Music at Laura and Eddie Cavazos household is a family affair

    “Pure Holiness” was also a winner in the 2003 Mid-Atlantic Song Competition in the Gospel division. Their songs have been recorded by many independent Christian artists and received radio and television airplay. This fall, their “You Move Me” hit number six on the Indieheaven Fan Faves chart. Other tunes of theirs have made the charts as well.
    The duo’s musical collaboration started when Laura, the “words lady” of the Cavazos team, showed guitarist Eddie some of her poetry, which he put to music.

    Eddie, who writes lyrics as well, has a love of music that stretches back to infancy. “My mom,” he says, “tells a story that that was the only thing that soothed me in the crib.” She would tuck him in with a little transistor radio every night, as that was the only way he would fall asleep. As a small boy, he remembers enjoying watching Lawrence Welk and other conductors on television and waving his arms along with them.

    He began taking guitar lessons at the age of nine and could play the ukulele in elementary school. Then came middle school and high school choirs and eventually a master’s degree in music education from the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). He has been teaching music in the Northside Independent School District for 24 years now, first at Villarreal Elementary and, for the past seven years, at Scobee Elementary. He has been involved in music ministry at Lackland Air Force Base since 1975.

    Lyricist Laura played the flute in her school days, but doesn’t consider herself a musician. “Interestingly,” she says, “all our offspring are very musical, so I might have the genes for it but I never pursued it.”
Words have been her “thing” since childhood, beginning with poetry and journaling, and she notes that she is the type of lyricist who lays down the words without melody, turning them over to Eddie to add music. (Eddie, on the other hand, hears the words with melody in the songwriting he does.)

    Laura, who attended Incarnate Word High School, is an early childhood reading specialist with a degree in psychology from UTSA. These days, with a preschooler at home, she limits her teaching to a part-time literature enrichment program at a few private schools a couple of days a week.

    Getting married upped the productivity of Laura and Eddie’s musical collaboration and added four more musical contributors to the mix — Jacob, 23, Josh, 21, Rebekah, 14, and 4-year-old Benjamin.

     Jacob (who has a degree in business) sings and plays guitar. On the most recent Cavazos CD project, Words and Music, the pair was flattered when he asked to sing “Run Away With Me,” a song Eddie had written years ago for Laura’s birthday. While they primarily write contemporary Christian music, they occasionally write family-related songs, such as the hauntingly beautiful “Will You Remember This?” which was penned after a memorable family day at the beach.

    Son Josh, who was a child musical prodigy, is a piano performance major at Texas State University and a big part of the Cavazos song-making team on keyboard and as arranger. “Laura and I write the songs,” says Eddie, “and then I take it to Josh and I say, ‘Hey, Josh, what do you hear? What do you think would sound good? What instrumentation?’” Josh, who graduates college next year, has already recorded three CD projects of his own.

    Rebekah, an eighth grader, enjoys playing the violin, and Benjamin is bringing up the rear. “His, gift, well, it’s hard to say,” says Eddie. “He loves percussion. He likes to make noise with things.” Benjamin has his own pint-size drum set and likes to sit next to his music minister dad at Mass, playing a shaker.

    The couple’s musical projects over the years have revolved around good causes, sometimes taking an unexpected route. “Unto These,” now the national theme song for the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, started out with another good cause in mind. The two had been moved to write the song after hearing a presentation at Lackland by Father Ray Leurck of Food for the Poor and had later sent it to him.

    In the meantime, a friend, Christian music artist Tony Martinez, who is involved with the St. Vincent de Paul Society, brought the song to the society’s local executive director, José Patterson. Patterson sent it on to the national office, where it was chosen over two other contenders (one from New York, the other from California) as the St. Vincent de Paul Society national theme song.
    San Antonians got to hear “Unto These” performed at the recent groundbreaking for the local society’s new home for homeless women and women with children in June.

    The Cavazos’ first musical project for a cause involved their song “I See Tomorrow” and it too started out with something different in mind. Then-Police Chief Al Phillipus had talked to their friend Martinez about needing a song that could unite the police force during some troubled times. Martinez brought the idea to Eddie and Laura who wound up writing “I See Tomorrow.”
    However, 9/11 intervened and the song instead became something bigger, being produced to raise money for Operation Enduring Freedom to help the families of men and women serving overseas.

    The pair again hooked up with Martinez when he picked their song, “Pure Holiness,” for his CD, Carry the Light, produced to raise money to build a children’s hospital in Umanana, Nigeria. The CD project raised $50,000 and the children’s hospital there opened its doors in 2002 with a Carry the Light Maternity Ward. “Pure Holiness” was performed at a Spurs halftime that year by a children’s choir.

    Proceeds from the couple’s latest album, Music and Words, will go to raise funds for the National Cancer Society, inspired by and in the name of Jonathon Guerrero, a 13-year-old boy in their congregation at Lackland diagnosed with leukemia. They held a benefit concert there in May for this cause, raising close to $4,000 through CD sales and donations.

    A friend has kidded them about being the only songwriters he knows who don’t make any money. “But we just find causes that are near and dear to our hearts,” says Eddie, “and that we feel good about. That’s kind of what makes us tick, I guess.”

    They are currently working on a Christmas project for their Lackland congregation — “Operation Basic Christmas.” This includes putting together some of their existing songs and rearranging other traditional Christmas songs for a CD to be given to trainees “as a way to kind of add a little spark to their Christmas,” Eddie explains. “Because they’re tied up in their training, they don’t get much of a Christmas per se.”

    The duo will be working on the CD with producer John Pollock of Wavemaker Studios, who originally brought the idea to Eddie. They also plan to perform the songs in a concert for the trainees and would like to see each trainee leave afterwards with a CD as a Christmas present. Being on a “shoe string” budget, they are presently looking for corporate sponsorship to make this a reality.

    They rarely do concerts these days, the couple notes, though at one time Eddie’s band DYNAMIS (Greek for “power of God”) traveled regionally to play weekly gigs everywhere from youth functions to prisons. Now, however, the pair has evolved into being predominantly songwriters.

    “When family came along and with kids growing up,” says Eddie, “it just became more of a hardship to try and schedule rehearsals and go out of town, so we decided at that point in time that we would just concentrate on our writing and see what would happen with that.”

    What happened — and continues to happen — is more uplifting and inspiring words and music from the musical Cavazos partnership going out into the world.