Quiet Days
Making music used to be accompanied by so much beyond it. Writing music always was part of a larger whole from the first day I picked up the guitar: I'm going to write songs, put them out, play live shows in support of them, have budding social media pages, and then cycle the process with the next batch of songs. In those years, music was going to be something significant.
And then without even noticing, it wasn't anymore.
I look back on that earlier version of myself and have some combination of gratitude, envy, and pity for him. The gratitude stems from knowing that I am not where I am today without him. The envy I feel is for how past Brian believed certain things that I can't possibly fathom to believe now. Namely, he believed that he was destined for some big musical break; he believed he was good; he believed that the toil, frustration, and endless parade of apathy was all pointing to a moment when it would all turn. To believe such a thing at the then-current level of skill that I possessed was absolutely ridiculous. What a weapon to be able to muster such confidence from such shaky premises.
To pursue such aspirations with baseless confidence might sound like the stuff of motivational anecdotes, but it's just delusional. Admittedly, a little bit of delusion is probably necessary to do anything at a high level, but the pity comes from seeing that person as someone who lacked a baseline of wisdom.
These words come at a time when I am about halfway through writing the next album --my 13th. I see that confident, young musician becoming smaller and smaller in the rearview, where to think of reaching him again becomes more and more unattainable, even as it is objectively (and subjectively) true that the music I write and produce now is light years ahead of the music I was producing alongside that brimming confidence 15 years ago.
That musician moved without reservation. It might even be a stretch to be calling it "confidence;" it was much more just blissful unawareness. When I tried to book shows, I just tried to book shows. Now, I have existential crises every time I even think about trying to book a show. Not because I don't have the chops --I actually believe the show I would put on now would be so much better, which is its own kind of hell-- but because I now ask myself an endless parade of questions full of real anxieties, made up anxieties, real logistics, and the biggest question of all: Do you actually want this?
The shows never get booked; they remain stuck in some mental purgatory. It's like being on a life support machine that just won't let you die, even if you already have. I still think about playing; I still imagine what it would feel like to get even modest attention for the songs again. In these days of uncertain employment, I muse if this isn't the time to do it, but then I've wondered that for years. I also can confidently say that these shows will never happen because, deep down, I know where this ends --perhaps the dark side of wisdom: you know better. Unless the process of playing live music has comprehensively changed for the better (it hasn't), my youthful exuberance and penchant for tolerating nonsense is in the rearview with that young musician. I don't have what it takes anymore. Maybe I never did, but I definitely don't now.
But gods I still love making music; I love playing music. These songs echo through my house day after day, and I hear myself play them, and they are good. They deserve, some of them, a bigger life than I have allowed them, and that makes me a little bit sad. But in the words of Ron Swanson, "Don't start chasing applause and acclaim; that way lies madness."
Halfway to Album #13. I think it's going to be good.