A conversation with Todd Fink

Anyone who knows me knows I revel in good conversation. On May 4th I was lucky enough to have just that as I sat down with musician, philosopher and yogi Todd Fink of The Giving Tree Band at La Sorella di Francesca in Naperville, Illinois. I’m not exactly sure how we got on the subject, but we stated talking about beliefs and the ever controversial and changing etymology of the word ‘religion’.

“Belief is okay,” Todd comments, “but we need more seeking. Seeking is what opens up our minds. The concept of believing in God, but not seeking is limiting. You’re better off not believing if you’re not going to seek. This is where the evolution happens. Whether religion or science, you may have the belief, but you have to continue to seek. If you have a belief you haven’t finished the journey. Having a belief just means you’re at the base of a mountain thinking there might be something out there, but not taking the steps.” 

This constant exploring, this curiosity and drive for knowledge and understanding and playing with things like energy is what led The Giving Tree Band to the concept behind their latest album, Frequency of Love. It’s their 5th studio album produced five years after their last, Vacilador. 

“What makes music unique as an art is that music is formless. You can see a painting or a sculpture. Music has a special  power to bring people back to themselves. Our real nature is beyond all these names and forms. You see you can create all this harmony. A reason music brings people together. Music takes away all these things that separate us like names and forms. There is great potential for harmony and oneness.”

The new album, Frequency of Love, released August 18th of this year seeks to do just this: to bring people to themselves and to create harmony between people and the vibration of the world. It’s a metaphor, but it’s also very real because music is vibrational, it has frequency and it has cycles. So the question begged: Are we in tune? The answer is as varied as the situation and the human behind it.

In terms of music, we measure frequency in hertz. Here’s a quick little science and music lesson from my friend, Todd:

“Strings and sound have cycles. So if you look at the strings in the piano, there are vibrations [when you strike the string]. The number of times it vibrates in a second gives us a pitch. Striking the A in the middle of the piano gives a cycle of 440 times in a second and we measure that in hertz. Well, there are cycles happening all over the place especially with spheres like our planets. 

There are cycles with the moon and the Earth and this is our home and it has its own cycle. My brother and I started thinking, ‘Well, why don't we find out what those cycles mean in terms of music. It will have a frequency. It has a number of times that the Earth spins on its axis in a time frame. What we could do is find that frequency. It’s going to be very low because hertz is measured in cycles per second. In one second the Earth is not going to spin on its axis. It’s not going to revolve around the sun. Nor is the moon going to revolve around the Earth, but it’s going to make a small fraction of that rotation and if we keep doubling it, we will get octaves. For example, if you double 440 you get 880 and in hertz that’s an octave of A. So we kept doubling this number until we got in the range of human hearing. Then we went to see if our instruments lined up with that and low and behold they don’t. Nor do any western instruments in standard tuning. Maybe it’s not a big deal, but maybe it is. So we then just slightly calibrated differently so it does line up perfectly. 

In a sense music is just vibrations. Frequencies that are organized then, all this vibration, all these cycles are music. We’re either harmonizing with that or we’re not.

As musical artists we felt like maybe it’s time to harmonize with that. Then, we did that in the studio and started to perform. When we finished that last performance everybody started spontaneously laughing. It was an experiment. We didn’t know what was going to happen. And we all started laughing. It had worked in the sense that there was a palpable difference, a felt shift. There was something happening energetically and on very subtle levels in our bodies. I felt uplifted. We rolled with that and this is the first recording with that philosophical conception. 

People have been using these calibrations and tunings for centuries. It’s not exactly new. Maybe we’re revisiting it. For example, 440 hertz calibration is used today in the western world. Musicians from Bach’s time may have used different tuning. Gregorian monks chanted in this way. It’s there, but not so much in popular music: Harmony from a conceptual level. It’s all a metaphor.

The bass is the foundation from which to build. Everything has a vibration. One theory is that 528 hertz is a very loving frequency, but you won’t hear it conventionally. 

Love, true love transcends all this. It is pure consciousness. Like when you’re sleeping. When you strip all that [consciousness] away, there’s just this foundation of peace, of love, of oneness.”

Being a writer and visual artist, I don’t really know anything about music theory. I brought my son, the musician, down into the listening room with me to listen to Frequency of Love to see if he would have any thoughts or reactions. We listened to it twice. I jotted down notes about the sounds, the sprinkling of banjo, the possible influences for the track Crystal Dawn which is much heavier than the other tracks. I noted that it was, on a whole, a little more pop than the other albums they’ve produced. 

Then a funny thing happened. During Glow - the single - my son smiled and laughed and said, “That’s nice!” at the exact same spot each time. I asked if it was the lyrics or what was it exactly. It wasn’t the lyrics, it was the tone. He was tuning in to those vibrations at that point in the track. Listening twice was good also because his ear could pull the layered melodies from some of the tracks which he said was a smart thing to do because it adds interest. He says all music is either melodic, chordal or rhythmic and this music is very melodic.

Four of their five albums were done in the home studio in Yorkville, Illinois. One was done in Wisconsin at the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center. The Aldo Leopold Legacy Center is the first certified carbon neutral building in the world with LEED platinum status. They named the album Great Possessions in honor of the conservationist Aldo Leopold. They rode ten miles from the camp ground at the state park they stayed at while making the recording and that year was named “the greenest band in the land” by Mother Earth News as well as the “greenest of albums” by the Chicago Sun-Times.

Then in 2012, Vacilador was produced. A folky album that put their varied talents to use. At that time they were a seven piece band: Todd on guitar, banjo and vocals, his brother E on guitar and vocals, Norm on mandolin and guitar, Charlie Karls on bass, Z on Drums, Woody on guitar and lap slide and Phil on violin/ fiddle and guitar. 

So many lovely bluegrass layers of sounds on the album. A folky album in which they covered Brown Eyed Women by the Grateful Dead. This cover has now reached almost 2 million views on facebook.

“They were totally supportive and great to work with on the licensing so that we could put it on our record. The song writer Robert Hunter listened to it and we got a message from their camp that he liked it,” recalled Todd. “That was pretty cool! I think we have over a million views on Facebook - I’m not sure about YouTube. It’s funny you don’t really think about bringing a song to over a million people. This is the legacy of rock and roll. Jimmy Hendrix covered Bob Dylan songs - this is our way of honoring them.”

“It’s been five years since Vacilador. Time to decompress, to reevaluate and to gel … Phil and Woody left the band in that time. Like Dr. Suess says, Instead of crying about it being over, smile because it happened - and I’m smiling, Im grateful we did some bad ass stuff together.”

In Frequency of Love, they partnered with DF Katz in the studio to bring live horns to the recording as well as The Accidentals, an indie-folk band out of Michigan that includes violin, cello and drum. 

“[In the business of music,] There are two brains that you have to use somehow. This was something that took a long time for me to develop as an artist. It’s always a challenge for us because our primary goal is to create. Playing guitar at five years old - you don’t really think about [business].”

I asked Todd about the band’s environmental stance and told him how my son volunteered to help clean up crew at Naperville’s Rib Fest. He called the aftermath something that looked like the zombie apocalypse was coming. Personally, the way people treat the environment sometimes or litter has been an embarrassment for me and at festivals it can really be heartbreaking. So I thought if I feel this way, it must be really difficult on them to see so often. I understand it is part of the evolution of mankind to make the small personal changes necessary. This goes for myself also. We all have our personal work to do, so to speak, which is the beginning step to being a positive influencer to others in the arena of conscious living.

“From an environmental aspect, we do ask for recycled containers at fests,” Todd says. “There’s a fine line between setting a right example and forcing our ideals. People have the right to go the wrong way. I’ve gone the wrong way. I’ve made mistakes so to think everyone should be on your learning curve creates another layer of chaos. Our way is to be a pattern as individuals and as a group and as a business. To be a place for encouragement rather than perpetuate a dogma so if you’re really open to that, people become more open to that vibration and feel more invited in. If you notice in the yin yang symbol there’s a little dot of the opposite color in the larger pool of each.” 
In The Way of the Wizard by Deepak Chopra, which I have been reading lately, Chopra says, “We all have a shadow self that is a part of our total reality. The shadow is not here to hurt you but to point out where you are incomplete. When the shadow is embraced, it can be healed. When it is healed, it turns to love. When you can live with all your opposite qualities, you will be living your total self as the wizard.” 

We have to accept these different sides of ourselves for ourselves and understand it in others to heal and to create safe, loving and creative spaces. To nurture growth and positivity.

“We all live together. We all have different personalities, but the over arching same philosophy in life,” Todd replied. “If you think about any relationship, if you don’t align, you might feel out of place. We’ve never had any rule about lifestyle - just standards when we’re actually working. When you’re using your body for your art, you want to be in the best place emotionally, physically. We have that respect for our audience. [This is a profession with a history of abuse.] We can serve a greater purpose. We don’t have to keep a tradition that doesn’t work. Nowadays if the band doesn’t respect the venue, there’s so much competition. It doesn’t have to be a dysfunctional enterprise. Just eight years ago every venue in Chicago allowed smoking and we’d come home smelling like cigarette smoke really bad. Now it’s a no brainer. You used to be able to smoke on planes in the 90’s. Then we thought, that’s kind of unhealthy. We’re evolving. We gotta keep going. That’s what being an artist is: looking at the bigger picture.” 

I asked where the band name came from and what it means to them. My son and I had been talking about the book, The Giving Tree. It’s a children’s book, but you see this human just taking every little thing from this tree and yet the tree never withholds, it never gets angry. I told my son how disturbing I thought it was, but I could never put it down and I could never not love it. I laugh at myself because even still as an adult I ponder its meaning which seems ridiculous as it is a children’s book. I asked Sky, my son, what he thought it was about because I saw the two characters as a mother and child and how cruel the child was and what an enabler the parent was. He thought it was about an abusive relationship. I said, you know I think the tree is the Earth and the boy is all of us.

Todd asked me if I had ever read Khalil Gibran’s book The Prophet. I had. 

“There’s a chapter when he says everything is going to be taken away anyway. You might as well give now while it is the season of giving. Give the joy. To give is to live,” Todd believes. “And in Shel Silverstein’s book, it is about an abusive relationship. We do take from the Earth. In this book, the tree is just demonstrating the higher vibration. So there’s a symbology in tuning in. It’s real, but it’s also a metaphor: ’getting in tune’.”

It was such a pleasure being able to sit down and chat with my friend and one of my favorite musicians and environmentalists. I’m ever thankful.

To conclude, I will say some of my favorite tracks on Frequency of Love are Rose of San Antonio, Live Love and My Time in the River as well as Crystal Dawn and Glow. You can hear the earlier influences of folk rock and also that of the 70’s, jazz rock fusion and Miles Davis. Frequency of Love is a fun and dynamic pop album with nice variation. Take a listen and see if you can tune in to the Frequency of Love.

In The Way of the Wizard by Deepak Chopra, which I have been reading lately, Chopra says, “We all have a shadow self that is a part of our total reality. The shadow is not here to hurt you but to point out where you are incomplete. When the shadow is embraced, it can be healed. When it is healed, it turns to love. When you can live with all your opposite qualities, you will be living your total self as the wizard.” 

We have to accept these different sides of ourselves for ourselves and understand it in others to heal and to create safe, loving and creative spaces. To nurture growth and positivity.

“We all live together. We all have different personalities, but the over arching same philosophy in life,” Todd replied. “If you think about any relationship, if you don’t align, you might feel out of place. We’ve never had any rule about lifestyle - just standards when we’re actually working. When you’re using your body for your art, you want to be in the best place emotionally, physically. We have that respect for our audience. [This is a profession with a history of abuse.] We can serve a greater purpose. We don’t have to keep a tradition that doesn’t work. Nowadays if the band doesn’t respect the venue, there’s so much competition. It doesn’t have to be a dysfunctional enterprise. Just eight years ago every venue in Chicago allowed smoking and we’d come home smelling like cigarette smoke really bad. Now it’s a no brainer. You used to be able to smoke on planes in the 90’s. Then we thought, that’s kind of unhealthy. We’re evolving. We gotta keep going. That’s what being an artist is: looking at the bigger picture.” 

I asked where the band name came from and what it means to them. My son and I had been talking about the book, The Giving Tree. It’s a children’s book, but you see this human just taking every little thing from this tree and yet the tree never withholds, it never gets angry. I told my son how disturbing I thought it was, but I could never put it down and I could never not love it. I laugh at myself because even still as an adult I ponder its meaning which seems ridiculous as it is a children’s book. I asked Sky, my son, what he thought it was about because I saw the two characters as a mother and child and how cruel the child was and what an enabler the parent was. He thought it was about an abusive relationship. I said, you know I think the tree is the Earth and the boy is all of us.

Todd asked me if I had ever read Khalil Gibran’s book The Prophet. I had. 

“There’s a chapter when he says everything is going to be taken away anyway. You might as well give now while it is the season of giving. Give the joy. To give is to live,” Todd believes. “And in Shel Silverstein’s book, it is about an abusive relationship. We do take from the Earth. In this book, the tree is just demonstrating the higher vibration. So there’s a symbology in tuning in. It’s real, but it’s also a metaphor: ’getting in tune’.”

It was such a pleasure being able to sit down and chat with my friend and one of my favorite musicians and environmentalists. I’m ever thankful.

To conclude, I will say some of my favorite tracks on Frequency of Love are Rose of San Antonio, Live Love and My Time in the River as well as Crystal Dawn and Glow. You can hear the earlier influences of folk rock and also that of the 70’s, jazz rock fusion and Miles Davis. Frequency of Love is a fun and dynamic pop album with nice variation. Take a listen and see if you can tune in to the Frequency of Love.

Frequency of Love is now available for purchase and you can also catch Giving Tree Band on tour.

​You can learn more about Giving Tree Band by visiting their website: www.thegivingtreeband.com

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