Thousands of dollars. Thousands of hours. Flaky musicians. Changing seasons. Playing concerts in sweaty, smelly overworked venues for ten people. Quite the memories. If you’re an optimist, you could count fifteen more waiting for their buddy's bar band to follow yours with a bunch of overplayed top 40s all the while boozing the night away. Don’t give yourself too much credit though. Within your ten, you’re counting the sound man, the bartender, and the drummer’s mom.
You wanted to do your own thing with your music. Not imitate. You were too good for cover songs! Perhaps, what’s more ironic is that in your originals, you were imitating songs and artists by the dozens, forever searching for your “sound” and “purpose”. Why didn’t it work? Perhaps it was a lack of vision, coherence, or a failure to channel the appropriate synergies shared amongst one another. Sure, you were each creative in your own right, but you were still finding those God-given sweet spots. Did the struggle hit because of anything misaligned amongst you? Probably not. Maybe it was the unavoidable post-adolescent angst that went with looking or being the coolest or striving to one up others in your sphere of influence— your own spirits, competitive to a fault. Eighteen and nineteen, nothing but the open road ahead. The promise of getting the right attention.
Your band life was never about chasing money or the commercialization of your work. Actually, you’d contend you were all but mere wilderness wanderers intersecting for short stints on an endless quest to make your voices heard—distinct but familiar.
Beyond the many obstacles sat potential. But then again, there’s still far too much upfront cost involved to really leave your mark appropriately. And that assumes you have the talent, skill, or discipline to really do it right. Of which, some do, some try, and some just don’t.
Don’t be discouraged by the cold open. What you did have was both priceless and special and not a feeling just anyone has. As an artist, you may have many motivations, but getting butterflies over something you helped create, that’s where it’s really at. There’s perhaps no more selfishly satisfying feeling, is there? The idea for passionate people to chase their dreams with reckless abandon is often hardcoded within you, never escaping until it’s channeled to the place it’s supposed to go. Where that is, you won’t know ‘til you find it. The medium, the method, the strategy, those things will change over time, but at the core of each of those you remain.
Amassing a body of highly imitative original works with more songs than fans, your pursuits became more work than fun and perhaps subconsciously that’s when your dream chasing faded away. You had miles and memories to separate you. Marriages needed focus. Children that required your presence. A career to provide for you and your family.
Naturally, this left walls and closets full of guitars, drum sets, speakers, cabinets, and microphones collecting dust for years. The spark was still there within, lost somewhere but never forgotten. The best part of all this… creativity’s not housed in gear or in quality recording equipment, but rather in its purchaser. Finding balance to your responsibilities, you worked on whims, impulses, and good humor—the fuel to your long idling engine. And that’s when you again took flight. And so, after a very long hiatus, you found your voice long lost. A method unorthodox. Spur of the moment epiphanies overrunning your crowded thoughts. And it’s those very things that allowed you to have a blast again.
Not with thousands of dollars of gear in a closet, thousands of hours of recording or production time, just an acoustic guitar, some cheap headphones, a tablet, and the few minutes you could squeeze in here or there.
Here’s Mickey D’s.
Sloppy. Goofy. Distinct.
The place where the odds meet the ends.
-Dan McDowell
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