Self-determination can be a slippery thing. What or who motivates choice? What actually makes you happy? I wrote “It’s All Up to You” in the mid-aughts when I was working out for myself how happiness really was an inside job. Toward that end, I traveled to India in 2008 for another yoga intensive.
On that trip, I met artist/composer Lasse Hukka. He’d traveled to India from Finland with his Martin guitar, and along with a couple of other yogi-musicians who were in Mysore at the same time, we formed a pick-up band. A couple afternoons a week, we’d go up to the roof of my rental to play (naming ourselves “The Chocolate Stand Band” for the nearby corner market that made and sold small foil-wrapped chocolate). There, Lasse helped me complete the music for “It’s All Up to You."
There’s no drama unless you want there to be
No story, no cheating, no lies
Take what you want, leave what you want
Back home in the US, I starting working with producer Ben Bernstein what eventually would be 2010. He called into the studio the amazing and lovely viola player Tatianna Ecoiffier to complete the track.
Review of It’s All Up to You in Consequence of Sound