Paul Vieira

That’s me up there, singing my heart out. I was only a kid, but I knew what I was meant to do. I started learning guitar at the age of 12. I wrote my first song at 15, at which I also began teaching myself to play the piano. Writing melodies and lyrics was something that came natural for me. By the time I hit high school I was holding concerts at my public school, at parties and formed a band that played to hundreds of teens every month. I sang to anyone who would listen. My songs were always very intense and emotional. Music was my access to the hearts of people and somehow I knew inside that this would be the vehicle through which I would make a difference in the world. I reached 20 years of age and something happened. I gave my heart away. The dream died.

I made a choice to follow a path that led me into religion. I was always weary of religion, but it can be very subtle. In my opinion, religion is our attempt to please God based on our own efforts of self-righteousness, which often leads to a sense of spiritual elitism, judgment and hypocrisy. When religion begins to lay hold of us, we see the world in terms of us and them, and we distance ourselves from people we deem to be sinners. We also judge the world to be a hostile and secular place from which we must escape. I never felt this way about the world; I went into an Evangelical Christian context to see if I could make changes. Instead, I was the one who changed. The life slowly drained from my being, and the music in me was put on the back burner. I gave my heart to the kinds of activities that my church leaders saw as more spiritual and of better service to the church. It took a while to finally come back to my roots. Now, I have left organized religion and it is good to be finally free.

My heart is telling me to return to music. After completing my book, I began to devout myself to song writing once again. I am very pleased by what is coming out of me. I am planning to debut these new songs very soon. So keep coming back.

I started a myspace site, so please feel free to check it out here. I need more friends.