Reawakening
From 2008 until 2015, I was an active live musician. I did the whole shebang—recording, social media pages, multiple open mics every week, every show I could get my hands on. I released six albums in that time. I played at bars, cafes, restaurants, art galleries, festivals, basements, house parties, college campuses, on radio shows, and on concert series. I drove around the Midwest. I played in a band. I went on tour.
I stopped doing most of these things with any kind of regularity after that window. Though this was a major life shift, the odd thing was that there was never the moment when I decided I was done. I didn’t have a farewell show, or a formal announcement of any kind. It just kind of faded away.
Since the beginning of 2016, I have played live four times: A church event at First Presbyterian in Lincoln, IL (2016), an open mic at Pizza Works in Peoria Heights (2018), a house show in West Peoria (2019), and a solo show at Rhythm Kitchen in Peoria (2020). I continue to think of myself as recently removed from my live music years, when suddenly I’ve been away longer than I actually spent doing it. Suddenly, it’s been almost a decade.
The unfortunate truth is that I had little to show for all of my efforts by the time 2015 rolled around. I had no lasting audience of any kind. The few shows I did play were underwhelming. I played to near-empty rooms on a regular basis— oftentimes the few souls keeping it from being totally empty were armed with earbuds, apathy, or both. Playing to empty rooms might feel like a rite of passage at 19. But at 28, it feels more like a dead end, like the universe making it abundantly clear that this is not the way.
The songs kept coming, though. The recordings kept coming. The songs got better. The recordings got better. But the shows stopped. The social media pages stopped. The dream of bigger things for my songs stopped, inasmuch as knowing I didn’t want to do the things I had been doing trying to make it happen anymore.
Four years since that Rhythm Kitchen show (and a decade-plus from regular open mics), I strapped on the old acoustic and took the stage at the Red Barn in Peoria, IL last Tuesday for a brief three-song set —“The Girls You Sang to Sleep,” a new song called “Rift,” and “Train City” for anybody keeping score at home (I am!).
There is a lot to unpack here: The adrenaline that came from being back on stage, the positive and negative feelings that open mics have the capacity to generate, and the feeling of being on this particular stage — a stage I took every week for more than a year back in 2010-11 when I was in, if not the infancy of my music, then my toddler years. All these things converged to make me ask a louder version of the same question I’ve asked myself for years: Do you want to do this again?
The performance went surprisingly well. The dust I feared had caked over my live abilities was discarded without much resistance and much of my normal energy came back. Rough around the edges perhaps, but my performance ability seemed a knife that could stand to be sharpened rather than it having transformed into a cracked plastic spoon during the years of my absence.
This experience was an encouraging development and does demand I reckon with these questions in a more pressing way than perhaps I have previously. One of the primary reasons I started writing these journals was that they sought to answer how and why being a musician has survived in my life despite my complete lack of desire to endure the warzone that is live music. But it’s untrue to suggest I have not felt a level of dissatisfaction as I look at my ever-growing, ever-improving collection of songs, and my ever-shrinking desire to take them into the fray. There is a tension, omnipresent, that gnaws at me. Not to seek some pathway to fame and wealth (though a small modicum of either would probably be alright), but perhaps recognition that the things I’m good at, or at least the things I have spent thousands of hours of my life on, can find a place in the wider world.
Going back to old haunts can feel regressive. It really doesn’t have anything to do with the people who are there, or how things go; it’s just being there. Sitting in the din of the Red Barn stirred up many of those sorts of feelings. I sat there with two people who were not in my life back in 2010. I played songs written in 2016, 2021, and 2024, rather than 2010. Everything about the experience was different, except, of course, the setting. It feels like you are trying to drag the setting into your current life, or your current life into the setting.
Both have very square-peg-round-hole implications. It’s hard to feel like you belong in a place more than once in your life—like returning to an ex. You might have love in your future, but you probably passed by the chance to have it with that specific person. Not impossible, but unlikely.
The night at the Red Barn did not feel transformative, but it’s probably important to realize that such steps don’t have to mean anything beyond themselves. Maybe it was nothing but a one-off night. Maybe not.