This City Don't Belong to You
Artistic expression is, more or less, our way of figuring out how we fit into this world, the means by which we explore our deepest crevices —so deep that these efforts often delve into our subconscious yearnings that only materialize when the work stands completed. Each creative effort is a multi-directional shout, at once a celebratory announcement of everything we are, but also a desperate plea for someone, anyone, to hear that plea, nod in understanding agreement, and save us from the depths of our isolation and loneliness.
Both are reasonable targets, but the problem with relying on the realm of human creativity for such things is that the realm of human creativity is a torturous, blood-bathed hellscape of pain and suffering, standing at the ready, with a full clip of ammunition, to shoot you in the face with exactly zero remorse.
Attempting to share art is often a one-way street of realizing that your shout is going spectacularly unheard. Instead, you must rely on platitudes about how you never know how your efforts may impact some stray individual, or how that impact is happening even when you don’t see it. Both are likely true in some capacity, but are hardly as loud as the voices that drown out your own.
Such a realization feels, mostly, like a healthy one. The belief that any one person’s ideas are important enough, or valuable enough, so as to deserve a place on the public pulpit is decidedly a very modern affair. Imagine for a moment all the incredible art that must have been created in the course of human history, but through lack of technology, societal norms, or lack of opportunity, that art was only ever enjoyed by a sibling, or a village, or no one but the author themselves. It’s humbling, and makes the thought of being offended that you aren’t better understood/valued for your art sound like total nonsense.
We are taught to own our surroundings — “Take the bull by the horns.” “Carpe diem.” — which, perhaps unsurprisingly, gives us all an air of ownership about everything. And when I began writing and performing many years ago, I had that same mentality: My abilities would develop, and one day my audiences would bow before the altar of my greatness. Insert whatever “lol” emoji/meme/gif you choose.
After the release of Simulation Avenue in March, 2015, I went into what was the longest songwriting drought of my life to date. This drought coincided with the slowing down of my live appearances, too. For someone who had been intensely going about such things since 2009, the vacuum that was created left a real identity crisis in its wake. For by that point, forty thousand dollars into student debt, it was becoming increasingly apparent that my writing, and my music, were things this world was more than happy to do without.
That is the point when “Train City,” my first song since recording Simulation Avenue, finally began to manifest. One of the few songs I have ever named before it was written, the title popped into my head while taking my brother to the train station in Galesburg, IL. The song always had that tension between the two unnamed parties: One an old timer who knows how this “train city” works; the other a young, naïve up-and-comer who thinks this place is theirs for the taking.
It's appropriate that the up-and-comer never says a word, but rather is just bombarded, verse after verse, of how they don’t belong, and, no matter what they might think, this place, in no way, shape, or form, belongs to them. And it never will.
This is the same message that is tarred-and-feathered onto most aspiring musicians. Some are made to endure fierce, mean-spirited, rejection, but most of us face that rejection in the form of limitless supplies of apathy. I chose to translate the apathy I received as evidence of the upset victory that was inevitably sitting just on the other side of the next song. But there came a time when I realized that upset wasn't coming. That time was when "Train City" played back to me after I recorded it: My own voice telling me, loud and clear, that I don’t own this place. And I never will. Another healthy realization.
Maybe that’s why that after I wrote "Train City", I created the town of Lakeside, the center of the record on which “Train City” ultimately appears, as well as the setting of my forthcoming novel. I guess I figured if I can’t own this world, I would just go make my own.