Ep. 83 "The Lifelong Benefits of Music Education" - Guest Del. Chris Head

Music influences almost every aspect of our lives, especially in our childhoods. Virginia Delegate Chris Head is not only a government official, but he has immersed himself in music from a young age and is a professional vocalist. In this episode, he talks to Melvin about music’s power to bring our country together, to help our children learn and grow, and to touch all of our lives in incredible ways. Are we losing many of the beautiful and foundational principles of music along with the breakdown of other aspects of our culture? Today, Chris Head gives us hope for the future.


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Transcript

ADAMS: Welcome to The State of Education. So delighted to have you with us today. I am also excited to have a good friend of mine, Delegate Chris Head from Virginia. We're going to talk today about the importance of music. 

 He is a musician, I have some background in music. But we're really going to focus on music as it relates to education and learning and retention and that kind of stuff. 

 I'm just honored to have you Delegate Head. Welcome! Glad to have you on the podcast today.

HEAD: Well, it's great to be here, Melvin. Thank you very, very much. I'm not used to “Delegate Head” with you. So I…I just think…Chris is fine!

ADAMS: Okay, we'll call you Chris, then, going forward. 

 Awesome. Well, today as we launch here…I think, let's talk a little bit first of all…tell us a little more about yourself for our audience who don't know you. Tell us about yourself. Some of your background and who—who are they listening to today?

HEAD: Sure. Well, again, I’m Chris Head. I have served in the House of Delegates for the last twelve years in Virginia representing the 17th district, which is about to disappear with redistricting. We've got new district numbers around. 

 I will be leaving the house of Delegates at the end of this year. I'm running for State Senate now, in a newly formed Senate District Three that I'm running for. Again, served for the last 12 years. My wife Betsy and I own a home care company. We have two offices for that, taking care of senior adults providing in-home care. We don't have facilities. We provide in-home care for that. 

 Prior to being in business, both of us had vocational ministry backgrounds. I also had worked for a large Fortune 100 company for about 10 years prior to that. But before any of that, I was on church staff for several years as a minister of music and youth. Betsy was a campus minister and did student ministry. 

 So we were both involved in ministry for a number of years. She stayed with that vocationally for somewhat longer than I did. Then we entered into owning our home care company and all of that's what led to, ultimately, me serving in the legislature.

 We met each other, undergraduate, at the University of Georgia. We were both music majors. My degree is in music education. Hers is in music therapy. Having done work in the classroom, having both been musicians—we're both both voice majors—knowing the importance of music, seeing what music does both on an educational standpoint and a therapeutic standpoint has really woven into a lot of what we do with our home-care business now, as far as the way we can see things and approach things.

 Because the music is such a powerful influence, it's something that gets left out a lot of times, and the messaging that comes along through that is so critically important. But that's a little bit of my background. That's sort of what led us to being here today because I think we had started talking about that…

 As a vocalist, I've done and was asked…I've sung the national anthem in a lot of places. Including having the great honor of singing that as a duet with Senator John Cosgrove at Governor Glenn Youngkin’s inauguration last year. I think that's sort of what started our conversations down this road.

ADAMS: Right.

HEAD: Among the many other conversations that you and I have had over the years!

ADAMS: Exactly. Exactly. 

 Well, I’ll tell you what: for our sake of our…thank you for sharing that. That's very helpful. For our audience: so…everybody's concerned about what's going on with children and grandchildren—learning, learning retention. We typically think “reading, writing, math,” we typically think about the importance of history and science and all these kinds of things. 

 Often the arts are kind of left on the sidelines and kind of looked as extra, peripheral kinds of things. Yet all of these things are important to creating a well-rounded person. You and I know, and many people know, that music itself is a tremendous tool for aiding and learning and helping with retention. 

 For example, who doesn't know the little song “ABCDEFG,” right? I mean, we learned that as one of the first things we learned as a tool to learning our alphabet. That's still commonly used. Once you get that down—I mean, you can have a one year old start learning that, singing that, and they know their ABC’s. 

 They may not yet know what they mean, but they know their ABC’s and these kinds of things become the foundation blocks to future learning. And can tie that into mathematical learning. There's so many things that you can tie it into.

 Talk a little bit about that. Let's start with some of those kinds of things and then we'll branch into other stuff that we've discussed in the past and we'll kind of dig into it a little bit.

HEAD: Well, you mentioned that the one that almost always comes up as the first example that anybody does is teaching your ABC’s through music. But think in terms of the nursery rhymes that you learned as a child, right? The songs that you learn as a child that stick with you. 

 When you embed information into a song, it sticks into your head. It just burrows down to the core of who you are. The music center in the brain is the first center to develop and it is the last to deteriorate when you're dealing with someone that has dementia. 

 Again, we work in the senior adult space. The music center of the brain—there are an awful lot of studies that have been done, and there are things that you can see on YouTube of examples where someone is almost catatonic in the dementia that they are in. They are unable to—they're completely uncommunicative, just slumped over. 

 Yet by putting a set of headphones on this person and playing music from their childhood, or young adult age, all of a sudden the light comes back on in their eyes, they sit back up, and in many cases begin to sing along and then converse. They're not back permanently, but they're back for a moment because that center is so extraordinarily powerful.

 I mean, it absolutely is. If you think in terms of what music does—as how it affects everything about you…in ancient times, if you were going into battle—and you look in Scripture, it talks about when Israel would go into battle. Who was in the front? The musicians were in the front leading the charge. They were on the front lines, not in the back lines. It stirs the soul.

 If you go to a football game and you want to get the crowd rallied up, there's a really important reason that the band has to be there and get people riled up and going. You get whole crowds—sometimes it's just a chant, but that is a song if they're singing that. It rallies everybody around, it moves the soul.

 It is an extraordinarily powerful influence on everything. The influence that you have on culture…it’s the driving force on that because that messaging comes along even if it's not conscious. The messaging that comes inside music is extraordinarily powerful and it begins to influence what you think, what you say, how you feel, how you respond. 

 It is why the role in Scripture of the Levite was so important. Because the Levite prepared everyone's heart for worship and that was done largely through music and beginning to train that. 

 There are many things that go along with it from an educational standpoint. Talking on just the secular side: you know, “ABC.” Back when I was a kid back in the early seventies, when they started their Saturday morning cartoons. They started doing—Multiplication Rock was the first one. and then they did Grammar Rock and then they did America Rock. Those were little two minute cartoons, three minute cartoons—shorter than that—that taught various lessons. The ones that people remember— Saturday Night Live did a sketch about it not too many years ago, of “I'm just a bill, I'm only a bill and I'm standing here on Capitol Hill.”

 People learned the process of legislation through that song and it burrowed down into who they were. The other one is if you wanted to memorize—I did this when I was a junior in high school when I wanted to memorize the preamble to the Constitution—it was with that son. You could run that song in your head after you learned that and the memorization of the preamble so that you could just rattle off: “We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice…”

 All of that would just flow out because: “We the people in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, secure domestic tranquility…” that ran through everybody's head. You could do that and memorize it and it doesn't go away.

 If you think about that, even today, the way that you'll memorize stuff—I am amazed at myself now at 60 years old that my wife and I can be riding along in the car and if we turn the radio and SiriusXM on to the “Seventies on Seven” and a song can come on that I literally have not heard in forty years—and haven't thought about in forty years—and suddenly she and I can start singing along. And you will know every word, all the way through because you memorized it way back and it doesn't go away.

 It's extraordinarily powerful. It's important for us to understand the power of the music, the way that it can convey things, and to leverage that appropriately. Because it's getting leveraged, whether we are paying attention to that or not. It's one of those tools that…if we let the enemy use this—trust me, Satan's going to use whatever he can use to get to our kids, to get to our culture, to get to our people, to get to us. We need to be aware of that.

 We also need to be aware of how we can combat things and equip so much better. Because the messaging that we want to carry, we want our kids to have and to stand on foundational truth. The nice thing about it is, foundational truth, combated against the foundational lie, will always stand and the lie will collapse, as long as you are presenting both of them. 

 But if we let the lies stand up without giving truth through the same medium, that's our fault.

ADAMS: Well, that's so true. 

 We talk about this a lot of times from the standpoint of school. And, of course, as a foundation, we talk about all kinds of educational opportunities—whether it's public school, private school, home school, whatever. Some work better for others, some are clearly better than others, we believe. But at the end of the day, all of them are viable options and our goal is to make them all better.

 But what we also focus on is that parents are really the first educators. The importance of early childhood development—sometimes that gets farmed out to kindergartens and stuff and typically they tend to be fairly good at doing these kinds of things. But the importance of doing that at home: if parents understand that value and can incorporate that… 

 Do you have any thoughts on that, from, particularly, the early childhood development side and incorporation of these things at home? Were there any particular things, maybe, that you did? I know that was a long time ago!

HEAD: Well, music was always around. My mother sang to all of us—and I'm the youngest of five by a long shot. I really grew up…my siblings were almost all out of the house before I came along. A large part of the time, it wasn't just me. We were always…there was always music around. She sang, she whistled. We learned a lot of songs driving down the road…you know, you'd sing to pass the time and you learned lots and lots and songs. 

 Her father had been a musician. He had performed and he was hired out in a lot of—he sang in churches and synagogues. He had a small stage career for a while. Just a lot of the songs that he sang and taught to her, she taught to us. Old, old songs that I know are part of things that a lot of people don't know because I learned them from my mother. You know, old folk songs. 

 One that comes to mind is Steamboat Bill, the song, the very first appearance of Mickey Mouse from Disney cartoons was Steamboat Willie and he is whistling Steamboat Bill. As a matter of fact, the whole thing is based on that song. So, things that have been around for a long, long time.

 Then when our kids came along, of course, I'm a singer, Betsy is a singer and we both know the importance of music. We exposed them to music, played music for them, sang to them and they began to sing at a very, very early age and continued to do that. 

 And to go on to—matter of fact, both of our daughters…our son did not want to pursue that. He's incredibly talented, but he just didn't want to pursue that at all. But both the girls got vocal performance degrees, undergrad. My middle daughter has just completed her doctorate in musical arts. She's an opera singer now and it all comes about from planting the seeds early on.

 Now. What if you don't sing? What if you don't like to sing? What if you can't sing? What if you think you can't sing? Because I will submit that anybody can be taught to do it. People that think they can't just haven't been trained. It's like anything else. The vocal cords are a muscle, you've got to train your ear and your vocal chords to be able to do the same thing.

 If people know enough that they say, “I can't carry a tune,” that means that you can hear a tune. And if you can hear a tune, you can be taught to carry the tune. You may not be great. You may not be a great performer. But you can be taught to. It doesn't matter if you think you're bad, it doesn't matter because you—also I go back in terms of, again, what scripture says about things. He doesn't tell us to make a beautiful sound. He tells us to make a joyful noise. And there's a reason for that! 

 Because it doesn't matter whether it's good or bad. If you're giving it a shot and starting to expose that, then it helps. But beyond that, you also can use recordings because there are so many that are available and they're so easy to get to now, more than ever before.

 Play music, but play the music that's gonna be conveying the message. Don't overstimulate your kids, particularly when they're little. Don't go too crazy with it. Make it a simple song that can get them something that they can latch onto because in the same way that you are not going to read to them from Tolstoy when they are small, you shouldn't necessarily try to teach something that's overly stimulating with lots of stuff.

 But you can play symphonic music, you can play church songs. If you've got messages that you want them to hear, find songs that convey those messages and that convey the lessons that you want them to learn because it will stick.

ADAMS: Yeah, that's great. We're going to be right back. We’ll take a moment to hear from a sponsor right now.

 You were talking about listening and learning and so forth. I used to be a music teacher and did a lot of voice training, voice lessons…had a lot of students in that area. Whether it's vocal or—I was also a trumpet major—or whatever, it doesn't matter. But here's the bottom line: good music always begins with good listening. Always, always, always.

HEAD: Absolutely.

ADAMS: Whether it's a solo type  focus or an ensemble type focus, it's all about listening. That's also so foundational to this conversation, because at the end of the day, you can't learn anything unless you listen. 

HEAD: That’s very true.

ADAMS: Now, for those who are deaf or hearing impaired, obviously, they have other ways to embrace things, to learn. But we're talking in this context about music and learning through that. That whole focus of listening is what lets the information in, whether it's sound, whether it's pitch, whether it's volume, or whether it's lyric. 

 The reality is, while good symphonic music and everything can be great for stimulating the mind for learning textures and so many things—and we don't want to get in the weeds here. But at the end of the day, much of music is really there to compliment or to accent a lyric, right? 

HEAD: Absolutely.

ADAMS: Really, you see in, say, a religious context—regardless of the religion. You and I both come out of a Judeo-Christian background. I'm thinking, for example, John Wesley, the beginning of the Wesleyan or the Methodist movement in early America. He came from England and he was a circuit writing preacher and he'd go into these communities and he'd preach the gospel. 

 But it was new to people. They were having a hard time remembering it. Charles, his brother, came along and set the lyrics or the key thoughts of the sermons to local tunes that people knew. When he would teach that to them. Then they would go home and they would remember those tunes. And the whole nation was singing Wesley hymns, right?

 Out of that came an awareness, a consciousness that just pervaded the nation. The same thing is true in every area. Let's talk a little bit about this from the standpoint of a parent, an educator—the lyrics at keeping those simple, keeping them true. And then putting them so that they follow a tune. There's much of that already available.

 But then later on—we were at an event where I spoke and you sang and we were talking about some of the songs and how so many people, they only know one verse of any patriotic thing because that's all they ever hear anymore. But the richness of the message is lost because we don't use it anymore. Let's talk about that for a little while.

HEAD: Well, a couple of things: I mean, my mother used to harp on at church—”we're going to sing the first verse of—” whatever; the song. I think the funny thing of that is, if you think about the great Martin Luther hymn, a Mighty Fortress is Our God. The messaging of that is you get to the end of the first verse and it says “Though still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe. His craft and power are great and armed with cruel hate. On earth is not his equal.”

 That's the end of the verse. That's not a good place to stop! You know? 

ADAMS:             Exactly!

HEAD: You know, it's like, “Oh, you know, on earth is not his equal. Amen.” And you sit down and go—I mean, you're in the midst of despair.

ADAMS: Yeah, exactly.

HEAD: We need to go on to the end when you know it says, “The prince of darkness, grim. We tremble, not at him. His rage we can endure. We know his doom is sure,” you know? Those things are important to get that whole message across. But I think the one that you and I were talking about was the Star Spangled Banner.

 Sometimes, as you just said with the story of Charles Wesley's hymns and and helping to convey the message of the sermons that John was preaching. I'm a recovering Methodist here. So that’s how I grew up. I know those stories very, very well. That carries that message across. 

 The Star Spangled Banner is one…recently, I guess it was last year, when I was able to sing the Star Spangled Banner at the inauguration, I actually asked the governor if we could do two verses. He said, yes. His team on the preparation side of that said, “You just really don't have time to do anything but the first verse again.”

 But here's the problem with not ever singing anything but the first verse of the Star Spangled banner: first of all, if you understand the story behind it, how Francis Scott Key came to write that poem—which was then later said to music, to a familiar drinking song actually from early American history. Just a familiar tune, at the time. 

 He was painting a picture of what he was looking at sitting on a British ship being held—he was not being held captive, but they were detaining him because he knew what their plans were as they were sitting out there in the Baltimore Harbor looking over at Fort McKinley and they were shelling it. This was the turning point. Understand that the city of Washington DC had just fallen, right? I mean, we just very nearly lost the war of 1812.

 The pivot point was this particular battle. All night long they shelled Fort McKinley with the flag flying in the midst of the darkness and the smoke and the explosions. There when it says, “The rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.” But at the end of that verse, what he says, “Oh, say, does that star spangled banner yet wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” That's a question. He doesn't yet know the answer to it.

 If we stop there, we're still questioning. I submit that when we don't teach our kids the whole of the song, whether you are paying attention to the grammar, whether you're paying attention to the power of that or not, somewhere along the line, you are putting into everyone the question.  if there's no answer to the question, it can leave you so on a subconscious level—I really think—at a point of despair if you don't know the whole thing.

 Well, you move forward, the rest of the story goes through the four verses. But the last verse is where it all comes together to me. Nobody ever sings the fourth verse of the Star Spangled Banner which says, “And thus be it ever when free men shall stand between their loved homes and this war's desolation armed with victory and peace. May this heaven rescued land praise the One that has made and preserved us a nation. 

 That's powerful stuff,  Melvin. That's powerful stuff. Then further, it goes on, “So conquer we must, if our cause it is just. And this be our motto: in God is our trust. And the star spangled banner in triumph shall wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” I want to stand up just saying that.

ADAMS: That’s the football [unintelligible 27:41], right there.

HEAD: And you go, “Yes, that's it!” That's what we've got to be teaching our kids because that's the truth of that song. Because there was no way we won that war. There was no way we won that war. But we did. and we did for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that God intended us to win that war, I believe as a Christian. 

 I believe that, you know that was the divine influence. But you ought to be proud of that. And the whole song makes you proud. I also think that it's important—and I've been a performer all my life—but that's one of those songs that I don't like to ever sing it any way other than just straight. 

 So many times you hear performers that do The Star Spangled Banner and they are wanting everybody to listen to what they do with it. It's a performance for them. And that song ought not be ever sung that way, I don't think. It should be sung—just an opinion. I've heard some lovely renditions of it, I've heard some pretty nasty renditions of it, but I think the intent ought to be with respect for the song and the nation that it represents. Just personally.

 I think if you do that, all of those things, contextually, carry a message to the listener and it's just really, really important. That's just, that's just one example. But there's loads of examples. You and I have talked about hymns, again, as well, that most people—I mean, let’s face it: most people if they are in church and they have spent time in church and they know theology and they know Scripture at all…what theology they know, they know more from the hymns that they sang than they do from the sermons that they listen to, or even the Scripture that they read. Because what latches into their soul is what comes in the context of that music. 

ADAMS: Yeah, that's true.

 Well, this has been good and I really appreciate you sharing time. This is a passion of mine. Quite frankly, I think we are losing so many things because we are not really teaching our kids like we should, as much as we could, those foundational concepts, whether it's our faith concepts, whether it's our national history, whether it's academic kinds of concepts.

 But there's so much that we can do and incorporate. Obviously, the industry—and when I say industry, I'm talking about the education systems—some do very well in that and others don't do that well. 

 Here's something that I have noticed…and I don't know if you've noticed this or not. But I believe that a lot of…it used to be everybody sang. Everybody sang. Because the vast majority of people went to church of some kind. There was always some congregational singing, they heard music. It was part of it.

 In our schools there was—we had choir, we had band, we had all kinds of method classes and stuff like that in most schools. I was just talking to a young person just the other day. And this person says, “You know, I'm so…my school has a band but we have no choir, haven't had for some time and it's like, I don't play an instrument but I love to sing and we have nothing.” This is a public school, okay?

HEAD: Well, that's a problem. 

ADAMS: That is a problem.

HEAD: That is a real problem. Look, we put a lot of emphasis—there's a reason that classical education over the years always included music. Always included music as a part of that. Because it helps foundationally. Music, again, is going to filter down in. People don't sing so much anymore.

 I don't want to harp on anything artistically that anybody wants to do. But if you're not teaching through the music in school…You know, my son-in-law is actually an elementary school music teacher down in Alabama. It's fascinating to listen to him as to what he's teaching and how he's teaching it.

 When you get into older elementary…I've had other friends and some school systems will embrace it and some won't. But the ones that do—if the music teacher is working with the social studies teacher, for example, and saying, “What lessons are you working on right now? Where are you in your curriculum? Let me make sure that, in the music time, I am teaching songs to them that reinforce what you're teaching. 

 It can be instrumental stuff. If you're studying Native American history, well, let's talk about some of the music from that. If you're talking about—wherever you are, if you're talking history, if you're talking…again, you can be talking about grammar rules. There are songs that teach that. There are songs that teach mathematical rules. There are songs that teach the periodic [table]. 

 There's Tom Lehrer who—I think he is still living, but he is a mathematician. He's got to be ninety years old now. But back in the sixties, he also got a fairly large following writing and singing and performing from the piano some political satire songs that he wrote. A lot of it's a little off-color. A lot of it is really poking hard fun at things.

 But he did a setting of the periodic chart of the elements from chemistry to “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" from Gilbert Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. He runs through what, at the time—there have been some elements that have been discovered since then—but he ran through the whole periodic table in the song. It's funny. It's fascinating.

 If you were to ever take the time to expose kids to learn that they'd know every element on the chart in the order that they're on the chart. You know? I mean, you can do anything and it locks in and it's a memorized thing. We miss the opportunity of doing that. Conversely, if you look around at some of the things that really bother people culturally, do you pay attention to the messaging in the music that the kids listen to?

 I don't want to be one of those—Listen, I don't want to be one of those that's busting on—“all the music out there is of the devil.” Okay. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know, because more often than not the music is what's bubbling up out of the people that’s there [unintelligible 35:12]. But if all you're listening to is lascivious stuff, if all you're listening to is violence, if all you're listening to is anger and hatred, that can't help but also plant itself.

 If that's the only thing you're putting in through those portals that are the most powerful entry points for ideas and hooking into your psyche, you're going to reap what you sow. As parents, we are responsible for sowing good seeds at the same time and making sure that we're taking advantage of that.

 It bothers me that school systems have put—I love athletics. I love sports. I was always in the band and in the choir. I never played sports. I did that but I love watching and I love participating and I love doing those things. There’s nothing wrong with any of that. But so often we're seeing schools are putting the emphasis on that at the expense of the music program. And that is absolutely a bad decision because we got to do both and we can't let it go.

ADAMS: Well, I think the issue here is when people are not aware of the foundational elements that music brings to learning, to helping reinforce learning, then it's kind of seen as, “Oh, well, that's peripheral. That's not so important.”

 But by not knowing how important it is, it's easy for administrators, for school boards to make bad judgments and emphasize things that, in all reality, do less to shape and develop and nurture and prepare our students than some of the things that are being promoted.

 I guess what I would like to see is, just a real focus on making sure that we don't cut out those foundational things. Because if we don't get the foundational things, nothing else is going to be able to stand.

HEAD: Absolutely. Absolutely. 

 I was thinking—you mentioned a little earlier too about the messaging of the lyric. It doesn't even have to be a lyric. I was thinking because you said that about—if you know the theme of even an instrumental piece, an orchestral piece…One of my favorite symphonic collections is Gustav Holt's The Planets.

 You go through and you listen. If you know the planet Mars that—Mars as the God of war, then you know that's going to be a sort of a marshal sound that goes along with that. I can hear that in my head as I'm saying this now. I can't hear that without visualizing the planet Mars the way that I imagine it is and have seen pictures of satellites…things that we've sent out there to take pictures and they send it back. I see that.

 Jupiter the same way. You have all of these things. Dealing with Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky. You have the Great Gate of Kiev. You know, we've seen a picture of it. That's a powerful piece of music. Dealing with— one of my favorite orchestral pieces is Wagner's Lohengrin from Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral. That's a beautiful thing. 

 She's progressing down to the wedding and it's just glorious. But you can see all of that imagery if you know what's there or if you have heard something that ties in with the music. The other thing, too, is the mood that it sets. Think in terms of watching a movie sometimes—and occasionally people have done exercises with this where you watch a really…if you watch a really great scary movie, take the music soundtrack out of it.

 It's not nearly—it's just not even close to being scary! You think about that, when John Williams wrote the theme for Jaws and you'd be watching along and things would get silent and all of a sudden you'd hear that double bass do the “Da-da, da-da,” and everybody in the theater would go, “Oh, here he comes! Oh, here he comes!” Because the music is conveying all of that stuff. 

 Again, we have to harness that in how we're teaching. And if we will do that, it really goes miles to taking people and letting them elevate and know more and be able to stand fonder and with a firmer foundation. 

ADAMS: So well said. Thank you for taking time to join us today, Chris. We appreciate it. 

 People can look this stuff up and listen to it. I hope they will take it and incorporate things that they're learning here today. Share it with your children, share it with your grandchildren. Take it to your classrooms. At the end of the day, it's a beautiful world, it's a beautiful life, and music just adds so much dimension to that. Enjoy it and use it in constructive, productive ways.

 At the end of the day, we're all working to build a great generation of patriots and citizens who are responsible and who make this a better place in the future, a better country, a better world. But it's what we sow into them today, is what's going to empower them to do that tomorrow. 

 Again, Chris, thank you for joining us, Delegate Head, and God bless you and all your work.

HEAD: Thanks very much. It's been a great pleasure to be with you.