Guest Room. “Life on the road accelerates relationships,” Greg told me. “My best friend and I got into a huge fight. It was over directions. It seemed insignificant, but it was the culmination of months of things unsaid and bottled up. We didn’t speak for two months. We decided to go our separate ways, literally. He and one of our buddies drove the van back to Texas while I continued to head south with another friend.”

But as Greg found out life on the road doesn’t only accelerate relationships; it accelerated his desire to work with non-profits. Greg did reach Guatemala and got connected with a non-profit called Safe Passage, a non-profit organization that provides school enrollment and after-school support for poor children whose families scavenge the Guatemala City Garbage Dump.

Meanwhile he was waiting to hear back from NYU graduate film program about his admission. “The moment I looked down into the garbage dump in Guatemala, into the depths of hell, I knew I needed to stay. That very night I got a message from NYU saying I got accepted. So I started trekking back to Texas to sell all my possessions and move to Singapore.”

His time in Guatemala got him thinking about that fateful dinner party and as he was crossing back over the Texas border to visit his kids in Nuevo Laredo, he called Carl Cooper to inquire about the status of Waking the World.

Greg encouraged him to “consider working with One Spark Films because Jake had a vision to support non-profits through creative media. But then we realized that our group of friends had such a diverse blend of gifts ready to be harnessed for service that if Waking the World could harmonize all of them, we could do so much more than media. Carl now had his vision.”

As he faced the prospect of taking on $67,000 in debt each year for the next four years for film school, Greg began to believe that he could pursue his passion for film without having debt up to his ears. In his travel through Central America, Greg had also “unlocked my passion for experiential learning. Before I could attend film school, I needed more adventures to discover what kind of stories I was called to tell.”

Instead of Singapore, Greg moved to Austin, got reconnected with Jake Hamilton and jumped on board with One Spark Films. What was really weighing on Greg’s mind was how he could focus his passion and natural talent for story-telling through filmmaking as well as help non-profits and Jake was offering just what Greg was seeking.

As Greg was making these big life transitions, Waking the World was and still is, entering its own as a non-profit. Carl, now the executive director, has just moved to Austin. Waking the World is now connected with Safe Passage, the non-profit Greg worked with in Guatemala, and with the Bridgeway Foundation, a non-profit run by Shannon Sedgewick Davis.

Long term, Waking the World’s vision is based on the philosophy expounded around that dinner table in College Station—using the unique gifts and talents of its members to impact the world—but now they have a practical way to fulfill that vision by offering business strategy and media solutions. Greg’s role lay on the media side and he is currently finishing up a documentary for Safe Passage, which he and Jake shot approximately a year ago.

Other members of the non-profit include accountants, strategists, photographers, financial analysts all seeking to put their expertise to work.

Because their core belief is that an individual’s potential to impact the world can be best tapped by applying their unique talents to non-profit work, their vision extends further than using their own talents to aid non-profits. The second tier of Waking the World’s mission is to help individuals recognize their unique gifts so that they can be placed with non-profits seeking long and short-term assistance.

Greg told me that most people understand the communications and business strategy side of Waking the World as it provides premium talent to non-profits at a price that pails in comparison to normal expenses. But the second mission, their movement, is more difficult for people to understand. It is simply that if you don’t have the passion, you don’t have the ability. Once you find your talent, your gift (often evident because of your passion in that area), you have the ability to greatly impact those around you and society. The fulfillment individuals find in their work results in positive changes for the world.

Waking the World is currently focused on finding funding, but also being able to carry multiple projects at once. “All the while,” Greg told me, “we’ve been focused on that second mission, getting people connected with their gifts, and becoming storytellers by sharing our philosophy at different forums.”

Greg is committed to the success of both One Spark Films and Waking the World and if you haven’t guessed already, his one-track mind is now consumed with changing the world through his films.

Director Greg

Greg and Jake filming Guest Room

Greg chases his crew member

Trying to keep up with these amazing and talented artists and go-getters is tough, so I thought I’d help you guys out with some updates every once in a while.

Phoebe Hunt of the Belleville Outfit performed live as a group at the 8th Annual Americana Music Awards. They are the buzz of this genre, which fuses soul, jazz, blues and R&B. They were also included in the Wall Street Journal article, “Honest, Unfettered Americana” by Jim Fusilli. Read the article here.

Jake Hamilton and co. (more of which you will learn about tomorrow) just returned Sunday from Nashville, TN and the Doorpost Film Awards. Their movie Guest Room made a big impression and took home the “Filmmaker’s Choice” award and $15,000. What an honor to be chosen as the stand-out among your peers! Way to go guys!
Visit the Guest Room website and OneSparkFilms.

Sally Pryor Taylor had a great first solo art show at the end of August. Sally sold 12 paintings that night and had a huge turnout! She still has some amazing pieces for sale on her website.

Found this great article that supports The Trophy Generation! The author finds the worth in our Generation and compares us to “the Greatest Generation”. She believes that we will achieve as much as they did!

Here’s a short excerpt:

“Despite their reputation for being pampered, a close look at the Generation Ys (a.k.a. Millennials) in your company may reveal more pragmatism than privilege. Recent surveys reveal that since 2006 Millennials have become more realistic about job expectations. In fact, Gen Ys have the lowest expectations of all four workforce generations when it comes to “soft” workplace benefits such as a pleasant work environment, liking the people they work with or having flexible hours. Here’s why.”

Read More….

Support a Trophy Kid at these Events this week!!

Tuesday, September 22–Kat Edmonson at Vino Vino in Austin at 7:00 pm!

Wednesday, September 23–Phoebe Hunt and the Belleville Outfit play at Scholz Biergarten in Austin at 8:00 pm!

Wednesday, September 23–Dallas Comedy House Presents Level 3 Showcase at Ozona Grill & Bar in Dallas at 8:00 pm!

Saturday, September 26–the Belleville Outfit play among many bluegrass greats at the Flatrock Music Festival at Camp Ton-A-Wandah in Flatrock, NC!

**and if you are looking for a good happy hour this week go visit Boyer Derise, head chef of Fleming’s Steakhouse at the Domain in Austin for their 5 for $6 ’til 7 happy hour daily

Visit the Events Calendar for more details!