Lee Safar
As a 17 year old school leaver, I was a hopeful musician looking to explore my dream of creating music with people as passionate and as scared of music as I was. My dreams, however, were crushed when, for cultural reasons, I was forbidden from pursuing my music. The resulting agony that came from not being allowed to discover that which defined me, forced me to walk away from the musicians that so inspired me and the passions that ignited my soul.
For 12 years I could not so much as touch an instrument, as the painful reminder of the dream I would never realise was too torturous to contemplate. Despite this, I lived a life that most would be proud of. I graduated from University as a Genetic Scientist, worked for a leading multinational IT company as a Senior Business Analyst, got married, bought a house and was very happy, or so I thought, until one day in 2003 I received a phone call that dramatically changed the course of my life.
The
phone call was from an inspiring musician who I had played music with
when I was 17. With a single question he signified the beginning of the
end of a life I had created to mask the pain buried within me. “What
are you doing with your music?” My initial response was, “Oh
that’s not part of me anymore”, but the more I remembered
what it was like to play music, the more disorientated I became within
myself and within my life. Increasingly I fought with my yearning to create,
but the more I opened my eyes the less I recognised of my surroundings.
I found that music was the only place I might be able to make any sense
of what was happening. So I took my pain and my fear to a piano and started
to bleed, and bleed I did, constantly, for what seemed an eternity. As
the creative spirit in me reawakened, the life that I had constructed
to protect me from my pain fell apart. Music became as necessary as air.
The more I wrote, the more real I felt, and the songs wouldn’t stop pouring out. I had never really played the piano or written songs - at school I played the saxophone - but the songs I was now writing moved people when I performed them. I began training with a vocal coach and eventually quit my high paying corporate job so that I could be around everyday people. I started making coffee for a living and found inspiration to follow my dreams from the people who came to cross my path.
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As
my confidence grew, things started slowly happening with my music. I recorded
a demo on my PC and one of the songs was rerecorded and pitched to Wind-Up
records for Evanescence by Roy Ayers Jnr. Although unsuccessful, the experience
encouraged me to continue, and I started gigging at songwriter nights
around Sydney every week. The response was inspiring, and the experience
of a room full of people holding their breath while I played solidified
my determination to pursue my dream of having my songs heard by the world……and
heard with my voice.
While the events that disconnected and reconnected me with my music have been both intense and agonising, they have been instrumental in showing me how necessary it is to actively make choices to pursue my dreams and have shown me a determination and passion that exists within us all. Consequently I have left Australia and am taking my music to the world. I am recording in LA with Jeff Blue (Linkin Park, Macy Gray, Limp Bizkit, Korn) and will be releasing the next EP in early to Mid 2009.
The songs that have been selected to appear on the current EP, Who I've Become are chosen because they best reflect, as a body of work, the process of awareness that was necessary to recognise the longing for my truth - about my lies, my soul, my music, my being and my not being.
Check out Lee’s MySpace site below for regular blogs.
Check out: www.leesafar.com / www.myspace.com/leesafar
Music
to Purchase:
Lee's Videos:
Some tracks below (please click on the play symbol):
For licensing, please contact: Amanda Street (Director)
Gallery
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Photo by Karem Nunez
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