Today, I am interviewing Ed Roman, an award-winning singer/songwriter, performer and multi-instrumentalist from Canada. His Music, which combines pop, rock, folk, and country, can be heard on hundreds of radio stations across North America.

Ed Roman is the 2014 Artists Music Guild Award and 2014 Artists In Music Award Nominee, and the winner of the 2014 International Music and Entertainment Association Award and the Indie Music Channel Award.

His performances could be seen at the Red Gorilla Music Fest during SXSW, The Millennium Music Conference, and the SS Cape May. He will be touring New York City and Philadelphia in July, 2015.

Ed Roman just got back from Jamaica where he filmed a music video and dedicated his time to assist the local communities (see video below).

When did you discover your talent?

Ed Roman: My home was a busy place as a child and at times I found it very difficult to be heard as the youngest amongst the household of eight people. As a young child I struggled in school with reading and writing because of my dyslexia. And, so, music was a natural thing for me to want to gravitate to as it allowed me to express my innermost emotions, anger and humor. As I started to perform, I noticed that people tended to greatly appreciate my abilities and honesty when it came to my approach to playing music. This, for me, was part of the greatest form of encouragement I could’ve gotten at that early age in my life. It empowered me with the idea that if I use my mind in a creative way, people could see and feel my true connection with something that I so greatly loved. My mom always said that I had a gift and I love her for that, but I’ve worked very hard at what I do and I’m always learning and trying to improve myself as a player and a writer.

What was your initial goal?

Ed Roman: I guess you could call me a full-time dreamer or perhaps an idealistic romantic but my initial goal in the pursuit of music was to try to help people think about their actions and the consequences of their actions. I always believed that the pen is mightier than the sword. I could point out so many different times over the course of our historical existence, where the concepts and ideas that have changed a multitude of people’s thoughts and actions have been through the direct proclamation of truth inside of a moment of intense complexity and gravity. Whether it was the Lutheran Reformation and breaking away from the Catholic Church, the speeches of people such as Martin Luther King, or the poetic justice of artists such as Bob Marley and many others. When I’m writing a song I’m not looking for the commodity inside the artistic moment. I am writing for the moment which ends up becoming a commodity for most. Music for me has always been and always will be a form of massive self-expression and personal therapy which allows me to continue in a state of harmonious existence with my surroundings. With that said, I hope my heart then translates in the same fashion into the hearts and minds of the people that fall in love with it.

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When did you begin seriously pursuing your dream?

Ed Roman: I believe I’ve always been seriously pursuing my dream because it seems to me that from a very young age music has been something that I’ve always wanted to do. There are moments in my life which are punctuated with far more advanced ways of thinking whether it be through education or playing on the road and recording albums, but, all in all, music is something I have never stopped doing and will continue to do until the day that I die. I guess I had visions of seeing myself performing as a young person as it allowed me to have a sense of great acceptance for what I was doing and it was hard for me to stop. As I mentioned it was also connected to the fact that the educational system was very happy about telling me that I have a problem and that my dyslexia was hindering my ability to learn. In the 1970’s they still did not completely understand what dyslexia was or how it worked or how it was brought about, but I can tell you this folks, it isn’t a disability. One of the things that took me a long time to realize was that the repetitiousness of being told that you have a problem does nothing for the problem. The realization that my mind and so many others think outside the proverbial box that we are forced into through the sterilized education process that we’ve had for so many years. The other thing that I’ve learned over the years is that as a teacher my job has become less about the amount of information that a student is required to learn and more about my ability to approach the student with concepts and more pertinent information which may not be quantity based but a moment and experience that sticks and has a great deal of quality.

“I am alive. I am living right now in the moment and experiencing all the things that any other human being is on this beautiful blue sphere.”

What aspect of your art do you enjoy most?

Ed Roman: The aspect of my art that I most enjoy sharing, without a doubt, would have to be performance. I guess you call me a ham or just a lover of the stage but, I’ve got to tell you, performing to me is such an exhilarating and moving experience that quite often I have been brought to great amounts of laughter and simultaneously moved to tears. Playing on a stage is like living a lifetime in just two or three hours. It’s an electromagnetic experience that occurs when you’re performing with other musicians in front of a live audience. Some would call it a symbiotic relation and others would call it a good gig, but to me it’s more like a religious experience. A great electric church or cathedral casting its energy into the open atmosphere and bouncing off of the audience and illuminating the atmospheric particles of everything for miles around.

Is there a specific message you wish to communicate through your art?

Ed Roman: There are many messages that I would like to convey through my art although some of them may seem specific and allows them to have a sense of mission, but all of them are quite unique in their own way and are all trying to illustrate feelings and emotions that are of no end. The human condition is filled with so many ups and downs it’s very difficult to pinpoint them into just two feelings. I am often reminded of the theatrical masks of the sad and happy faces when it comes to music and its emotional relationship to a message. In music you have two kinds of chords, major and minor chords and many versions and variations which can be seemingly endless in music. Life is very much this way. In a dialectic sense we can be happy or sad and, at the same time, there are many variances of these emotions and how they affect us in a moment and for a great time to come. If I was to say there’s one message that I’m trying to communicate through my art, it is to try to love one another and to throw away the things that are unnecessary in our lives. They discombobulate our hearts and souls from truly seeing differences in each other’s lives.

How does your work fit into the direction of the world today?

Ed Roman: I am alive. I am living right now in the moment and experiencing all the things that any other human being is on this beautiful blue sphere. I’m always being moved and driven to points of mental insanity when it comes to the things that I see occurring all over the planet today. At times I feel like I have great power over these things and at times completely helpless. As I take on a mission of writing one of the things that I try to pay most attention to is a sense of feeling and a connection to what I call a higher consciousness of everything that is around us. I am consciously thinking about the words I construct, yet at the same time they seem to come to me in such a magical way, as if somebody were to speak them into my ear and describe to me what I should be saying. I believe that all artists that are listening to this voice inside of themselves are like transmitters for this information that is always there and is always changing as we move through our historical past and are ever-changing future. A quote which I often use with not only people in discussion about music but with students that I have goes as such: “The definition of an artist is one who has the ability to fuse their life with the rhythm of the times” ~ Herbie Hancock.

Is there something you’d like to share so as to encourage people to pursue their dreams?

Ed Roman: We live at the most incredible moment in human civilization when practically any form of information can be in the palm of your hand at the touch of a button. In such a short period of time so much has changed in our day-to-day lives in the way that we live culturally with one another. In the last 120 years we’ve gone from living with oil lamps to the advent of the electric light, major telecommunications like telephone radio and television, new forms of mass production and manufacturing that has staggered the post industrial age and is making incredible kinetic jumps into the 21st century and the additional manifestation of the Internet that is now omnipresent in our day-to-day lives. I would encourage people to think about technology as a tool. And nothing more. We tend to feel that unless we have all the latest gadgets, squeaks and whistles, we are really keeping up with the proverbial Jones’s mentality especially when it comes to what we feel is important in life. Find things that you can do with your body, your mind and first and foremost your heart. We live in a culture that is tactically driven by the things that we turn, bang, screw, tap and punch but we forget our hearts first. This is one of the things that I encourage people to do when it comes to pursuing their dreams. It’s your heart that feeds your dreams in your soul. It’s the thing that protects you from doing the things that are wrong. It allows you to pronounce outright about the things you truly love and enjoy. When these kinds of things are amplified in your own heart and your mind, it translates into everything around you and everything you do. When this happens there is no such thing as a dream, everything becomes a reality.

Ed Roman – Comin My Way – Canadian Artist – Acoustic Performance – YouTube

Canadian Folk Singer Songwriter Ed Roman Sings Reggae Song About Jamaica – YouTube

Learn more about Ed Roman by visiting his website and his Facebook page, and follow him on Twitter (@SpecialEdRoman).

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