Taking my music down from Spotify was the first step...reaching for something, and striving as I have, is no longer possible for me. I don’t know where this leaves me; at this point, I honestly think I’d prefer to sell ten vinyl records than have 100,000 streams. The tang of tangibility. It has begun to feel like the difference between playing to a room with twelve people listening intently, versus a bar with 400, hollering over their beer. I do not miss the beer gigs, hundreds of them.
I am working to accept that this whole thing (music) has not turned out as I expected; but does life ever? I have always been woefully bad at networking and making connections. I don’t reach out to people and I don’t slot myself into scenes because I cannot; I don’t know where to begin and I never have. The shoe does not fit. And yet, this is my life’s work. What do I do with it? I suppose, exactly what I am doing.
For many years, I wished to progress in my martial arts training in a visible way; to rise in the ranks, as it were. Not something that I like to admit. These days, I just want to go to class with an open heart and learn. I want to accept that my left hand is fucked but that it still works; at least I can pull up my socks and tie my shoes without my eyes watering. And I can ride my bike again. Carry a not-too-heavy bag of groceries. Can I find this acceptance, this approach with music?
We dropped our son off at college the first week of September, and I’ve not cried that much in decades. This is something for which I lack words; the emotion floods in at unexpected moments. Sometimes it is delicate and gentle, a soft weep with a deep breath, followed by one lone tear. Sometimes, I shake and sob, snot running down onto my lips. It is impossible to explain how much I miss him…I am crying now, as I type.
I have a great abundance of work, so much in fact, that I’m not sure what to do. I think I’ll just operate on intuition here. The first, is a four song ep, titled Cheever Moon. Available everywhere online, save Spotify. Of course, I know that’s where most people listen to music...
I wrote the first three during the pandemic, and finally went back and re-tracked a bunch of things; bass, more guitars, blips and bloops, and had my aforementioned son play drums on two of the tunes. I played drums on the others, and while I’m awful at it in a conventional sense, I like what I made.
I was re-reading a bunch of John Cheever at the time, and I sing:
“Dear John Cheever, where are you now,
when we need you most, to write our stories?”
I was thinking about how we might have named various moons of the year after writers; imagining a world where they were still on the cover of magazines, not pop stars. Some literary naturalist view of our place on Earth. It is impossible for me to think of John Cheever without imagining someone swimming under a full moon. The third song on the ep titled Cartpushers, which also appears on The Bellows, felt cinematic to me and hence the parentheses. It is not in a film, but perhaps this will inspire someone to change that.
As I’ve said before, the writer Ben Jahn worked with me on lyrics for The Bellows, and he had a particularly heavy hand in Cartpushers. Enough that I had to ask him what certain lines meant to him, so that I could know what they would mean to me, and by default you. I remain ever grateful for his writing. I recommend that you read a recent short story of his, which I love.
In other news, I received as a generous trade from my old pal
Mike Bullock (who will appear on no less than three of the forthcoming releases) his old, beloved, 1947 Epiphone B5 double bass, and it has consumed me completely. The physicality of this instrument has thoroughly captured my heart. I’ll write more next time about entering a new phase of my musical life, one wherein I make music just to be making music. Like the great martial arts master (I forget who he was now and where I read this) who after eighty years of training, asked to be buried in his white belt.
Here’s a video of me at week five, feeling both excited and bewildered, with sore fingers and soaring heart. Where will this take me?
And lastly, as I undergo this enormous life shift, I’ve been revisiting old material. I tracked a new version of this one with a band last spring, and filmed this in my shop a few weeks past. Where does the time go?
