A crazy thing about singing is that sometimes it makes me silent; choosing to do what you love most in the world as your career has a tendency to wring the joy out of it, strip it of its simplicity, expose all the rocky terrain around it, demand that you use your bare hands to scale impossible grades, force you to profess your love for it over and over and over again, and if it’s singing that you love you’ll do that at the top of your lungs until your throat’s gone raw and the pit of the thing you love so much—the singing itself, such a universal human habit…a response…a connector…an expression…a means of joining the larger and continuous hum of everything—causes you physical pain and shuts you right up. How counterproductive. How perplexing…
I’ve been quiet for a while, trying to figure this out. When I feel joy or when I’m not thinking or when I’m alone and graced with a moment where no other sound fills the space, I am always singing. By the kitchen sink washing dishes, in our old car when the broken antennae won’t let any stations through the static, when the house is empty, when the moon is full, when my mind is spinning and I’m burdened and jumbled and nothing makes sense because there’s just too much of it, there is always still a wordless song to sing. It’s the anchor. It’s the gift for which I’m most grateful, forever regenerating itself, and it was totally accidental—just genes. I turn to it involuntarily yet with deep-rooted dedication. I’d call it a practice if it wasn’t so unconscious. If the soul is a thing at all, this is what is written all over mine, and if reincarnation is the way, I have been many birds and whales and will be many more. This is the simplest, purest thing about me, and it’s the best of what I have to offer, even though it has very little to do with me; this part of it, anyway, is just there.
And there’s the writing part, which feels like necessity and is often the only freaking way to iron out the whole wrinkly mess. Categorization. Writing furiously to pull one’s self out of a dank old well and back up into clean air. Survival. Writing toward resolution, even when there may not be one; at least with words and sentences and gushing openness, a path is lit. I don’t know any other way to do this. Kid fiction and journals gave way to bad emo high school poetry, which led the way to maturing poetry workshopped to death in circles with other writers at breweries, which began to manifest itself as sprawling nonfiction prose, and somewhere along the way (not the cap or the bookend but more an extension), an old man with a thick white beard loaned me a mandola with a great blue heron emblem on the headstock, and those two- and three-fingered folk chords bridged the gap: songs.
And so there was a choice, and when I made it, it all seemed very bright and shimmery and dreamy and powerful and right, and I was full of sweet, naive hope and the support of family and every friend I’ve ever had—“Fucking go for it,” my dad said when I told him I wanted to pursue a career in music, so I did. Seven years later, I’m still trying, getting better at some things, making new mistakes, learning stuff I never expected I’d need to learn in order to sing, toughening up and becoming a bit ruthless even, navigating the best I can a business that is harsh and unpredictable and pocked with snares. My face has changed. My friends are having babies and making money. Suave and I are renting out our house to stay afloat, staying in my parents’ basement when we’re not out playing shows so that we can spend our time making music…when what that really means often is that I wrap cables and restock the merch bins and send booking inquiries and post the shows online and promotepromotepromote until I’m nauseous and draft contracts and negotiate meals and mail press kits to radio stations and schedule meetings and research labels and agents and update the website… And there’s a shit-ton of off things I know now, like what the bathrooms of hundreds of rest stops look like—the one that has the weird, grainy soap for greasy hands to the right of the sink and the foam stuff to the left, the one whose doors open all wonky and leave you standing half-in, half out if there’s not a free stall, the one with the good potty poetry, and the one outside the building that you need you need to ask the cashier for a key to and that key is attached to a two-by-four. I know that I should never opt for gas station pizza but nuts and hard boiled eggs instead, and I keep earplugs and an eye mask in my wallet so that I can sleep whenever there’s a chance. We don’t have pets or plants of our own to care for anymore because we’ve committed to only each other and this, and some days, after too little sleep, too much to drink, too little exercise, and a few too many sent emails that will remain forever without response, I feel the weight of this somewhat insane choice, which I absolutely didn’t understand fully when I made it and probably still don’t. But since one of my biggest flaws may be my excessive stubbornness (my high school English teacher called it “tenacity”—isn’t that nice?), I will likely bang my head against this particular wall until the bricks begin to crumble… but what will that mean for my head?
I’m passionate about too many things. Suave and I talk in the car about how twisted and sick our government is: that in the 1950’s if you worked forty hours a week, you would undoubtedly reach some level of comfortable success. Hard work actually equaled success. But somewhere along the way (in the ‘80s maybe?) that narrative changed, and if you were too stupid to get an education and then a better job, you could work forty hours a week and remain impoverished for your whole life and give birth the the next generation of folks at the bottom. Too stupid. Or lazy. Stupid and lazy. How did that happen? What crafty fucker changed that? The people boisterously calling for tighter immigration laws are the same people who hire Mexican migrant workers at $6 an hour to work their fields and factories. Albino children in Africa are being attacked in their sleep and having their limbs hacked off because they’re believed to have magical properties. Rhinoceros tusks are being brutally severed from the animals’ faces, and the rhinos are left to bleed out in the wild because there are men who believe that the tusks, ground up and in pill form, are an aphrodisiac. Black Lives Matter. #BlackLivesMatter. Shocking video footage of police brutality. Shootings in movie theaters and churches and on live television. The very real threat of hydrofracking right here at home and its potential to destroy our fresh water lakes and all of the life and business that depends on them. Overpopulated American prisons and the corporatization of the penal system. The fact that there’s even a discussion of defunding Planned Parenthood. Donald fucking Trump… It’s a raging swirl of psychosis, and I hear all of it shouting some nights when I try to fall asleep.
Sometimes I want to hide, while other times I want to go back to school for my PhD so I can help guide kids and maybe have a couple of my own in the process and watch them all flesh out into the shells of their potential, and other times I want to ask my brother to take me with him on his next trip to Africa so I can get outside of my own stupid world and actually help some people who need it; commit to a thing that’s bigger than me and actually has nothing to do with me, because man, I get tired of me. I get tired of the work that doesn’t feel like singing anymore—doesn’t even resemble it sometimes. I didn’t mean to sign up for a life of unrelenting self-promotion. That wasn’t what I meant. But because Suave is good…and smart…and because he knows me better all the time and is learning what I might need to be reminded of, he always reels me back in…
There are an infinite number of ways humans can contribute to the healing of this giant catastrophe that we are and have always been. Because I have a voice that I use to sing, my place is within the music. Without a doubt. And even if it isn’t something concrete or necessary to our survival the way that crops and roofs are, I wouldn’t want to live in a world devoid of art—to me, that isn’t living at all. I might not be able to grow or build or protect things the way some people can, but I can write, try to translate these experiences, watch things, notice, and yank the meaning out, and I can sing about them out loud, and maybe, if I’m really lucky, those songs will help someone make better sense of her or his existence, even if only for a minute. Who can really say what the value of that may or may not be? Diamonds are only diamonds because someone decided they were. I can come back around (after some rest and some time in nature and some deep, deep breaths) to feel my gratitude radiating in full as the old anchor within me touches the floor and I open my mouth to sing. This is all I can do… or it’s the best I can do. So all of the other things about this job, this choice, can go ahead and get melty and blurry around sharp-focused center. It’s still there. It always will be. I don’t mean to complain, so I’m sorry for that, okay? Bear with me. I’m trying just like you are. And thank goodness, I can still write myself out of the well—it just happened again. Sweet dreams, dreamers.
