Kleen 2013:  The Album.  

It has taken 25 years to complete this album.  I came into recovery in 1988 and have been clean since 1995.  Early on, I began writing songs to express the experience, strength, hope, pain and gratitude around this thing that has become the most important and central element of my life. I have grown from a boy to a man over this quarter century and while recovery began as life support for me, it has evolved into an all-encompassing life style.  I attend meetings regularly, I have a sponsor, I participate in service, I continue to work the Steps and I don’t use–NO MATTER WHAT.  Everything good I have in my life today is a direct result of the love I have been given from you—my family in the rooms—and HP.  I am alive, free, and relatively sane today.  Had it not been for recovery, I would have none of these things.
 
This album is a mission to honestly share the joys, hardships, challenges, and blessings in my process of recovering from the disease of addiction.  It is an attempt to work a personal 12th Step with music:  The spiritual awakening and carrying the message.  I wrote most of the songs with the same formula that I use when I share in meetings.  In each song I wanted to join together our common bond and our common purpose.  Our common bond is the pain and suffering we have all experienced at the hands of the disease of addiction (i.e., “If you survive addiction, you’ll remember making prayers to die”).  Our common purpose is the miracle of recovery—the transformation of our lives as we begin and continue this process (“if I didn’t have addiction then I’d have no recovery”).
 
There are 21 million people around the world afflicted with and suffering from this disease.  Many will die having never heard the message that recovery is possible.  If one person hears the message in this album and finds their way into recovery then its mission will have been fulfilled.  Beyond that, it is my hope that you—whether you are in recovery, someone suffering with addiction (in any form), or you love/support someone in recovery—find some of yourself and a little bit of hope in these songs.  As I was in the early stages of working on this album, I intended to create a collection of songs that when heard, as a whole, would approximate the feeling we get when we attend a good recovery meeting.  While a few of the songs seek to remind us of where we have been, most of them are a testament to the miracle that any one of us can stop using and find a new way to live.  I am grateful to get to share this little slice of my recovery with you.
 
Lisa and I invite and encourage you to leave a little bit of yourself here with us.  Please use the KLEEN BLOG to record your thoughts, feelings, experience, strength, hope, and/or gratitude.  If something in this album or website speaks to you, we would love to hear about it.