What is "Music For Your Soul"?
Music For Your Soul is a product of passion and love. It is an online music journal featuring reviews, interviews, artist spotlights, a library of lyrics, and more to come. Music of almost every genre will be featured. The focus will be on music that features conscious lyrics promoting peace, love, and unity. All of the musicians that inspired this website, and will be featured in future content, are a part of the "master playlist", Music For Your Soul, that this whole website is based around. You can see the master playlist, and all of its sub-playlists here.
Who is behind this?
My name is Shane Laures. I have been a lifelong music fan. I experienced the initiation of my spiritual awakening back in 2012. At Summer Camp Music Festival in 2014, I had my first taste of musical medicine and felt my love of music and newfound spiritual interest merge. You can read the full story of how this festival changed my life below.
My intention here is to share the music I have discovered with you. I will listen with my heart and soul, reflecting honestly on the music. I have developed a rating system and standard format for reviewing the music based on the lyrical content and energetic feel. You can view the rating system here. I hope by doing this I will spread musical medicine into people's lives all around the world.
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If you are an artist who makes conscious music and would like me to do a review for you, or just a fan of good music with a recommendation for me to check out, please contact me at mfys.shane@gmail.com or by using the contact form here on the website.
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If you are interested in learning more about spirituality, including how to change your life by changing your belief system, please check out my book; Dawning New Beliefs: A Collection of Meditations and Affirmations for Life Transformations.
The Origin Story
The year was 2014. I was at Summer Camp Music Festival in Chillicothe, IL, my first ever music festival experience. What a weekend it was! 7 stages of music over 60 bands, and nearly 20,000 people, I never would have guessed the profound impact this weekend would have on my life. I was already a seasoned concert veteran, having been to close to 100 shows already, but this was something different. One taste of the festival life and I was hooked. The energy of a crowd that size is so potent you are transported out of everyday reality and into a whole new arena of crazy awesomeness.
The reason I bring up this festival is that it was also my introduction to musical medicine, or as I like to call it music for the soul. If that's too 'hippy' for you, you could call it conscious music. The key factor here is that the music comes from the artist's soul and embodies the divine light within us. Conscious music is filled with lyrics that uplift your spirits, reminding you of the love and perfection that flows within you. It is music that reminds you of who you are at a soul level. It is music that changes your mood, and expands your consciousness. Conscious music can be any genre of music, so long as the vibration or frequency of the music is high in consciousness. This doesn't mean the music is always talking about happy, or uplifting topics. Music that explores difficult topics can be just as conscious as music that talks about the love and joys of life. It is all about the perspective brought to the topic and the intention behind the music. This can be expressed through the lyrics, mantras, tones, or even just a beautiful instrumental that takes you on a journey of the mind.
Growing up I was what some people in the music scene would call a “Hard Rock/Heavy Metal Elitist”. Essentially before this weekend if it wasn't hard, heavy, in your face, loud, angry, rebellious, or just plain belligerent, I wanted nothing to do with it. If the music didn't have a guitar, bass, and drums, it wasn't even music in my books. I would trash talk anything and everything that wasn't heavy enough, including some rock music. “Music is like candy, because you throw away the rappers” used to be a favorite saying of mine. You might think I'm exaggerating but I seriously used to call certain bands “butt rock” because they weren't heavy enough for me.
Since I was so constricted in my musical tastes, the only band I knew or cared about on the line-up this weekend was Primus. I decided I should try to figure out who else I was going to see perform for the rest of the weekend. Before the festival even started I went through the entire line-up and listened to 2 songs by each artist. This was not an easy process for me, because this was definitely not a grab bag full of my usual taste in music. I pushed through it, knowing that if I didn't find anyone else that I wanted to see I would probably end up just sitting at my campsite bored. So I decided I might have to broaden my horizons a little in order to enjoy this weekend more.
Now armed with a taste of each band, I carefully planned which sets I would try to catch throughout the weekend. The band on my list that caught my interest the most was Nahko and Medicine for the People. This one band would spawn in me an obsessive desire for more music like it. Back in 2012 I had my first awakening experience, and slowly and unconsciously, I had been outgrowing the music I had been so attached to and defined by over the years.
After experiencing Nahko and Medicine for the People's performance, I knew my soul craved more. I don't think I was even aware my soul was craving something so radically different until I experienced it. I was fully enveloped in the conscious healing energy radiating from the music, the musicians, and the crowd. I was a changed person right then and there. I left the festival so full of love and joy, transformed by the experience and a deep desire to embody that feeling forever. The lyrical and energetic content of the music and crowd awoke within me an awareness of the disharmony between what I would normally listen to and this new type of music.
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This shift in my consciousness gave me new insights and an understanding of how the music I listen to affects me. I began to understand that the negative lyrics and low vibration energy in the music that I used to like was actually harming me. It was emotionally, spiritually, and even physically attacking my body. The lyrics that would echo through my brain influenced the thoughts I would have, lowering my vibration and mood. The stress and anger the music reflected to me was causing my body and cells to physically hold the same energy. Whenever the body becomes stressed, fearful, or angry, it functions less optimally, and causes us to experience dis-ease. When we break the word disease down this way we can see anytime we are not feeling at ease within our body, we are creating disease.
Nahko and Medicine for the People was not just a name to me. It truly felt like I had discovered medicine for my soul. I now had a desire for all of the music I listened to, to be uplifting, conscious, and in alignment with my soul. Thus began the endless process of sifting through thousands of songs, that I never would have listened to before, in order to find more 'musical medicine'. This became my main playlist called Music For Your Soul on Spotify. That is where you will find all of the artists I share here and more. I would estimate that I have listened to over 12,000 songs in the last 6 years in search of conscious music. I am very happy to say, I have found an abundance of music that fills my heart and heals my soul.
When I first started my search it was tough. I didn't know where to look, my tastes in music were still very constricted, and I wasn't always able to be open and nonjudgmental enough to hear the message in the lyrics. In the years since I started my search, I have greatly expanded my musical tastes. I have found that if you look hard, listen deep, and use the soul and heart to interpret instead of the mind, you can find truth in almost anything. I have found that the truly uplifting and healing music will always speak directly to your heart and soul when you open yourself to it.
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***Disclaimer***
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In June of 2020, multiple allegations of sexual misconduct came out against Nahko. I was heartbroken when I heard the allegations. I read the stories these women shared on social media and I felt the pain, sorrow, anger, and shame of them. At the same time, I could not deny the love, healing, and growth that his music had provided for me, and countless others. I had personally experienced a transformation because of Nahko's music. At the end of the day however, he is human, just like everyone else. In several of his songs, he admits to faults and being “part of the problem”. We must remember to never place another person on a pedestal, no matter how they may appear. We are all fully capable of doing both wonderful, and horrible things.
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In the heat of all the online drama and people calling for his cancelation, I admit, I got caught in the emotion of it as well. For a period of about 6 months, I completely removed his music from my playlist because I did not want to financially or energetical support someone who would do those types of things. It was a heartbreaking decision. After the removal of all of his music, my playlist contained about 4 or 5 songs that were not Nahko's own, but did feature him in part, and every time one of them would come on I would feel mixed emotions. At this point, I have decided to hold space for forgiveness and redemption for Nahko and continue to enjoy the medicine his music has provided.
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I do not condone any inappropriate actions that may have taken place but I cannot ever know for certain what did or did not take place. I am choosing to take the lessons, wisdom, and blessings of the music he has created and let them speak for themselves. The message within the music is what is important, even if the man who wrote the music may or may not have done things that I do not approve of. I pray for the healing of all involved, including Nahko himself, because I understand that we can only hurt others if we ourselves are hurting. Let this be a lesson we are all still learning and growing, we are all capable of making mistakes or hurting another, and that we all deserve forgiveness, healing, and a chance to do better.
You can read this interview with Nahko, from MODE Magazine, to hear his story in his own words.
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