Genuine Frustration
When I first began playing live music at the end of 2008, I immediately believed in myself and my trajectory. There was a naive, but strikingly confident side of me that emerged that I had never really seen before. Maybe it was just arrogance masquerading as something more wholesome, but it was undeniably present. That confidence carried me through years of underwhelming live shows, and all the frustrations that come with being an active musician. I was excited at every return email from a venue, believed that every show was worth it in the sense that something might manifest from the most unlikely place. I took everything that came my way.
To a degree, this behavior was rewarded. I can truthfully say that shows did lead to more shows, random connections were unexpectedly made, and I found myself with what one might call a modest network –of venues and owners, other musicians, and the like. But tangible growth was harder to see. While the music improved, the audiences and venues did not. I was no more interesting in 2014 than I was in 2008, my audiences continued to shrink (despite heavy social media presence), and I started to feel the weight of what I can only classify as failure.
In terms of audience size, my peak was unquestionably my time with the folk band Something with Trees in 2011-12, but I suspect some of that boost came from having four individual’s social groups supporting us, not just one. After we split, however, was when my thoughts about my music peaked. The audience was the biggest with the band, but what I thought I could be as a live musician peaked with Lesser Tragedies in 2013 –my first A Metropolitan Guide album, and first release post-band.
The most tangible evidence in support of that statement is my desire and willingness to take Lesser Tragedies to a formal studio, and to pay the consequent hundreds/thousands of dollars such a decision often costs. There is a feeling of freedom that arises from band dissolutions, as you no longer feel shackled to any kind of democratic institution, even if the “shackles” were really never that suffocating to begin with. But when Lesser Tragedies was brewing, I thought it was my real chance for something to happen.
I played a great number of shows in support of Lesser Tragedies, but was quickly humbled. The rooms remained mostly empty, the coffee blenders and bar patrons I was playing over got louder, and each show felt more and more of an imposition that was leading nowhere. The most striking shift I recognize in my musical story is the juxtaposition between Lesser Tragedies and my follow-up EP, Pioneering, that was recorded about six months later. Where the former is loud, raucous, and full of studio-induced roar, Pioneering was recorded by my brother, Kevin, in his living room with one guitar and one USB microphone, as we strategically planned takes around the kicking on/off of the furnace. These two albums stand as a microcosm of what I believed about my music just six months from one another. Lesser Tragedies thinks it is going somewhere; Pioneering doesn’t.
I continued playing shows in support of Pioneering, and eventually Simulation Avenue the next year –the first album where I took over the engineering of my records, a control that I have not relinquished since– but those shows continued looking much the same. And so by the end of 2015, my live music career had fizzled. Since, I have released a greater number of albums (5) than I have played shows (4). That’s still shocking to me when I read that sentence.
A menagerie of frustration, discouragement, depression, enthusiasm, gratitude, and, yes, growth, is the baseline for my creating music. But the music continues to be written all the same. And perhaps the desire for something bigger for these things will give way to the larger truth that my songs merely need to exist in order to be a beacon of resilience…a resilience that says “fuck you” to any force that might seek to obliterate them.