014: How Music Can Help You Communicate and Connect with Ed Roman

Musician Ed Roman is definitely living a Hell Yes Life, and he’s doing it his way.

Ed is a getting-dirt-under-your-fingernails kind of guy. Raised on a farm in Ontario, Canada, one of his favorite sayings is “dirty hands make clean money.” Ed has learned how to unplug from online life and get out into three-dimensional world to do tactile things like gardening.

“It’s not what you believe. It’s what you do.” That’s what Ed’s grandmother taught him, and he lives by that credo to this day. You can even find the saying embedded in the first single off his new album, “I Am Love” (which you can listen to at the end of this episode).

Ed has certainly done a lot. He started playing music when he was young, in part to address the struggles he was having with dyslexia. He found that music helped him communicate and he felt empowered by that.

As he grew older and more into music, he began to get accolades from his peers. Then he started meeting some of his idols. When he was 14 years old, he met Herbie Hancock, who wrote on the back of one of Ed’s Jaco Pastorius records: “The definition of an artist is one who has the ability to fuse their life with the rhythm of the times.”

Ed kept that definition in mind as he grew older, kept making music, and started touring around the world. Now, Ed is an award-winning musician and a Top 100 MTV.com artist who has earned numerous fans from around the world who call themselves “Ed Heads.”

His latest album, “Red Omen” was produced by renowned producer Michael Jack, who has worked with Bono, Nelly Furtado, Hilary Duff, Rush, and Olivia Newton John, among others. The album is an eclectic mix of pop, rock, country and folk. There’s even a punk song in the mix (“Clone the Sheep”). But themes of love and compassion pervade the album. In the interview, we discuss something he says in his single “I Am Love”: “You should go up to your worst enemy and give them a hug.” In these divided times, that seems like it would be a challenging feat, but maybe it’s exactly what we need to do.

As one of Ed’s favorite sayings goes, “The mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's open.”

So keep your mind open and enjoy my interview with Hell Yes Lifer Ed Roman!

On the episode, you’ll learn:

• How Ed's upbringing on a farm influenced him.

• How he was inspired by meeting Herbie Hancock when he was 14 years old.

• How he struggled with dyslexia as a youth but then found music as a channel to communicate.

• His meeting with Bunny Wailer of Bob Marley and the Wailers in the West Indies and what he learned from him.

Connect with Ed:

• Ed Roman - Website