ROCKIN' RICH LYNCH NEWS: Rockin' Rich Lynch: Meeting My Heroes

• News

Rockin' Rich Lynch: Meeting My Heroes - Michael Anderson

Rockin' Rich Lynch's classic rock-loving ears perked up the first time he heard the steady back beat of Michael Anderson's "Sound Alarm" blast through his speakers courtesy of the legendary New York radio station WNEW-FM back in 1988. That song was set apart from the standard fare of the day by its theme drawn straight out of the Book of Revelation and passages from Joel as Anderson urgently sang about the Beast and False Prophet - all while offering a dinner date to the End Times for anyone who was listening.

Songwriter Michael Anderson gets a new Rich Lynch Band shirt in Nashville.

"At the time I had first heard Michael's track I had been writing my own compositions for eight years or so, pioneering a genre that I dubbed 'Apocalyptic Rock' to little fanfare," Lynch joked. "So, I felt a kindred spirit with the man and when an opportunity arose 32 years later to meet him in Nashville, I jumped at the chance."

The pair met at the "turn of the last century" confines of Marathon Village for some photos and conversation and ultimately the discussion veered toward the idea that America may be - as some prophecy scholars conclude - the foretold biblical Babylon that meets a fabulous demise in the world's best selling book.

"Within a year of signing my publishing deal with Critereon my life had changed in many ways. I started reading the Bible a lot. I had gone through a lot of changes in my life at that point. I had a spiritual awakening," Michael offered about the mysterious origins of one of his mightiest tracks. "That particular song just started coming out of me as a groove."

"The groove is - I don't know how many people ever noticed, but the groove is 'Dancing In The Streets' from Martha and the Vandellas," Anderson recalled describing how it all began. "I did my best little imitation with my little drum machine. It's kind of Motown-y and I just started bashing on an acoustic guitar to that drum beat. And, this song just came pouring out of me. It was chords I had never played before. Lyrics - I just started screaming 'sound alarm' at the top of my lungs. It meant nothing to me at the time. The lyrics just started coming out of me."

With a recent Presidential election that is still contested and a nation divided as never before we asked the songwriter who wrote the words "Sound Alarm, It's Armageddon R.S.V.P., Sound Alarm, Babylon's burning sea to sea" if he had any words of advice for his fans who live in a nation that could possibly soon experience unprecedented internal civil strife if cooler heads don't prevail.

Check out the powerful title track from Michael Anderson's critically acclaimed debut record.

"Calm down," Michael cautioned. "God is in control. No matter which scenario plays out. There's two world views of this country. There's the side that sees all the evil - which actually is absolutely real. But, there's also the side that is hopeful and is the most modern, progressive country in the world since 1776."

"There's been more freedom here. There's been more traditional values that have built a rock solid - up to this point - society. Just like yin and yang they have worked together all of this time," Michael mused on our current predicament brought on by this troubling political stalemate. "Just to give anyone hope - is that, if you study history and you see the history of the world - these kind of events have caused other countries to fall, to crumble and be taken over by outside forces. You see this played out all the time. But, we had a Civil War in this country and we came out of it in tact. We're still working through the effects of the Civil War at this time. But, we have a foundation. I think the foundations are strong."

"I just want to say cool out. It's going to be okay. Settle down. Let the dust settle," Anderson added. "We've got to have elections in this country that everybody trusts. Because, if we lose our faith in the quality of our vote, if we lose the faith in the institutions, that's when all the bad stuff is really going to happen."

If and until that terrible day of our great and tragic national destruction occurs we still have a relative amount of freedom in the United States of America. You are still free to go on over to YouTube and give a spin to Anderson's "Sound Alarm". When you do you will discover a song that still sounds as fresh and powerful as it did when it first dropped over three decades ago. That's probably because it's more relevant now that its message and warning carries even greater meaning today in the ridiculously perilous year that is 2020.

In addition to this stark and striking song that served as the title track to his debut album, Michael has several other solo releases to his credit including Michael Anderson (1990), Saints and Sinners (1993), Love Is The Hard Part (1996), White Trash Shakespeare (2007), Shot O' Salvation (2015) and Hard Redemption (2020). He penned "Maybe It Was Memphis" that was a smash hit for country icon Pam Tillis in 1992. He wrote hits for John Fogerty and Juice Newton that all served to cement his status as an expert in the field.

In this capacity he composed a sought after print and digital format guide to the discipline called "Michael Anderson's Little Black Book of Songwriting" that critics called 86 pages of pure gold. During his many years in Los Angeles he developed the songwriting curriculum at the Musician's Institute in Hollywood and taught a devoted community of students. Today, he has moved back to Nashville where - in addition to writing and recording his own music - he still actively blogs about the subject of songcraft on his social media outposts.