Richard Zeier — Running With Horses

RICH Z:  I can actually remember most of the songs I’ve ever written, good or bad, because I started out making little booklets containing my songs, and still have them. Later on I got a little busy or lazy, and wound up with a collection of notebooks, notepads, and loose pages that are not well organized, but have most of what I’ve written. I would estimate, that over my lifetime I’ve written well over 1000 songs and instrumental pieces, and some kind of recording exists for mabey half of them. At this point in my life, there’s not much need to write more music (except for film scoring). I think my time would be better spent reproducing the best of my unheard archives.

(cont.)  I was raised by devout Catholic parents that sent all nine of us kids through at least 8 years of Catholic school. I was relieved to be given a choice to attend public High School. I always had faith in God, but not much appretiation for formal religion. At 16 years old, my parents made Sunday church optional, and this happened to coinside with my starting to play in bands.

You could call this the beginning of my prodigal years. I was probably 17 or 18 when I wrote Verses of Destiny. Being a fairly prolific writer at the time, it was normal for me to write one spiritual song for every 5 or 6 party or political commentary songs.