An Unexpected Journey
The relationship between an artist and their work is a lot of things. For one, it’s volatile. Someone once asked Colin Meloy –the frontman of The Decemberists and the band’s principal songwriter– what his favorite Decemberists song was, and his response was “I love and hate them all in equal measure.” I relate to this. I don’t think it’s a literal love/hate, but rather a tidy way of describing the complicated menagerie of feelings that sways rapidly between gratitude, pride, and embarrassment when thinking on any and all of your creative offerings.
Second, the relationship is mystical. The roots of where songs come from –the mysterious wellspring constructed from the impossibly complex recesses of a brain synthesized with the seemingly important demand of the universe “to reach up and tear the divine idea from its heavenly cradle and proffer it to the world” (Nick Cave; The Red Hand Files #274) – is fascinating and perplexing, a paradoxical combination of blind wandering and focused, predestined exploration that brings you to the X on the treasure map: Your journey, your skills, but also a map and treasure for which you owe a debt to another for having placed them there.
Third, the relationship is parental. It may sound overly precious to think of your work as your children, but it’s more about your relationship to the process than the emotions. You create them, you nurture them, you are proud of them yet constantly fear you’re screwing them up, and, eventually, send them out into the world where they have lives of their own fully apart from you.
That the songs, much like our children, have those lives is one of the most rewarding aspects of being a songwriter. In the Mark Knopfler documentary, A Life in Songs, he mentions at the close that “I’ll go home, in an hour or two, and take a look at the songs…see how they’re getting on.” The personification of songs as living, breathing entities is such a powerful concept to me, and evokes warm feelings when I think of these songs much as I am –they are what they are, doing the best they can with what they have.
A couple of years ago, shortly after I released The Girls You Sang to Sleep (2021), I received a surprise purchase of that, and another, album on Bandcamp with a message: “Hi, Brian! I saw you at the Champaign-Urbana Folk & Roots a few years ago and really enjoyed your first album. I was browsing Bandcamp and was quite pleased to see you’ve put out more stuff. I got a couple of your songs on the radio, on The Folk Revival in Worcester, MA. The host particularly liked ‘Brave’ and has included that in his annual baseball show a couple of times.”
Wait, what?
First things first: This message came to me in 2022; I played the Folk & Roots festival in 2013! At the quaint Iron Post, I played on a bill with three other musicians, one of whom was quite vocal on why he didn’t play strumming chord progressions between verses when he played live because it was boring –I presumed these spaces had fills and leads on his recordings. Having played before him, and having probably been guilty of doing that, I couldn’t help but wonder if such pointed commentary wasn’t directed at, or at least reinvigorated by, me.
My set was about 45 minutes and focused mostly on songs from Lesser Tragedies, though I think a couple of songs on Pioneering had been written and made some of their earliest appearances there as well. I remember a gentleman approaching me afterwards and expressing a fondness for “Brave.” And though I had no further interactions with him, I can only assume he was the same man who reached out through Bandcamp almost a decade later. The show was enjoyable enough, but otherwise mostly unremarkable alongside so many others of that era.
But because of that show, somewhere in the interim, “Brave,” and another song that he didn’t mention by name, had been gallivanting around Massachusetts, making their way into themed radio shows, and I hadn’t the slightest clue. That feeling was, and is, magical.
I hate promoting my work, at least in ways beyond the performance of the work (or writing about it). I too easily slip into self-centered insufferability, while placing unfair expectations on those around me, all the while feeling slimy about the whole thing. I much prefer the idea of trying to operate with some level of dignity. I don’t care about convincing you to read or listen; I want to be engaging enough that you want to. When I get messages like the one mentioned above, I have a glimmer of hope that such a path is possible, if only I continue to create and subsequently send those things out into the world.
These journal entries are another one of these songs, so to speak. I have doubts about them constantly and think they occasionally indulge in things that I don’t know that I want to be known for indulging in. But as I contemplate the ever-present internal war of taking my songs back to the stage for the first time in several years, I hope the journals continue to churn away, clinging by their fingernails to relevancy, another song that might net me an email in ten years from someone for whom it, in some way, mattered.