About the Music of Justin Heart

Justin Heart is a singer-songwriter producing his own songs and CDs. His voice or what it carries is always at the core of the songs. Relatively exceptionally, Justin accompanies himself mainly on classical guitar.

Though many forms and expressions of music are of course meant to awake some feeling in the listener – and they do – it can be said that Justin Heart is a ‘specialist’ in sensitive music. The focus is not as usual on the form, with some feeling added to that, but on sensitivity put in a form. This perspective has surely got to do with the fact that he is very sensitive himself. As Justin says:

“You are your own limit. Your music can’t go further or deeper than the depth of life you allowed to become. A musician or singer doesn’t play or compose just a nice or even great song. It is you yourself that is being given, even if you don’t know yourself. The music, the sounds you hear – and most extremely this is so with the voice – is ‘just’ the form in which the gift of the heart is being transmitted. Even each of our expressions in life – not only in art – is an expression of the quality of the heart. We cannot fake anything here. We could only try, in vain. The quality of heart is in fact always that which is being communicated, transmitted, not what we think we hear or perceive.”

Many listeners are, indeed, touched by Justin’s music. While listening you, as many others, might forget how a song or music is supposed to be. You forget about the form, but listen to ‘something beyond the form’, something deeper, even if we don’t know what it is.

Although Justin Heart values sensitivity or heart above form, this doesn’t mean his music is without force or structure. His music can even be quite powerful. There’s always a duality between these two: heart or energy (or form). Many will intuitively or consciously recognize this duality, surely also in music.

“In the end, in truth, every musician or artist or even every human being wants to combine heart and form, to let these incomparable magnitudes be one. Nowadays a lot of good things happen in the world of music – as always by the way. Still, I see a tendency to (mis)use a sensitive way of singing for creating some kind of effect. It is used as a form, another form that happens to be more popular nowadays. Instead of a pure expression of the heart itself, in this case in the form of music.

For me the heart will always be number one, I cannot help myself. It’s a lifelong challenge to give a form to that, to give energy to the heart, feelable power. I realize that most people do not have this distinction and order so clear, let alone they would be faithful to it in case that would be so. And it is true, I can’t earn my living with music this way. Pity. I don’t care about norms, how to write, perform, record and mix a song. The heart is the only ‘norm’ for me. Everything else is important – I surely pay a lot of attention to it – but still, it will always remain of secondary importance. You won’t hear me playing perfectly. That is a direction, not a goal.

It’s not enough for me to put a solid baseline behind the heart and that’s it, that would be the union of heart and form. It’s not that simple. There are still two that way. It’s not one whole. It’s a long way for us to truly realize that we don’t have to sacrifice the heart for the form. For example the length of a song shouldn’t be something to consider. Here quite some musicians and especially producers go wrong. If a song is good it’s just bluntly stupid to stop it after 3 or 4 minutes because time ran out. I take people into a sphere with my music. In principle sphere can take any time, it’s timeless. Entertainment is dependent on again and again new impulses, because it’s empty of itself.

I see that I and musicians like me are some kind of forerunner instead of what it seems, that we would have missed the boat. It’s about the depth of music, of life in general, not at all about success, fame, money, sex. I like to show the power of the heart. With my music I like to take people to a ‘deeper place’ where in normal life one doesn’t come so easily, if at all.”

Question: Justin, why did you record Leonard Cohen’s songs?

Justin: Well, he’s one of the best examples of ‘heart’ in the world of music. He writes the best texts I know so far in the whole music scene. He gives a great form to the Darkness, to our unavoidable human suffering. And his music I love as well, surely with his voice in it. Altogether Leonard Cohen is since I was 26 one of my very favorites in the whole spectrum of music. Still, and you may call it arrogant if you wish, I feel I can add something to it even – otherwise I wouldn’t have done so. I’ve no impulse to just repeat things or even use another one’s music to get ahead myself. What I can contribute is related to what I spoke before about, the (further) integration of sensitivity and power. Or, if you can follow me, to bodily manifest the purity of heart. This integration takes you deeper into life.

I wouldn’t know what I would be doing here on earth but to go deeper and deeper into life, discover it, and to express via the heart what I found. I don’t like amusement at all. Not me. Nothing more boring than entertainment. Music, for me, is life itself. Not just a representation of it. But of course it depends, how deep do you go in it.