The flood that took place in Mexico’s Tabasco state in November of 2007 didn’t attract that much worldwide notice, but to those living in the affected areas, it was devastating. 80% of the state was underwater at one point, and over a million people were impacted. Jamie Owsley has used his project in Landmark’s Self-Expression and Leadership Program to raise relief funds for those people. A musician, Owsley and some of his colleagues are using sales from the “Make it Spicy” CD and donations collected at live with shows to raise money. Owsley was recently interviewed by WLRN, a South Florida public radio station about his career and the Make it Spicy project. He also talked about the influence Landmark Education has had on his creativity. Parts of the radio interview appear below.

Jamie: Back in May of last year I took this great education course called Landmark Education and it just really opened my eyes and ears and I started writing music like crazy. And I said ‘Phil I’m coming over to Japan, I want to record my music with you,’ and we started making it happen. So six of the tracks on the CD are originals. I think only one of them is kind of an older song. I think the rest are all written since last summer.

Host: I was about to ask you-You actually wrote these in the past year?

Jamie: Yeah, one of them I wrote the very next day after this class. The title track, O so He so Dela,I wrote for a beautiful young woman’s smile at the restaurant I used to work at. As I was driving home it just kind of came to me. And you know different inspirations.

Host: And what kind of class was that you went to learn how to write like this?

Jamie: Well, that was a class called Landmark Education and it’s not really about composition or music, but it’s about how to get really whatever you want out of life and what I want to get out of life is having my music reach people and it really kinda freed me up to be able to express myself.

I wrote the tune Make It Spicy for the CD inspired by my Mom who said “Make it spicy if you’re writing a song for me.” And I was telling you about the Landmark Education courses I was taking and I took a Self Expression and Leadership program with them, and one of the things we do in that course is to take on a community project. And the project I decided to take on was to benefit the flood victims of Tabasco, Mexico who experienced the largest natural disaster in Mexico’s history back in November and almost nobody that I’ve talked to has even heard of it. And so I’m thinking Tabasco, make it spicy, you know?

So what I did was I enrolled a lot of my friends in the musician community to come together and we put together a song to dedicate to Tabasco, Mexico and about this tragedy and wanted to raise money and awareness for this crisis. And so we had a lot of musicians come together. My friend Sam wrote the lyrics to it, to the song you just heard. And my friend Gabriel Science produced, arranged, and played piano on it. This is a new pop Latin version your about to hear. My friend Carlo Magno Oriam played drums. Wendy Peterson sang the vocal track. Teddy Mullet plays the horns on it. Dave Henrandez plays saxophone. So we’ve got great Miami jazz musicians came together. Mixed my Mike Levin, I’m sure a lot of our listeners are familiar with from the theme music of this radio station. Mastered by Javier Carion. And you can find out more about the project at makeitspicy.org, and you can actually here the song there. And we’re going to play it right now I guess. But yeah go check it out at makeitspicy.org – you can find out more about what the project is about and you find out how you can be a part of it.