Matt Wahl, The Fun Side Of Life from mattwahl on Vimeo.

(To play the video, click on the play button in the lower left hand corner of the video box. Also, I’d love to hear what you think. You can leave comments below.)

Welcome to The Fun Side Of Life! Thank you so much for taking the time to visit my site. I hope you’ll look around a little and watch all of the videos.

I have been playing and singing for a living since May of 1999 and The Fun Side of Life is born from my desire to give people more than just my music.

As I kept performing and kept writing new songs I noticed some common themes that ran through my music. About 8 years ago I started getting into self improvement material. I’ve read tons of books and listened to tons of audio programs on spirituality, The Law Of Attraction, health and wellness, psychology and on and on. As I would read these books and listen to these programs I would do a lot of writing of my own, either in a journal or on my computer. This writing helped my digest and understand the material I was absorbing. Often times, I would pull different ideas from different sources and combine them in ways that really rang true to me. And sometimes I’d make up my own ideas and observations and create ideas that helped me live a better life.

The more I read, listen and wrote, the more this material started creeping into my songwriting. All of these songs came from my desire to live a better, happier life full of fun. I don’t come at the Fun Side Of Life from the point of view that I have it all figured out and now it’s time to teach others. Sometimes I listen to the words of my songs and I think, “how I can write about that and not live it?!”

I’m just a guy who wants to play music and be happy!

I always wanted to be a cool musician. You know, the guy with hit songs who looks cool, acts cool and everyone loves everything they do! Which is kind of funny. I’ve never been cool at anything I’ve ever done so I’m not sure why I thought I’d be a cool musician! I think to be a cool musician I’m supposed to say “dude” and “man” a lot and write a lot of songs about “chicks.” Hair styles and leather wrist bands with buckles seem to fit in there somewhere too.

I’m being a bit facetious but if you read about the music business there are patterns people are supposed to follow in order to be popular musicians. Nothing ever felt right. I never really seemed to fit in any where. I felt like I was doing some of the right things but it always felt like something was missing.

About 5 years ago I had the idea to create something like I’m doing now with this blog and these videos. I wanted to take the themes from my original music and go deeper than I could in just a 3 minute song. I wanted to share the things that I learned and came up with as I tried to live a better life and I wanted to wrap all these ideas and messages into one big package called The Fun Side Of Life and deliver that package to the world with my music!

But I didn’t do anything. I kept banging my head against the wall, trying to force my way into different conventional music venues and markets hoping to someday be that cool musician. But every once in a while I would do a show in a venue where I could go a bit deeper with the idea of The Fun Side Of Life. I loved those shows. People would come up afterward and tell me that they loved the message! That felt so good and it just felt right but still I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t know where to go with all of this. (I still don’t!) I didn’t know who would book me or where I’d perform (I still don’t!) and that kept me from taking any action.

I’d complain that I didn’t have any gigs. I’d complain that there wasn’t anywhere for me to play where people would actually listen to me and I grew more and more depressed about my music. I thought about quitting several times but every time I thought about my Fun Side Of Life show (that’s what I call the performance I’ve dreamed about giving where I share all of this) I would get excited.

Finally it dawned on me that I need to just put this stuff out there. I need to take a leap of faith and see what happens. It just feels right. It feels like the perfect combination of the material that has meant so much to me over the years and the songs that have sprung from my desire to be a happy music guy.

So in the last 2 weeks I filmed, edited and uploaded these 21 videos and created blog pages for each of the videos. Everything is far from perfect. I wouldn’t even let myself watch the videos all the way through. I didn’t want to get bogged down trying to make everything perfect. I knew if I watched them I’d see myself make faces I didn’t like or say things I could have said better. I know the sound isn’t wonderful either. I’m a nut when it comes to live sound but again, I just wanted to get things rolling.

Thank you again for being here. I would love it if you would tell me what you think of these videos in the comment section of each blog page. These 21 videos are just the beginning. There is a lot more to come!

Thanks for being here!
Matt

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