One of the complexities of life is people are similar but different.  Everyone lives at the same time both in the world they perceive and the larger world referred to as reality or a commonly accepted form of what really exists.  Even that is not the final reality.  This is why there is both Religion and Science.  Each claim to be the final arbitrator but it is physically impossible for the finite to conceive the infinite.

Back to the original subject…

My neighbors and I live in different worlds which overlap.  This is not to say one is better than the other, only different people with different concerns.  We all live in the same place but place value on different things for a variety of individual reasons.

Still people are more alike than different.  Many people can be similar to one another without being the same person.  Many artists and bands are very similar but at the same time very different on many different levels.

I have an excellent illustration of this.  I took Carlos Santana’s online course The Art and Soul of Music.  I discovered we are more similar than what I had previously thought although I had been his longtime admirer going back to his first album.

This is not to imply I believe I have the talent and ability of Carlos Santana as that would be not only vain but ignorant.  He is major league, I played in a sandbox.

However we have similar backgrounds starting out and conceive of many things in the same way.  Some are because of music, some are because of growing up impoverished, or some because of another reason.

• We both have heavy Latin influence in our music.  He was genetically and culturally in a Latino environment, my relatives were largely in Texas and Florida when there is a lot of Latin music.  So percussion is a big deal for both of us.
• Because we grew up with no financial advantages, we both are deeply empathetic and go out of our way to help other people.  He can do big things, I can do little things.
• We both married women in a different area of the same field.  He married Cindy Blackwell his drummer.  I have told my own story many times before.
• We both are deeply spiritual people who are not dogmatic or follow an organized religion.  We both believe in something bigger than the god of any human religion.  We perceive their gods as merely symbolic, or something beyond that religion’s authority.
• We both have a little training in formal music which we applied in a popular music environment.  We both play guitar in a much more melodic fashion than most Rock guitarists.  We generally don’t play riffs or heavy chord progressions, we play melodies.  Neither of us wander but are very concise.
• We both have identical ideas about how to run a band.  This is because he could verbalize what I had thought for years but could not put into words.  When I say “Bands which are democracies generally fail” this is a direct quote from Carlos Santana.