MUSIC FOUND ME IN THE DARK

People often ask when I got into music.

The truth is, I never really got into music.

Music got into me.

Long before I ever wrote a lyric, stood on a stage, or dreamed of making an album, it was already there... waiting patiently in the background of my life.

It began in a house that we knew as haunted.

Growing up, I lived among strange sounds, unexplained events, and the constant feeling that unseen things moved through the rooms around us. But there was something else in that house besides the ghosts.

There was music.

In 1972, my father brought home what felt like a machine from the future: a massive quadraphonic stereo system. Brown wood cabinets. Record player. Radio. Eight-track deck. Four large speakers wired throughout the room.

Most people listened to music.

I sat down on the carpet and lived inside it.

The sound didn't come from one direction. It came from what seemed like everywhere.

Songs moved through the walls. Through the furniture. Through your chest.

You didn't hear music.

You felt it.

My mother understood that feeling.

Before she became a flight attendant with TWA and traveled the world, she had been part of a singing trio act with her friends. She was good enough to be offered a recording contract.

She turned it down.

Life took her somewhere else. To the skies.

But the music stayed.

My sister and I grew up singing with her around the house. Jackson 5 records spun on the turntable. Puff the Magic Dragon floated through the speakers. We sang along to Glen Campbell's Rhinestone Cowboy and Barry Manilow's I Write the Songs.

I didn't know it then, but those moments were laying a foundation.

The soundtrack was already being written.

Then one day my father handed me an album.

Band on the Run.

Paul McCartney and Wings.

Something happened when I heard it.

I can't fully explain it.

But if you've ever had a moment where a door suddenly opens inside you—where something shifts and you realize the world is larger than you thought—you'll understand.

That was the spark.

And for me, that moment would come from a place I never expected.

Not from a stage.

Not from a recording studio.

Not from success.

But from loss.

From ghosts.

From cancer.

And from a voice in the darkness that would ask a question powerful enough to change the rest of my life forever.

For years, music drifted in and out of my life like a familiar spirit.

I turned down being leads in musicals such as Bye Bye Birdie, I didnt want to sing in front of an audience. I didn't want that spotlight. I wanted to goof around in the background and cause a little Mayhem to make the audience laugh. Safely, like a stooge. I would poke fun at times with my characters. Such as lip syncing in Comedy of Errors to Robert Plants "Sea of Love." I was bored and instead of watching the dancers dance to it high above on the platform, I decided to improv. I started acting out and Lip syncing to it. The director thought it was great, and it became part of the act. Ironcially the crowd loved it! Shockingly, it was a hit. Yes this exists on VHS tape.

The director did ask if I wanted to sing it for real. Said they would teach me how to sing. "Nope", I said. "Robert Plant sings it just fine. Its a comedy, not a concert." He agreed, and we left it to the playful comedic lip syncing.

After high school, I decided to take it seriously. I studied piano, voice, guitar, art, and psychology in college. For the first time, it felt like maybe I was moving toward something real. Maybe the kid who spent years pretending to be in bands would finally find his place in one.

Then life intervened.

A football injury damaged my fingers and made playing keys and chords difficult. Around the same time, a moment on stage shook my confidence and quietly pushed me away from singing. I got extremely sick, mostly out of fear for singing "Vouch Safe, Oh Lord!" Looking back, neither event seemed dramatic enough to end a dream, yet together they did exactly that. I would rather knock people down playing college football, which I was doing, then get ridiculed for singing.

I didn't make a grand decision to walk away from music.

I simply stopped walking toward it.

Years passed.

Then more years.

The strange thing about destiny is that it doesn't always disappear when you ignore it. Sometimes it circles quietly in the background, waiting for the right moment to return.

Instead of music, my life moved deeper into another world.

The paranormal.

Ghosts.

Hauntings.

The unexplained.

What had begun with childhood experiences in a haunted house evolved into a career that took me across the world investigating mysteries most people never experience. Television shows, haunted locations, historic sites, eyewitness accounts, strange encounters, and questions that rarely had simple answers.

I spent decades listening to stories.

Listening to people.

Listening to places.

Listening for voices.

I just wasn't listening to myself.

Then something happened that I still struggle to explain.

Between 2010 and 2012, while investigating the haunted Belvoir Winery in Missouri, I found myself humming a melody.

At first I barely noticed it.

Then the humming became singing.

The song wasn't modern. It wasn't something from the radio. It sounded ancient. Repetitive. Haunting. Like an old blues field song carried through the fields and through generations. Before the radio, before the wars.

The words weren't important.

The feeling was. The emotion.

It felt as if it had come from somewhere else.

Not in a dramatic or supernatural sense.

More like remembering something I had somehow forgotten.

The melody lingered for years.

I couldn't shake it. Found myself humming it off and on, in different ways.

I didn't understand why it had appeared then or why it refused to leave.

I only knew it felt important.

It lingered.

In 2014, I finally tried to follow that musical feeling.

I wrote a demo rock song called "Ghosts Don't Die" and recorded it with musician from the band Warrior Soul, Johnny Ricco and producer Rob Deaner.

For the first time in years, music felt possible again.

The song wasn't meant to stand alone.

It was part of a larger vision.

A television project.

An EP.

A platform.

A beginning.

At least that was the plan.

Then a single decision changed everything.

The opportunity disappeared.

The project collapsed.

The momentum vanished.

People got busy with other things.

There wasn't any money to bring it all together.

Johnny and I continued creating anways. We developed ideas, themes, instrumentals, and concepts for future projects. Johnny created all the music, he was good with that. I helped with direction. But the doors never seemed to open.

The dream didn't explode.

It simply faded into the background once more.

And life moved on.

Or so I thought.

Years later, in 2022, I began quietly experimenting just a little with music again.

No expectations.

No plans.

No audience.

Just curiosity.

I revisited old lyrics, old concepts, old ideas that had been sitting in notebooks for years. Popped them into some new technology and out came 10-20 seconds musical clips.

Something was stirring.

But I still didn't understand what it was.

Then cancer arrived.

Everything changed.

Suddenly life was measured differently.

Days mattered.

Hours mattered.

Moments mattered.

The future was no longer something you assumed would be there.

It became something you hoped would be there.

Hospital rooms became familiar.

Chemotherapy became routine.

Then came the moment that changed everything.

Lying in a hospital bed at Northwestern Medicine, staring at the ceiling after another exhausting day of treatment, I heard a voice.

Clear.

Direct.

Familiar.

A voice I had encountered before during other unusual moments in my life.

It asked a simple question.

'If there was one thing you could do in this life that you haven't done yet, what would it be?'

Even though I thought of other things I wanted to do to make a difference in the world if the statement meant "anything was possible" it said "No" and asked me again... The answer came instantly.

There was no further hesitation.

No further debate.

No second guessing anymore, I went right to it....

'Music!'

'I want to create music for the world to hear. If I could express myself in music...'

Then the voice was gone.

The room was silent.

I even laughed.

'Too big of an answer?'

Nothing.

Just silence.

As the next few days moved on, pain became part of daily life. Doctors, not knowing if I would make it.

And somewhere in the middle of that battle came one of the hardest losses I've ever experienced.

My cat, Noir.

People who have never loved an animal may not understand.

But those who have, know exactly what I mean.

Noir wasn't a pet.

He was family. My best friend.

A companion through some of the most difficult years of my life.

When he died, something inside me cracked open.

The grief was overwhelming. At first I wanted to go with him, but I realized I had three other cats counting on me...

And in the middle of that grief, I did the only thing I could do. I had just started chemo. I had no immune system. So I did the only thing I could do while I was screaming inside.

I wrote.

In two days, I completed a song lyrically called Will I Ever Hold Your Paw Again.

At the time, I had just begun experimenting with some of the early artificial intelligence music programs that were emerging. What started as curiosity quickly became something more meaningful.

Using UDIO, an ai music program I had been playing with for fun off and on. I built my first complete song, slowly in thirty-second increments, guiding the direction, lyrics, emotion, arrangement, and overall feel until it reflected what I was trying to express. Back then it only created 10-30 second clips. For someone confined to hospital rooms, exhausted from chemotherapy, and unable to work with musicians in a traditional way, it gave me a creative outlet when I needed one most. One piece at a time.

What began as an experiment soon became a new creative process over the next year from September 2024 the end of 2025. Expressing myself in music.

When I got out of the hospital and ended chemo in 2025, I kept writing lyrics and titles. As the technology evolved, I began working extensively more with platforms such as SUNO, using my own lyrics, titles, concepts, and musical direction to shape songs from the ground up. Rather than pressing a button and accepting whatever appeared like I did with UDIO sometimes in 2023, I found myself acting more as a writer, producer, and creative director—guiding the style, instrumentation, vocal approach, arrangements, structure, and emotional tone of each piece. I knew what I wanted. So I told it what I wanted. Something I always wanted to do with paranormal tv episodes and shows. Produce and tell the whole story my way from what I saw and felt. From spirit. From the family. From the heart. With this technology, in my room, on the couch or on the bed recovering. I was able to do that. No one bothered me. I was all alone. So no one got in the way.

The process didn't end there.

Once the songs were created, I continued refining them inside digital audio workstations, editing performances, restructuring sections, adjusting details, and preparing them for professional production. From there, when I was healthy enough to venture out as my immune system was no longer at dangerous levels. I starting traveling 40 minutes to work with audio engineers in a recording studio to further polish the material, improve mixes, repair problem areas, enhance specific instruments, add additional musical elements where needed, and bring the songs to their final form. Did this over 6 weeks and then again on a more material for another 7 weeks. I put in the time and effort to really produce the material my way with the help of audio professionals.

The ai technology became just a tool to express my concepts, my lyrics, my overall cinematic audio expression.

The stories, words, experiences, direction and most importantly, vision remained my own.

In many ways, it allowed me to become something I had always wanted to be—not necessarily the performer standing on stage, but the writer, producer, and creator behind the paranormal project, telling the story the right way, but in this case... in the music itself.

I got ahead of myself in sharing this with you. I regress.

Lets go back.

Back in the hospital at Northwestern on Cancer floor 15, in downtown Chicago, in early September of 2024, NOIR my buddy, my best friend, my cat...died, I was devastated. Part of me died in side. I felt helpless. So I did what I could only do. I wrote a song about him even though the chemo and my non existent immune system had me exhausted physically. I was now lost emotionally.

Weak.

Heartbroken.

Yet somehow the act of writing this song, the lyrics and creating the music with UDIO gave me something chemotherapy couldn't.

Relief.

Purpose.

A reason to keep moving.

Noir was gone...

but something extraordinary happened.

I posted the song on my facebook page and I felt a sense of piece.

When I played the song, I cried, I grieved, but I felt I did what I could. I created a gift for him. For those that had also lost a pet.

After a few days.... I felt restless.

Thats when the songs arrived.

Not one.

Not two.

Dozens.

Then more.

Ideas I had carried for years suddenly connected.

Lyrics appeared faster than I could write them down.

Titles emerged out of nowhere.

Stories I had experienced throughout my life began demanding to be told.

I wasn't searching for songs anymore.

The words, the songs were finding me.

In hospital rooms.

On my couch.

At my kitchen table.

Late at night.

Awakening from deep sleeps with a catchy title that popped into my head.

Early in the morning.

Everywhere.

Yes even in the shower or on the thrown.

From hard rock to the mysterious blues influence I first encountered years earlier at Belvoir Winery returned as well.

The humming came.

This time I understood its purpose... CREATE & EXPRESS!

Collective consciousness was speaking. When it talks, you listen.

Many of these songs became part of the foundation of what would eventually become Boogie Man Blues.

A collection of songs rooted in ghosts, spirits, hauntings, loss, survival, spirit communication beyond death, hope, faith, redemption, and the strange mysteries that have followed me my entire life.

The album became more than music.

It became testimony.

Not only to surviving cancer, but to surviving life and disappointment, grief, loss, fear, and the countless moments that convince people to give up on their dreams.

Because sometimes the things we are meant to do don't arrive when we want them to.

Sometimes they arrive when we're finally ready.

Looking back now, I can see the thread connecting everything.

The haunted house.

The quadraphonic stereo.

My mother's singing.

Band on the Run.

Standing on stage with AC/DC.

The injury.

The years away from music.

Belvoir Winery.

Ghosts Don't Die.

People telling me no.

Projects failing and not seeing the light of day.

Heartbreak from fake love and dishonest relationships.

Constantly in and out of hospitals, from 2020-2024, sick with one illness after another.

Then.... Cancer.

Noir.

The voice.

None of it was separate.

All of it was leading here.

To this collective moment.

To this album.

To Boogie Man Blues.

I still live with physical and emotional pain.

I still battle neuropathy.

I still deal with brain fog, exhaustion, and the lingering effects of chemotherapy.

There are days when I don't feel strong.

There are days when I still have the blues. I want to give up.

I don't go anywhere. I isolate myself.

But now there is music.

A place to go.

And after waiting more than fifty years, music finally answered back.

Maybe that's what this album really is.

A conversation.

Between the living and the dead.

Between the past and the future.

Between the boy who dreamed and the man who almost forgot how.

And perhaps between something greater than all of us.

Whatever it is, I'm grateful for it.

Because the story isn't over.

In many ways, it's only just beginning. To what end, I don' t know. But, I am still here. So music is my message for now.

To quote my new spiritual friends that came forward... during those late nights.. their figures and shadows filling my room like an old haunted Juke Joint in the dark... conjured, called upon to help with this album... I felt you, I saw you, I heard you. I love you! My tears streaking down my face in gratitude. A moment I will hold dearly. Moments, no one will ever understand.

Then to feel and hear your words, I so quickly wrote down....

"Do you feel that?

It's getting warm in here...

We are here...

we have all come together...

we sang this once...

Let's sing it now!"

I could not have done it without you.

This is your testament as well.

From Conjure to Sweet Grace.

Surely, not the end for any of us...

Hopefully, the beginning of something special.

- Christopher S. Fleming

515 Collective

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