By Kris Searle © Copyright, 2012
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There was this moment after a performance I did for the Haiti relief fund in Hollywood where this man came up to me and asked if he could speak to me. He came up to me and held my hand with both of his and said, “I have HIV and sometimes I lose hope when everything seems so dark. Your performance tonight and your songs gave me hope. Thank you so much.”
The reason I write music is to heal myself. From a young age, I realized that presenting that music also helped others heal because of the reaction I got when I performed for others.

I remember one of the first times I ever performed was at a Pepsi Search “For a Star” event where I was one of the three finalists. I was 18 and had just started to learn the guitar. My best friend at the time had passed away after a freak accident and I wrote a song called Outside because I felt so lonely without him. The song soon presented itself to me as my official “coming out” song. As in, coming out and away from who I thought I was. I had no idea that his death inspired me to “come out” to the world through my music. It was a familiar feeling to me.

At that moment in my life, after 18 years of struggle within myself to show my true colors, I learned that losing someone was really like a release of emotions. That ended up healing me because I learned from that experience of letting go. I found that letting go of something or someone when you have no power is actually freeing and I found the gift of mourning the breakthrough after the breakdown — the happiness of remembering who they were, the power of feeling that, the empowerment of death, and the passing of something that I held so dear to me: a friendship.

So, coming out to myself was letting go of someone I thought I knew. A person I had created to hide myself from the world and others. I had found a new me. The song “Outside” represented my whole life up to that moment. That moment will always stay with me, and losing my friend changed my life for the better. Saying that then would have been devastating, but then again, that really wouldn’t have entered my mind in the first place.

I took what had happened and healed myself. I had also become one of the three finalists from 1,000 in a songwriting competition, with my first song. I knew only three chords.

Then the seed was planted and I’d sit in my room for hours on end, sometimes full days honing my musicianship and writing my feelings onto paper. No matter what, I just wrote it down and I sang it the way I felt. A lot of the songs were melancholy, but that’s how I felt and that was and is real.

People want style, they want to relate, and they want to heal, too. So my style became singer/songwriter and I started to let people hear what I had written. At first, I was terrified (still am to this day. I have fear playing a new song to others because I always write from experience/feelings) and it took me a long time to play in front of a proper audience. The first couple of years, I played for friends, when someone asked if I wanted to play at a party or maybe, just maybe, a house concert. They were and still are my favorite performances to do.

To me, relaying a message of hope or love is always more powerful when you have a story attached, and to me, real songwriters write from the heart. Before I sing a song, I try to tell the story of the conception, the reason behind the song. I choose to honor my style when I write from my heart, no matter how many people tell me that they want to hear happier songs. Well, that isn’t me, that’s not what naturally streams from my fingers or voice (I actually do write faster electro dance tracks, but I’m talking about my calling, the true writer in me).

To me, it’s like writing a story on a blank page and keeping the rawness of that even when the song develops into something bigger. I have paper, a pen, and a guitar. When I start to confuse it with other instruments and/or computers, I start to lose the point of the song. Of course, sometimes I’m writing on a laptop, so the pen is not needed. But 99 percent of the time, the song is born on a page.
Music has been the driving force to all events in my life.

Any important event in my life has always been written into song. Mostly my love for others and in relationships, but inside that are other topics like the pain of letting go, the moment you realize you love someone, the day you said goodbye at the airport, when you found out someone you loved was cheating/lying to you, etc. There are even topics inside those topics like the feeling of how you felt when that happened because, let’s face it, most pop songs about cheating are filled with genius moments like “I left you, yeah, you lost out, yeah, so now who’s laughing” (by genius, I mean lazy).

There are total gems of lyrics about the description of the way someone made you feel and metaphors of how that felt. You can go deeper and you can even turn it inside out and go kind of surreal with your story and sometimes turn it into fiction, but build on that feeling. It is so much fun when you play with it. Remember, your experience is yours and you can write for fun or you can write with fact. Hell, you can totally make it up, but for me, the essence of song is truth, especially if you are a performer. That essence of truth comes out and can be easily seen by the audience.

The most powerful thing for an audience to see is truth. There are no performance or acting skills required. Have you ever been to a gig and all of the sudden the room goes quiet and you hear someone, even you, say, “Wow he/she really felt that?” Well, that’s because they did. They either sang from truth or connected to the song on another level where it showed quite clearly to a now captive audience.

Songwriters and performers are here to inspire, to lead and to show others the power of communication. To create comfort with your audience/listeners so they want to share their feelings — most of the time, the feelings they haven’t faced up to within themselves.

Over the years, I’ve seen many friends, family, and fans transform their thinking because of the power of song, and for me it’s been THE most powerful.

I remember the day I was in LA and I got a call from my little brother when he was 15, telling me Dad had died. “Kris, you know Dad... well, he died. Just now...I put my football gloves and socks on him to keep him warm...are you coming home?”
I didn’t say anything; I just dropped to my knees. I dropped my phone and cried so hard it actually felt like a scream. You know the first thought in my mind? A melody. You know why? Because it comforted me… My song “The Way You Loved,” was on my first album and received great feedback after getting radio play around the same time I won my first LA Music Award. I remember writing it in the studio and reliving all those feelings I felt that day.

When I arrived home the next day after my brother had called me, my Mum had managed to keep Dad there for me to say goodbye. The wall of emotion that hit me hit me so hard I once again fell on my knees, but this time onto him, and my arms were able to hold him one last time. This was the most significant loss I’ve ever felt in my life, not only the power of losing him, but the power of having to see my young family go through this, too.

This was very painful because I’d spent almost three months with Dad in the cancer ward at the London Bridge Hospital looking after him and spending time nursing him and wishing I could make him better. I blamed myself for not helping enough. The following album was titled “Slowly Diabolical,” a 10-track album of indie soft rock inspired by my music up until then, and sealed by Dad’s passing creating an overall melancholy feel. I didn’t realize until I came out of the mourning that the sound was that way. Now I understand why and I also am comfortable that it had to be that way.
Whilst I was holding Dad in the dining room of our home where Mum had set up a temporary place for Dad to be comfortable in his last days, I saw his mp3 player and headphones on the side of the cabinet we all kept our photos in. I asked Mum what he was listening to and she told me that it was my music and it comforted him in his last hours. She told me how proud he was of my music, and that in some ways she thought he thought that I was there with him, because I couldn’t be.
To this day, I believe he needed to hear that music to help him with the pain and to help him transcend into the unknown. Maybe he felt better about leaving. I don’t know. Maybe one day I will find out. My heart says so.
From that experience, I wrote so many songs in ways I could have never imagined. I still pull on that inspiration to write more now. That becomes real and becomes income. Right there you have power to make money, to draw from the worst moments in life to create a better one for yourself — the very moments you feel you have to relive in word because that’s where the magic is no matter how intense you think it is. Write it. If you need to go back and edit, then you can do that then, but for now, just write and keep it coming. Dig deep and push your boundaries.

From one of the most important conversations of my life with Dad, I wrote three songs. I had been looking after him for almost two months and we’d moved rooms a third time. I had just signed a production deal for my first album and was thinking about going back to America to start the project and go to Burning Man. I talked with Dad and, to be honest, I wanted to stay, but the doctors said that he had six months to a year. Dad was always so strong and healthy. We decided together that I would go and come back at Christmas. It was just a few months away. He died on November 27th.

That moment I walked away out the door to the elevator will always stay with me for as long as I live. I remember pushing the elevator button and wanting to run back to him to hug him and kiss him goodbye, but for some reason I didn’t. I’ve fought with that ever since. It’s been very crippling for me and only recently I’ve let go of the anger and pain from that experience I held inside. Those few months inspired “Somebody’s Son,” “The Way You Loved”, “Everything Can Break,” and “Graduate.” I remember singing “Somebody’s Son” to the nurses on the ward Dad was staying on as a thank you, and I will always remember Dad’s face when I did. He was so proud. I was so thankful I could do that.

Being aware of the evolution of your creation is paramount to your songwriting skills and helping them to connect with your audience/listeners constantly. Be aware of your current outlook on life and be honest with yourself. If you are breaking down and are totally lost, write about it. Go to that dark place because you know that everybody else has been there. Turn your breakdown into a money-making album. Take yourself there and make it a hit single, or just write a great song and move your audience. Just get it out of you, feel the release of being honest with yourself knowing that you will be helping others. Commit to healing yourself.
The biggest reward I’ve ever felt was the day I knew I healed myself with song. I remember recording my second album “Dawn of Momentum” and the song “Graduate” being born. I had no idea that it was there. My co-producer, Troy MacFarland, asked me to write something to finish off the album because we were one shy of completing it. I actually thought I had enough, but after the selection process and losing a few songs, I thought it would fit on the album. I found I had to come up with another track. I found this particularly hard because, at the time, I had no idea that this song was bursting out of me and when I realized it, I couldn’t find the words or melody because of the weight of the subject. Finally, it hit me. This was my completion song with Dad. “Graduate” is the finale. I faced up to my loss with lyrics like “I forgot that we both agreed that it wasn’t just me” and “I fought with the moment I walked away to touch you again.”

In my new album, “Dawn of Momentum” (named after my Mum, Dawn, and momentum because this is the evolution of my sound and my life moving forward), I also have a track called “StarFire,” which is, in some ways, a synopsis if you will, of my feelings toward losing people I love in my life. It was inspired by loving that special someone and using a shooting star as a metaphor for how quickly life can take them away before you feel you even got to know them.

After my 5 LA Music Awards and two Grammy considerations, “StarFire” became my career stepping stone and my lifeline into my rebirth as a songwriter over performer. “StarFire” sealed my confidence in pop music and in myself. It helped me see the star I can create within my life and others around me. The star I am to my family and to my friends, and the stars they are to me.