Some Thoughts On Writing Songs

Worlds

Look At How Far You've Come

Sometimes you don’t realize how dark it got until you turn around and look at the ascent you’ve made to rise out of it.

Every challenge, every destructive pattern that was ripped from its foundations, every stumble that led to knowledge, every sleepless night that culminated in a flash of understanding, every encounter with the painful truth - All of these things are single steps that added up to the climb.

The mountain metaphor has been serving me well in framing my own process of overcoming a couple years of anxiety and doubt and anger, a couple years in the shadows, in the valleys, in the lands lower than I knew. The only problem with the image of the mountain is that it peaks. I realize that there is no summit that we can hope to attain, only more inclines into thinner air.

On the solstice, I stumbled on my roommate and our friend performing a ritual, burning two candles for that transitional day. One candle burned for all they hoped to gain within themselves, and one burned for all they hoped to leave behind. They asked me if I’d like to join them, and I did.

A couple years ago I would have dismissed this invitation and left them to their own devices, but getting that deep into some canyon wilderness opens you up to all kinds of things as you try to locate your trailhead. I can see it simply as an exercise, and I can take from it what I need and filter what doesn’t connect.

We talked a lot about losing fear, or more, actions from fear, actions from loneliness, actions from unhealthy ambitions, greed, dependency, weakness, a need to control. We talked a lot about opening up to courage, to faith in ourselves, to action from love (in all of its complexity and misinterpretation), action of kindness: to ourselves and those around us, actions of knowledge and strength.

After the candles were lit, my friends were elated, they said that they felt like a weight had been lifted. I told them that I felt a burden. They tried to help, they asked me about it and I explained it with the mountain metaphor. I told them that I felt like I just arrived at a false-summit, that I suddenly caught my first glimpse of the next ascent, steeper than before, rising higher into the clouds. “The challenge of love?! the challenge of courage?! The sort of discipline that real kindness demands?! This is going to take everything I’ve got, and then some...”

My roommate told me to turn around. She said, “Take a minute, and look back down at how far you’ve come.”

* * *

Sometimes I feel like a pessimist, but outwardly, people often comment on my optimism. My good friend who passed through town on tour the other day asked how someone who tends to wear all black, has naturally black hair, can exude so much light. Damn, that meant a lot. Maybe I’ve been mourning something. Maybe I was born mourning something, but every moment gives you a choice between wallowing and hope. My whole life I’ve spent wishing, always longing for something, but I always believed I could get it, maybe even if I didn’t understand how. I used to want very material things. I wanted the spotlight, and power over people, despite my drive to understand things, to know people, to know the world, to be open, to talk. We’re conditioned to want all that empty stuff. I think deep down we feel that it will somehow break that vast separation between us, dissolve that universal loneliness, if only we get a little more - but it only pulls us further apart.

Now I just want to be calm. I want to not fly so high and drop so low on my ups and downs. I want to create, and have much less interest in reaping the spoils of my creations on any economic market, or up on some stage. I believe that we can be kind to each other, to understand our world and ourselves. I believe in patience and in process. I believe in the action of love, as complicated and difficult as loving can be - and I’m not talking about some mystical innate romanticized force of hollywood love. I believe that we can be friends, that we can let down our walls, be peaceful, be reasonable, resolve things. I believe we can find value in our passing moments and not in the hollow goals that pull us from them. I value beauty - real beauty - in nature, in art, in all our hearts, in the sunset that comes with each waning day. I believe in hard work towards genuine ends, that we can learn to share, that unjust power will always crumble, that we can never be perfect, but always be “perfecting.”

I don’t know what it says about our times to be called an optimist for spouting this stuff. These aren’t things that were meant to be strived for. These are things that we’re all entitled to. Why does our system shove them away? How far into the darkness are we when it seems like only the hopelessly hopeful, the deluded, the guru, the therapist, the rambling artist, can speak of any of this stuff genuinely and openly and not face a cold shoulder or a dismissive joke?

And then I start to wonder: in which direction are we heading from here?

Some Thoughts On My Approach

I’m learning to paint. It has been a long time coming, but somehow up until now I’ve spent little time with a brush in my hands. I’ve noticed that I think about a painting in a similar way to how I think about a recording - I approach the balance of colors and textures with a similar mindset. Recording is also feeling a lot like sculpture. This has made me reflect on the way I make music, on the way that I take abstract thoughts and feelings and moments and mold them into something tangible. It has made me think about why my music process differs from my process with visual art.

Learning how to paint is easier than learning other things because I’ve become more skilled now at learning new skills - and I’ve already put a short lifetime behind my approach to creative endeavors. That’s not to say that I can make the brush do everything I want it to do (hardly!). I just finally know how to be patient with myself, I know that with time and the right effort, it will get there. I know that when I start learning something it will seem simple and I’ll have some semi-conscious fantasy that I’ll be a natural, and know all the moves instinctually. I’ll want to do it my own way, but eventually I’ll make mistakes and learn why the masters of that skill share certain techniques in common. I’ll work to learn the rules, and then I’ll encourage myself to break them. I’ll find myself humbled by the infinite ways to approach the medium. And I’ll do whatever it is, a lot, and over the course of years find my place within it.

I’ve been painting as much as I can. I have a better handle on the brush, on the feel of paint, the way it mixes, and I’ve had multiple pieces to show to people further down the path than me, who can offer a few constructive words in response that break the task wide open for me again. The more you do it, the more confident you become. The more you respond to a piece in a way that only you could respond to it, the more that your pieces start to be recognizable as “yours.”

The way that the system supporting music has been set up really stunts the art-making potential of musicians. We aren’t often encouraged to treat ourselves as “artists,” as far as the process is concerned. The album cycle, the idea that you refine and record a dozen songs and then go on an insane journey to market that material greatly inhibits creative growth. Being signed with a major label allowed me to see the priorities of the system from within. It’s a business. They finance a product and use all the channels they have to sell as much of it as possible. Indie labels do this. Independent artists do this as well. It's standard twentieth century American procedure. The scary thing is that when I talk with musician friends, our conversations usually turn to matters of business, as that’s how we’ve come to gauge success. Things are of course changing as this system crumbles away, but I don’t want to expend my limited moments of life worrying about how much my music sells or who I get to open a show for or what some executive says they think.

As far as creating great artistic material is concerned, though, there are relatively few musicians that have been able to produce enough material to have their own voice start to shine through. Your starting point as a young artist is most always going to be the work of others that moves you or entertains you or challenges you, so it makes sense that so much of the new music we get pushed at us is a collage of references to other people’s works and style from the past.

As much of an adventure as I’ve had creating and releasing two full length albums, I feel that I have held myself back in a lot of ways. I’ve probably started more than a thousand songs in the last ten years, but seen only a couple dozen through to a polished, recorded, state. Recently, learning to record myself has been empowering. I now am less dependent on engineers and producers and studios and someone to finance those great costs. I also have a direct connection with the medium, when before, as a performer, I brought the concept and the paint, but someone else with a different skill set was doing the painting. As my own producer and engineer, I have control over the brush, and of so many new colors to mix in. I can paint on so many surfaces now. This has made songwriting and recording fresh and exciting again. There is so much new potential to aspire to, a new medium in which to find my voice, in which to make new shapes, to say the things I need to say.

A few months ago, when Lucinda Williams released a new album and I was blown away by the continued growth in her songwriting, even in her late fifties, I began to ask people why is it that most musicians do their most compelling work so young in life and sputter out instead of grow? Shouldn’t artists like her be the rule, not the exception?

This question obviously gave way to tons of other questions, and I had a lot of great discussions, but one answer that rang true to me is that musicians have the freedom and motivation as amateurs to create provocative work, but in entering their professional career, the call of the day often becomes entertainment and marketing - selling the product. As professional entertainers, the art becomes secondary (it feels pretentious to even be calling it art!), growth is stunted by tour schedules and the details of photo shoots and agents and managers. You are as a young artist, more often than not, critiqued on such abstract grounds as trends and fashion and who you associate with, that it is easy to become more insecure with success, to shoot towards the safe middle instead of finding your edge. If creative work was only a vehicle to enter into the spotlight, then once in the spotlight, different priorities might emerge in order to stay there. That is a totally separate issue.

I don’t want my creative process to suffer, to never develop to its full potential because I’m driving to the ends of the earth to market it. With Street To Nowhere we worked on our one album for three years, and toured on it and marketed it for almost two years. The experience was incredibly interesting, and I wouldn’t change it, but it still shocks me how much time was spent on eleven of my songs. I think of my favorite painters and how much work they produced. I can’t picture any of them going around the world for a couple years to promote their paintings, painting the same image again, night after night. They experimented freely, took risks, and just their finished pieces fill thick reference books. I’m becoming more interested in their approach, in those creative priorities. I’d rather share with you more songs, straight from my head and heart, even if that means they are less polished, even if some experiments yield freaks of nature. I’d like to expend my energy to further find my voice, and refine my skills, even if that means my work reaches less people. I don’t need to be Starbucks. I’m happy being a neighborhood coffee shop.

My Work Space

Trembling In A Room

You can't predict when it will happen again.

You step into a room and it grabs hold. Jostling you, one arm around your throat, the other taut around your chest. Your breath is inconsistent and your words tumble like rocks yanked loose from the mountainside. Unexpected, heavy, and conspicuous - crashing below. You want to let the force pull you into the shadows. You want to let it drag you back into your car, its hand guiding yours as you turn the key. You want the engine to rumble, to feel the car reverse down the street, flow silent and surging backwards into the river of headlights. You want to let it shove you back through your front door, slam you down hard on your bed.

It isn’t humility when you find yourself suddenly kneeling unintended at the presence of others. It isn’t the awe of staring upwards into the branches of a massive redwood or of being swept into the stratosphere by a string of music. The feeling is humiliation. It is a sudden thick shadow shooting out from you, saturating the world around you. You handed away your power, let your anxieties seduce you. How did it happen? You don't want this.

You simmer in this silent injustice and fury. In this quiet, uncontrollable, unintended, dehumanization.

Some will take advantage of it and perform their invisible rituals on you, manipulate you, exploit you, experiment with push and pull and gifts and insult. Some will try to save you to save themselves, to lift you, to frantically convince you of the virtue that you have inside - and some, will allow you to just exist as that whisper of a person, casting their gaze to the floor as you drift by.

There are others though, that will stick with you at a healthy distance, allow you to navigate your own ascent into understanding, to ride your own wave of strength and weakness, and expect you to soothe them when they fall. Because this shocked and shaken creature isn’t you. It happens. it’s a symptom of something that is in you, but you’re bigger than it is, and you’re losing it - you’re way too hard on yourself. There is no way you must act with these friends, these companions. The effect of the mixture was predetermined. It is chemistry. There is a way things will go because of the ingredients involved. You may react oddly when another element is thrown in, but some things are just more conducive to one-another than others.

So fuck it. Go out into the world and be the conflation of elements that you are, see how the world around you reacts, hold on when you feel something dragging you away, and look for an opportunity to grow and for those that will grow beside you. Be fascinated as one moment and one feeling slip into the next.

New Apartment Recording

Love

Emptied

Sometimes you share so much that you drain yourself. I feel that way after I sing. After I really sing. When my throat is all chopped up and things are hazy and sort of out of reception. I could just burrow somewhere and hibernate. When I really rear back and sing, when I’m not thinking about what I’m singing, how I’m singing, it’s redemption, it’s a gap in time, a space that couldn’t comprehend anxiety or fear. I could command a sudden army, or break a stable of horses. And after, there is this space where everything feels numb - the house is burned down - there isn’t hardly an everything to feel.

A lot of today was like that. Today I shared my history and walked through the halls of another’s. We saw other people’s lives pasted up on massive walls and deconstructed into flashes of paint, into torn-out images wrenchingly arranged. Days like that are fascinating and cathartic and you can feel your darkest chasms taking on light, but as I drove away my heart wanted to nod off like a little kid on in the back seat on the long ride home. My heart had partied too hard.

A lot of tonight was like that too. I was confronted with a taste of my own history, in the back of a tour van with an old friend in the driveway of a beaten down house with a party swarming around us. And we were playing songs, writing songs, and I was fucking wailing. This was like we used to do. He used to pick me up in his band’s van when we both had some new songs, and we’d idle on some deserted corner, or find a picnic table in an empty park, and with whispered restraint, share the best of what we’d been creating. We’d give each other notes. These were our own little songwriting workshops. I’d get his approval, which I’d learned to trust, and then I’d be ready to sing for the world.

Now I don’t have much restraint. People kept climbing into the van. They were there, and they weren’t. I can sing loud over anything, anywhere, and it no longer phases me. I’m stronger within myself. I have a better idea if something I’ve written is ready - there's no such thing as ready. I don’t need his approval as much, or I should say, I now value my own approval so much more.

You don’t need to turn the stereo on when you head home from a day like that. You’re a shell, or some discarded bones, a light on a distant radio tower flashing on and off against the horizon. All of the longing that goes into a day, all of the need to connect, and to give, and have your isolated existence be recognized and understood in that of another - all of that is washed away. There is nothing to be accomplished. It’s time to rest.

Songs About Songs

Poets writing poems about writing poetry.

Sometimes the process swallows up everything around it, and then there is only the process. Days drift by unnoticed. Goals arise, are sliced open, hastily performed, forgotten. Somehow the need to get up and go to work, to put something down on the page, becomes more urgent than the job itself. What if you just didn’t show up? Where do you trip the wire of consequence? What is the bottom line to survival? Is there anywhere you have to be?

Everyone needs to tell their story. Sometimes when you start to tell it back, you can only talk about the telling. It might be time to wake up in the woods then, and find your way home.

Birds sing in the middle of the night here and I can see stars from my bed. In the morning, the shade from the wall keeps the concrete cool in the back yard. I have a routine suddenly, where I stand with that first cup of coffee and see if I can find the observatory in the distance. Today I recognized the sensation of a summer morning, a thread of cool air trembling in the heat. People have climbed to the top of the hill across the way. Below it is an empty college campus. Graduation came and went. It’s quiet now - just joggers and kids from the neighborhood. I’m living in a dining room with curtains separating it from the kitchen. I keep the sliding glass door open to the patio all day.

A couple years ago I reached the point where I was writing songs about my life as a musician. That was the case, because being a musician was my entire life. I had a lot of pain to exorcise, a lot of appreciation to express. You’ll hear. Then everything shifted. A part of me got ripped out, and I’ve been filling it in with something else. I didn’t know how to relate it as it went by, or if it was important to do so. It was mostly happening internally. Now I’m not sure I care much about being anything. What I do know is that I’m getting home. Getting to a new home. I can feel it coming - and it is not a song about writing songs.

Pulled Apart

How our anxieties pull us apart. How I escape from conversations I want to be in. How I talk myself out of talking to those I wish to speak to. How I sell myself short to those I want to impress. How I disappear from the sight of those I’ve connected with. How you apologize to me for being yourself. How we protect one another from the painful truth that we need to hear. How I feel guilty for speaking my mind. How you smile and nod while you’re really spinning in your thoughts. How we talk around and around what we’re really talking about. How I start believing that you want this conversation to be over. How I shift my weight from leg to leg. How I rip the label from beer. How I burn as I walk away.

Photos From The Last Few Months

Days

Why does the positive have to add up to the negative - cancel it out, outweigh it?

Why is it that we make judgements on blocks of 24 hours and label them “good” or “bad?”

My day yesterday was so many things. I sat down and started to work, and within an hour was flooded with anger at myself, impatience at the process, helplessness, loneliness. I went to a museum and saw giant abstract paintings, watched a light rain fall in the sunshine on a pond in the sculpture garden, the drops illuminating like sparks as they hit the water. Time stopped. I spent an hour on hold with some corporate bureaucracy. I worked on a painting. I had a medium sized panic attack. I drank a cup of tea and stared, content, up at the hillside and the sky. I made dinner and snuck onto the balcony off of one of my roommate’s rooms to catch the tail end of the sunset. I watched a buddy I toured with almost five years ago perform an open-hearted set of his always poignant songs at a quiet venue and had a flashback to twenty-two. I drank a couple beers. I laid in bed trying to shake the uneasy rage that resurfaced from the morning, frustrated that I understood why it was there, why it was useless, but still couldn’t cut it loose.

That wasn’t nearly all negative. It was mostly interesting. It wasn’t all good. Some moments were painful. Some were contradictory, or overlapping, or oddly complimentary: Beauty and sadness, anger and understanding, fear and loneliness, happiness despite physical discomfort. I guess I could call it good, but why worry whether it was good or bad, if my life is exciting enough, or happy enough, or if I’m appreciating it enough. You’re not present with thoughts like that. You’re not savoring any moment. And what’s the measurement for any of this? Other peoples lives?! Who knows what they’re experiencing! You can’t touch their reality. You can’t get in there and feel it.

All I can say is - good or bad, yesterday happened.

And now it’s today.

Recording This Album

Right now I’m taking a break from comping vocals. For me, in the process of recording this record, this means that I spent a good chunk of the day today singing my song “Something You Could Say” into a microphone in my kitchen, and now I’m going through the takes (there’s about 25 of them), slicing them up, pulling out the best parts, then pasting them together as the performance that you’ll hear. Yesterday I did this with electric guitar, tomorrow maybe I'll sing again if my voice feels up for it.

One of the best things about making art is that it lives in a world that, if you allow it to, functions without ethics. Almost anything can be art if you treat it as art, and I’m always fascinated by the multitude of definitions people scrape up for the word, the action, the state of mind. That fundamental lack of right and wrong, though, makes a task like the one I’m currently getting some space from, a challenge. How can you know if you’re on the right path when there is no trail to follow! Sure, there are some rules, like pitch and meter, but sometimes the best performance is a little out of key, a little off the beat - and that’s okay, that may even be what somehow makes it great, but you have to be strong enough to allow yourself to break those abstract rules (theory, training, genre, the politics of what’s “cool”) that have been hammered into us. Having a producer helps on a project like this, an outside ear, another vote, but I’m at it alone this time.

One of the goals for this recording is to use it to further refine my ability to know what I like and don’t like, to execute on what I'm stoked on and follow through without second guessing myself too much. This includes knowing when to stop, when to take a break, when to give myself a pep talk, when to go take a hike, or meet a friend for a drink, or take a few days off. I’m working on this in all aspects of my life. There really isn’t ever a reason to be hard on yourself, or work harder than you have to. You can never be “perfect,” but you can always be “perfecting,” and a bad attitude won’t do you any good with that - though it will often try to convince you not to shake it. Better to step away for a while and enjoy the world outside, keep the balance.

When I was tracking in Sacramento two weeks ago with a bassist and drummer, we recorded some songs together in the same room, completely live. This means that we didn’t isolate our instruments, that all of the microphones in the room were picking up sound from everyone... You can hear my vocals on the drum microphones, and the drums cut through on the mic that’s pointing at my acoustic guitar, and so on... This is great because you have to live with what everyone played on each take, and there is no worry about “what’s best,” only “what happened.” I always think that the emotion gets across better on recordings like this as well - you’re all there together, feeling it.

This leads me to another of my themes for this project: Documentation. Music is obsessed right now with mining the past for all its resources. So many bands start off by deciding who they will be influenced by, or what genre they will be in, and weighing each decision against the canon of American pop culture from the last eighty years. I’ve done this. I do this. It’s hard not to. But I’m interested this time in just documenting what the process of this album sounds like, instead of trying to force it into some sonic state that's come before. I’ve been pushing myself to simply capture what my friends and I sound like playing in a room, how my voice echos off my kitchen walls... my guitar, the upright piano at my parent's house in Oakland, the strange old Sears, Roebuck & Co organ that an ex-roommate left in the garage here... It will certainly sound like other records that have come before it, but I think it will also have a sound of it’s own, of the houses and studios it was recorded in. And however the final product, I know that I will have grown through the process - every day I'm learning something new, having fun with it, taking it slow, and staying curious as to what will happen next...

There Is No Destination

When I was sixteen I started jamming with a friend in his parent’s basement, where he had his drums set up. I would bring my Strat and my little Fender amp over, and we’d play the songs I was writing. We’d have a blast. He encouraged me with my songs, and we decided to start a band. We brought a friend of ours in on bass, and a kid in our class started recording us. We started playing out, at community centers, at this odd warehouse venue where The Locals, an Oakland band I was crazy about, threw shows. That may have been the most fun I’ve ever had. It was magic. I suddenly had the confidence to talk to girls, kids at school apologized for having ignored me or put me down before. The world was full of hope and importance. Music was this vehicle for us to be heard, this force that was going to bring us out of the clamped jaws of high school angst, a very real depression for me, and into the arms of acceptance, of happiness.

From there ambition took a hold. We all went off to college, but the real goal was to be professionals, and as time went on, the incredible moments of music and performing began to fall into the shadows of the desired destination. New goals would form before old ones were attained, so I began to appreciate the achievement of them less and less. I dropped out of college. I put in the work, I played the shows, I wrote the songs, I made the record, I signed to Capitol Records, I went on tour, opened for big bands, played shows to thousands of people, and though I feel like I sucked all of those experiences dry and appreciated them as much as I could, I still wanted more. I had so many nervous breakdowns that anxiety became the norm. And through that process I lost all of those old friends, including that drummer and our friend that recorded us. In a way, they were casualties of managers and lawyers and the opinions of other people, but also largely of my own ambition, of their ambition, of the abstract destination, the etherial solution that lay in front of us somewhere. Only recently did I begin to ask what I was looking to solve in the first place.

I made decisions to distance myself from my past. I chose a team of business-people that I knew deep down didn’t care for me as much as status and money and I impressed upon them my old patterns. I was accepted by the world now in so many ways, but I continued to find people who wouldn’t accept me for who I am, and would eventually only let me down.

Capitol had a merger and fell apart before our record got promoted. The band broke up. I made a new album on my own, and I still had the drive, I still had the energy to push and push. When I finished the album and had downtime, I helped run the Oakland office for the Obama campaign, and when the economy had collapsed, when no labels were clearly interested in even listening to my new record, one of my managers had an idea. I should move to New York, where she was based, and get my name out over there. She would be there to work with me, to find me opportunities.

When I made the decision to pack my Honda Accord and drive across the United States through the ice and snow, I knew I was following the advice of a woman who would openly berate me to a state of tears, and I wouldn’t fight back. But I still felt that I had to try. I had to get to that place, that place I’d been longing to get since those days in my buddy’s basement. I got to New York, slept on couches, and sloshed through the snowy gutters in Brooklyn to find a place to live. I stretched duct tape over the broken windows in my vandalized car, and I tried to get a hold of my manager.

She wouldn’t pick up her phone. I’d sometimes get a quick text back, and when I’d try to schedule a time to meet, she would disappear form the conversation. When my first show came, I stared at the door in the back of the room as I played, but the set ended and she had never walked in.

When I’d called the head of the company angrily, when I’d confronted her via email, we finally got coffee. I was shaking. I was afraid to show my anxiety around her because she’d always used it against me. I addressed what was happening in as calm a tone as I could, and she responded indignantly, “You’re not making me any money!”

She was on salary, and the company had seen a really nice chunk of cash from my old band’s record deal...

When they asked to work with me, I was told that it was because they loved my music and believed in me, but at the same time I had a major label bidding war, and of course this was what it was all about. And there I was spending my own savings to live in the ghetto in Brooklyn, risking my life and my mental health (whatever was left of it...) to make these epic drives alone in the middle of winter, often in the middle of the night, and I had no support. These business-people, that I had been trying to believe were invested in me and my music, became so transparent.

I tried to switch to a different manager within the company, and I waited in my apartment, in the cold, depressed, alone, for an answer. I started releasing my album online, song by song, I played a lot of guitar, I wrote a lot, read a lot of books, tried to get out to some museums, but I was in so much pain and so tired of the cold. I didn't want to be there except to further my career. I’d go up to the roof of the building and look out at the city stretching to the horizon on all sides. No one gave a fuck about me. No one would care if I was splattered on the sidewalk below.

After days and weeks I still had no answer. Every few days I’d call again and the receptionist at the office in San Francisco would tell me that the head of the management company was “In a meeting” or “on a conference call” or “just stepped out,” and I’d never hear back. The shows they had helped me book had run out so I put together some gigs for myself, but they usually didn’t pay, and I was playing a lot of the time for just the sound man.

After almost two months of this, I flew back to San Francisco for a couple shows and managed to pin down the head guy for a meeting. I knew what was coming. The company dropped me. I had so much of my life invested in my relationship with them, so much of my self worth came from knowing I was being handled by the same people that handled these famous bands that I looked up to so much, a reality that is difficult to look back at. I left the meeting with hug and a “thank you.” Sometimes, laying awake at night, I wish I had flipped a desk over, smashed some windows, but what difference would it have made? That wouldn’t have changed all the pain I had already been through.

Back in New York, the city was still iced over. I waited another two months for my girlfriend to graduate from college so I wouldn’t have to drive back to California alone. When we finally made the drive, a rainstorm lifted as we passed through Reno. And as we crossed the border into my home state, a flood of sunshine broke through the drenched pines. I felt tears of relief streaming down my face.

That experience broke me. I’ve stuttered again and again in the last two years trying to keep my music career going, but I’ve hardly been treading water. I’m barely afloat financially, and I'm struggling to stay at all interested in the business aspects of it - which are a necessary evil, I guess. But this is largely because I’ve spent a great bulk of my time getting to the bottom of the illusions that led me to believe that pushing to the ends of the earth for some surface ambition was going to get me anywhere I really wanted to be. I’d been so many places, but always brought with me all of the baggage that had always weighed me down. This period in my life has been such a fulfilling endeavor. I’ve spent the time getting to know myself, my history, my family’s history, and the way my body and my mind work, the way our society, our world, works. Now I understand what happened. I’m just glad to be alive.

Last night I picked up my drummer friend from the airport. We’ve reconnected after all these years, and he was flying home from a European tour. After telling me about performing for these massive crowds over there and talking about all of the various projects he has his hands in now that he’s home, we started talking about real life.

He and I had already been incredibly successful at sixteen: we were having fun and expressing ourselves to the best of our ability. And we still do that, which is the best part! Everything else that has happened since then has been about other, more deeply rooted, desires and issues.

We agreed that we are in a similar place, that we’ve seen enough to know that the best of what life has to offer is there for you in any simple moment, that all of the eyes of the world staring at you with admiration would still feel like shit if you have no love for yourself. Ambition is good in moderation. It gets you out of bed, allows you to survive, to do the things you want, but it can be compulsive just like anything else. We agreed that there is no destination anymore, there is only now, and if you can’t appreciate your ‘now’ - you need to figure out why that is.

I’m working on a new record, and a lot of the lyrical content is driven by this experience. I still make music because I love to write songs and sing them, because they help me to put my life and my feelings into some sort of structure and hear them played back. I write because I have something to say, and because the creativity keeps me challenged in a healthy manner. This has always been true, but it was submerged under so much desperation, such an irrational need to be accepted by the world, when the reality was, I was never accepted by my own self.

Some Thoughts On Arguments And Belief

I never want to have an argument again. I’m done letting my wires get tripped in the heat of discussion and feeling the sour chemicals of frustration stream out. I never again want to find myself in a feedback loop, shutting someone down, being shut down, shutting someone down, being shut down - walls of memory banks crumbling, old feelings, old behaviors, rolling out into open air.

Beliefs.

Beliefs are heavy, burdensome things. I’ve tried to shake the beliefs of my friends and family, but a belief is something big and rooted. A belief is a house with foundations laid deep. It can have many levels with many rooms and so many things hung in its closets. It can be hard to grasp in the moment, but there’s someone living their life inside of that belief, just as you go to bed each night in yours.

How often is it worth it to bring in a wrecking crew to try to dismantle someone’s convictions, someone’s perspective on the world? For them to watch the shelter they dwelled in be destroyed, to have all of their belongings strewn about? How high should the stakes be for us to make our loved ones rummage through the pieces in embarrassment, to try to construct some sort of roof to raise above themselves while they figure out what’s right? Especially if they’re getting along fine, if they aren’t harming themselves or others, the way we all stumble along with our ever-imperfect situations. Why put someone down? Why tell them they are wrong? If they are, they will probably learn it in a more effective way (the hard way).

Often, I think, we’re trying to be kind. If we see something that we think could be better in this world, we want to make it so - or we at least want to point it out. But conversely, for so many reasons, we also want to control others, want to have our statements and feelings validated - whatever they may be. But what good is validation from someone whose throat you’re holding a knife to?

People need to believe different things at different moments in different places in their lives. We’ll never be all on the same page. Right and wrong as I see it is a spectrum, an art-form. It’s a chess game, and we must address the intricacies of each move with fresh tact. It’s a skill we should always be honing.

But then there’s bigotry, there are cults, there are harmful notions that cut through our culture at all discernible levels. These beliefs can become towering high-rises, and constantly being under attack, their foundations get dug deeper and deeper every time they are defended. They tend to be eclipsing something buried, something someone carries around with shame. We know that an argument is touchy, and that there are slow and effective ways to address these issues, to stand up to them, but they are often more risky and more complicated than blasting our own fiery convictions back into someone’s face. Maybe there is a right time to let the anger flow when it comes to addressing dangerous ideals, but I really think you need a steady hand to cut ties so tightly bound.

Of course, I know I’ll find myself in arguments again. I’ll wake up in a heated debate over something inane and watch it roll right over the edge into battle. But I want to remember in those moments that what is happening is no longer about the content of the discussion, it is about something deeper and unique in each of us. The way someone behaves in a conflict shows their true colors, gives you a glimpse of the actual home they were once helpless in. It seems to me that once we enter into an argument, we begin to work out our issues on one another - our needs for control, our needs to be accepted and validated and praised and loved, our needs to be understood. We start to vent these feelings from the past - the grief, the anger, the sensations of being victimized - all the things we’ve never had a place for and never were able to throw out. We start to hurl rocks at each-other's houses, forgetting why we got so heated in the first place.

I want to always be honing my craft. To get better at taking that deep breath, making the pact to disagree, and disbelieving the part of me that thinks I was being insulted. I want to be able to make a clean move to the next string of moments. I want to be open, and stay strong, to know what needs to be defended, and what needs to be shrugged away.

Inexplicable Shifts

Sometimes you’re solid. You get it. Whatever life throws your way you take with optimism, with tact and rationality. You’re aware of yourself, certain, excited to take risks for pure enjoyment. You smile at strangers, make small talk. You’re calm and sympathetic. People are drawn to you. There’s nothing you need, and no one can push or pull you out of your element. You’re in control, modest and powerful simply for being you. Life is easy despite any inconvenience, any challenge, and it’s going to stay this way forever.

Then for no clear reason, something shifts within you. You spring a leak and begin to take on all of the doubt, the self-loathing. Every action requires a great effort, if only to take a breath, to keep your spirits above the surface.

Clenched teeth. Stiff Joints. There is this glare to everything, like you’re looking perpetually through some dusty late-afternoon window. Your headache pulses to the beat of everything.

And you’re going to fail, and all you’ve left behind you on that hard road are epic and complete failures. You’re fucked. And your friends don’t understand, and their advice proves that, and they don’t answer their phones anyway cause they probably don’t even like you. But you need their advice. You need someone to tell you how to get through this. The walls are fucking sheer in this pit, someone has got to throw you goddamned rope. There must be answers, but you can't quiet your anxieties long enough to actually think.

Of course, it’s hard to sleep. And when you do sleep, if you get to dream, you dream of conflict. You fight hard and you lose brutally. You’re confined. You’re stranded at great heights. You’re tortured. And any sense of hope is an illusion. If you come up, you’re going to fall, and fall hard, and wake in that sudden flash of sweat.

Has it always been like this? Have you ever felt your neck and back unclenched? Whose fault is this? You play back the long list of wrongs done to you as you stare into the darkness. You’re the victim here. Someone has to pay.

But then, one morning, with no singular shimmering cause, with no clarity you can discern from Freud or your friends, you wake up, and the day feels easy. You’re rested. And you notice that the morning is constructed of all these incredible little details: shapes of sun across the wall, hints of singing birds. You savour them.

And the past rolls off easy, the future dangles before you in pleasant mystery. And every moment, every thought, everything, has the quality of a secret joke, a punch line you couldn’t possibly explain. But why would you need to?

Curious Processes

I’ve been thinking about this album for almost three years.

Laying half-asleep one morning in summer 2008, when I was putting the finishing touches on Everything Changes And Nothing Changes, I became aware of a melody in my head. Being only semi-conscious, I stayed helpless in that state while the song built up in a feedback loop, forming around a sort of embarrassing interaction from the previous night. When I finally lifted from sleep, I grabbed my guitar, and sitting in bed began to sing the chorus to “I Know That You Don’t Want To Be My Girl.”

I used to think that I was consciously responsible for the things I create. But the more music and art that I make, the more I’ve found that I am hardly ever in the drivers seat. I used to think that there were artists I looked up to that must have fully conceived their work before hand and executed it from there, but now I’m beginning to recognize that the artistic process (and this feels true for so many processes in life) is more of a meandering conversation. When you are inside of a project, you are constantly reacting to the elements that you have completed, and then reacting again, and again, until your reaction is to stop. That morning I was responding to something my subconscious had stirred up, and I molded it from there, but I was hardly in control of the outcome.

Deciding what the end result will be and sticking militantly to that fantasy is an easy trap to fall into. You often wind up forcing your way through rocky terrain, pass up potentially interesting pathways because they don’t fit your mold, miss out on the spoils of curiosity, all of the happy accidents, and your enjoyment of the present moment. I also think it demeans the individuality of a work, as it is easy to envision a new take on something that has been done before, but I think the really unique moments happen when you just dive in with an open mind and see what’s down there. I had a ton of reference tracks that I’ve been collecting in the last couple years, recordings that for one reason or another had an essence I could envision a song of mine sharing, and these were a nice starting point, but on the first day of recording I left all of those references behind.

I have no idea what this album will sound like when it’s completed. Hell, I have no idea how long it will take to finish and who else may be helping me with it along the way. I am simply getting up each morning and going to work on it, curious to find out where it takes me next.

Recording, so far...

Famous Blue Raincoat Cover

New Cover Song: Smog's "I Break Horses"

Coldest Winter

Everything Changes: Pay-What-You-Want

Photos From The Last Few Months

Say Thank You

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