Check out this song that was written and recorded by Thomas Mack.

This is Part 2 of my interview with Thomas Mack.  Part 1 can be found here.

What kind of feedback were you getting when you first started to sing?
Good feedback. I mean just from my peers. I would hear “good job”, “you sing really well”. A friend of mine that I really looked up to, the guy that was leading worship before I started, would put his arm around me and encourage me to sing. He would say, “You sing really well, we should do a recording”. So that was an encouragement to me.

When did you decide you wanted to study music in college?

I always knew that I would like to. So probably fast forwarding to like junior/senior year of high school, I played Ice Hockey. My senior year, which was the first year since I was seven, I was not going to play hockey. I just really wanted to do music things and pursue music. I was playing in a rock band with high school kids while I was leading worship. I said that is what I want to focus on.

Then, going into college, I really wanted to study music but because of practical considerations and stuff I decided to study nursing, of all things. I had a brother was deaf and mentally and physically disabled. We spent a lot of time in hospitals. It was practical and I could impact people and do something that was just a little more than putting food on the table.

But then as my freshman year went on I was involved in a lot of music. I attended Cedarville University and they had a promotional group called HeartSong and I was running out of gas with nursing. I just was not really into it. So I told my parents I wanted to study music. My parents wanted me to stick with nursing. They said I would never be a millionaire but I would always have a job and I could live anywhere I wanted to live and still do music stuff. It took a little while for my parents to come around. But they saw the fiber of who I was. It was music for me so.

So HeartSong was one of the things I was involved in. It was a salaried position and on weekends during the school year and for 10 weeks of the summer I would travel around. So as I am studying nursing, every weekend I am traveling with this promotional group, going to churches, Christian schools whatever to say “Hi, were from Cedarville University”. It was a big deal. It was a job. So that was occupying a lot of my time. By the time sophomore year came, I said I really wanted to study music and my parent eventually came around.

My sophomore year, I studied voice and learned a lot. I had a voice teacher, Beth Porter, who is now the chair of the music department at the school and she really just carried me along. I was not practicing as I should, I was doing my own thing in music. I was doing coffee houses and writing stuff. I’m was doing my own stuff and I was studying classical voice. But I was putting more effort into pop songs and stuff.

Is classical voice classical music or is it classical technique?

Yea, a classical technique. A lot of that has fallen by the wayside since college. We would have a jury every semester. You sing three classical numbers before a jury of professors and you get a grade for the semester. You would sing in Italian, Latin or English and they would ask questions like what is Tropo? When was this composed? So you have to know those things. That was two credits every semester.

Did you enjoy that?

I did, I did… and it gave me indispensible tools, even though I am not singing classically. I sing in a modern/popular style differently now that I ever would have before. You get a consciousness of the mechanics of what’s happening when you are singing. My sophomore year was my last year. At the end of my sophomore year I was burnt out on that. I still wanted to do music but I was tired of learning about music. I wanted to go do music. I learned a lot that sophomore year. I aced music theory. Ear training was a little harder for me. But, I was very much into it. I just wanted to move on and start doing things. I was just telling my dad, I think after this year is done, I don’t know what I’ll do.

Your parents could not have been happy to hear this.

Yea, put yourself in their place, you know, change your major one year now you want to drop out the next year.

Next week….Thomas talks about how he left college and became a worship leader at Calvary Chapel in Old Bridge, NJ.