Like A Beaver is A Dam-Builder
Have you ever thought about quitting something? I don’t mean a job you hate, or a summer gig that was always going to evaporate come September. What I mean is quitting something that you love, or something that you’ve committed long stretches of your life to. For me, music and songwriting have long been in those sorts of crosshairs.
There has been no shortage of moments in my life when music has felt like a dead end. Honestly, I think it almost always kind of feels like that. The fuel for those feelings takes different shapes at different times. It might look like a lack of creative energy, a lack of public success, or a lack of clarity around what an ultimate goal does, or doesn’t, look like.
I think the closest I came to quitting was 2016-2018. That might seem like a large window to lump into one set of feelings, but it was a cumulative effect of discouragement and disappointment. I have written in this space about the songwriting drought that I went through after Simulation Avenue in early 2015. The rest of the that year, together with much of 2016, I only completed two songs —“Call of the Trumpet” and “Train City” — along with a partial rendition of “Good Morning, Lakeside.”
The timing of the drought wasn’t particularly surprising. 2015 was the final year of my “active musician” label, where I regularly sought out live performances, and travelled too many hours for too few gains. As those elements dried up, it was a natural extension that perhaps the music itself would dry up too. I had never before separated the act of making music and the act of playing music live —each just always seemed one side of a chicken-or-the-egg sort of coin. Each seemed to always be in service to the other. In those days, I found myself asking often why I was even trying (and failing) to do this anymore?
“Train City” was the first song that I recorded with the current recording equipment that I use —two AT4040 condenser mics, and a Behringer Xenyx QX1002 mixer. When I heard the sound difference between “Train City” and the songs I had done for Simulation Avenue on my USB Blue Yeti microphone, I heard such an exciting improvement that was worth exploring further. Sometimes I think that maybe what I heard in that song kept me trekking through those months. I don’t think “Train City” will fool anyone into thinking some professional engineer was at work, but it is a substantial step up from the sound quality on Simulation Avenue.
The end of 2016 saw a half-dozen songs emerge to fill out The Grand Revolution of Lakeside, but the spigot shut right back off again. The album came out in January 2017, and I only wrote one song for the rest of that year (“Carolina Mountain Girl”). The tally ends up being 10 songs between March 2015 and December 2018. Hard to give an exact expectation of what I would classify as acceptable levels of production, but that ain’t it. Not for all of the time I have committed to music.
The root of the word “quit” comes from Latin, moves to French, and eventually makes it way to Middle English, where the word takes on an interesting meaning that, while tangential to our current connotation, is a valuable distinction to make: “set free.” We still think of “quit” in those terms somewhat, but it’s usually a colorful way to express getting away from something toxic: “I finally quit my job! I’m free!”
But “set free” is such a different framework than “leave a place permanently,” or “resign from a job,” or “stop or discontinue" — the first three definitions that appear on a Google search. The former framework implies a type of healthy liberation that focuses on expanded possibility, where the others have a subtle negativity that turn the focus backward. You aren’t being set free anymore, you are stopping, or leaving, or resigning. Freedom isn't the operative concept, what you're quitting is.
The title of this post comes from Bill Callahan’s song, “Summer Painter.” (which as an aside, is incredible). There are many great lyrics in that track, but I have often come back to “but like a beaver is a dam builder, you never really quit,” and how such a sentiment informs my, or anyone’s, continued involvement in making music, no matter how negative the feelings are in a given moment. It’s tempting to go the twenty-first century platitude route of “you are enough,” or just because you aren’t doing something now, doesn’t mean you are not that something anymore. I don’t disagree with those platitudes necessarily, but I do ask how long can you not do something before you have to start asking yourself whether or not that thing you aren’t doing is of any value anymore?
Like the beaver above, you eventually just kind of are something. Which begs the question of can you ever quit even if you wanted to? I have penned about 35 songs since the beginning of 2019. Not exactly prolific, but a number indicative of steady commitment from a time where little consequence existed had I folded up the tent.
All of my shows in 2015 closed with an a cappella version of “The Parting Glass.” I remember feeling the pressure of those shows, as each, one after another, was a clear reminder of just how much of a dead end live music was fast becoming: Playing to empty rooms, people wearing headphones while I played, no momentum of any kind. I had been at live music for six years, and had little to show for it.
The result was that songwriting drought. The more I have contemplated that time the more I feel that perhaps it wasn’t a drought so much as a shift in the climate. I had to learn how music could exist in my life when one of its pillars had become unreliable.
Eight years later, you’re reading a journal about how I’m still trying to figure that out.