Everything's Gonna Be Alright

The Artist in the Machine: Part II

This is part two of a three-part series of personal essays about my various charges at the windmill of commercial success in service of my creative work. By no means should you read this in hopes of learning anything useful at all about becoming a big star or even earning a living from your art. You won’t find 10 easy tips or hacks to grow your audience here. In fact, you might actually lose followers just by reading this post. Enter at your own peril. You’ve been warned. If you missed it, you can read the first essay here.

“I wrote something new, while I was out in LA. It’s pretty different. Can I see your guitar?”

I handed Shawn my guitar and turned away from the microwave oven-sized computer monitor where I was working on a t-shirt design to promote his latest independent album. The two of us were sitting in the guest room/studio/office where I’d recently set up the first computer I ever owned. It was a gift from my parents and cost a small fortune. It was also a life raft for a twenty-six year old who had, quite surprisingly, become a father the previous year. What I earned in 1996 from working in a music store, teaching guitar, and gigging barely covered the rent– it wasn’t enough for a family.

Fresh off the road from his latest solo tour of coffeehouses with his dog Roadie, Shawn looked weary. The year before I’d gone out with him and another songwriter friend, so I knew the luxuries of the couch tour playing for tips. He adjusted the capo and started the opening riff of the new song. When he began to speak the opening verse, I understood this was something very different. When he got to the chorus, it was still Shawn, but like a highly concentrated, sugar and salt-infused version that passed the blood-brain barrier and made you feel instantly high. Simply put, it was an undeniable pop song.

“Everything’s gonna be alright, rockabye, rockabye…”

The next year, that song would be playing on every alternative rock station in America multiple times a day, Shawn would have a six-figure deal with Columbia Records and make appearances on the Grammys, the Tonight Show, and Letterman. I would be working in a small print shop using my fledgling Photoshop skills to supplement what I earned teaching lessons in the back of a guitar shop. I didn’t really ever hang out with Shawn in the same way after that. While he had played at my wedding and was there for the birth of my child, we were never more than two guys in a race who happened to be running next to each other for a few miles. At the time I didn’t understand it was a race. I didn’t think like that. I didn’t have that extra gear, and in the years to come as I watched a disproportionately high number of friends in the Atlanta music scene go on to huge commercial success, I would suffer for it.

I didn’t understand the trade. It’s funny, until I wrote that, I don’t think I recognized the underlying meaning of the word “trade” when we refer to work. You must trade something to get what you want. There’s a necessary exchange of energy. The deal Robert Johnson claimed to have made at the crossroads was about this transaction though the devil was not some horned beast, it was merely his own ambition. In the music industry and show business in general, most people who make that deal make it at the expense of any meaningful personal life where they can be present for anyone but themselves.

I couldn’t make the deal, not because I didn’t want it or because I somehow thought I was better, more virtuous than those who did give themselves over to it, but because I couldn’t let my parents down, my wife down, or most importantly, the new bright-eyed child I held in my arms down. Let’s be clear, there was no seductive deal I walked away from. Most artists don’t get that choice. To choose an artist’s life is to spend a lifetime scratching lottery tickets. And I had a family to feed.

So I taught myself a skill that the world would pay for. With the help of some “grown-ups” who happened to be my guitar and songwriting students, I was able to get my first real jobs working in technology. I could be home for bath time and stories. I could eventually make a down payment on a home, buy Christmas presents, and pay for a few days at the beach for the family every Spring. But those jobs were to me then, what my job is to me now – a day job. I never fully committed to it. The dream of being an artist was not one I could euthanize. I wrote, recorded, and played shows within the margins of work and family life. I kept the pilot light on for all those years, even when it seemed ridiculous and vain. While other fathers were pursuing MBAs or learning to play golf, I was saving pennies to be able to track drums for my next album in a friend’s studio.

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” – Leonard Cohen

Whatever I produced, it was never enough. I was a man haunted by the road I hadn’t taken and it didn’t help that there was a never ending parade of reminders. Watching Shawn Mullins’s success was one thing, but seeing John Mayer, a nineteen year-old kid I had befriended when he first started playing the open mic at Eddie’s Attic, rocket into the stratosphere was too much. For years I had dreams about him or more accurately the nameless thing he represented to me and I woke up with this deep sadness, this longing which made the day in front of me feel like I was standing at the bottom of a well.

Whenever I wrote a new song or released a new album it felt like I was hurling a grappling hook up toward that small circle of sky, hoping it would find purchase and allow me to climb out. I had this unsinkable optimism that my latest project would defy all odds and create the break I’d been hoping for. Needless to say, that never happened. After releasing my fifth album, I’m Just the Same As I Was in 2010, something broke in me. I turned 40 that year and it was a wake-up call. I wasn’t happy. Though I was really proud of that album, I had to accept that it would never see the light of day. No one was going to discover me at the one or two local shows a month I was able to play. The pilot light I’d managed to keep lit for more than two decades was finally extinguished.

I’m well aware that for most people, that would have been the end of the story. Lesson learned, level unlocked, time to grow up and embrace a simple life with reasonable expectations and minimal risk.

I decided to start writing a novel.

I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why at the time, but looking back, I think I needed two things: a wide-open place where I could roam freely and be an amateur with no understanding of the rules or expectations and I needed something solitary and challenging I could throw myself into that didn’t require an audience. I’d been carrying the seeds of the story I wanted to tell for a long time. They had just been waiting for a patch of soil with more space to put down roots than could be found in a four-minute song.

Ever the frog in the pot when it came to my day job, I found myself—after the 2008 crash—in the belly of the corporate machine, working as a “principal technical architect” at AT&T. Employees lovingly refer to it as the Death Star for good reason: it’s a place where dreams are anesthetized. Scott Adams owes his Dilbert fortune to time spent within its walls. In essence, I was doing the same shit I’d been doing for nearly a decade at a small family-owned web development shop that folded—only now I was doing it at a glacial pace, with fifty more meetings a day.

I managed to carve out an hour in the morning before work and another on my lunch break to write. These were my constraints, along with the one piece of advice most amateur writers doggedly take to heart: write what you know. Within six months the first draft of Rewind Playback was complete.

Writing this novel helped me unpack a lot of baggage I didn’t realize I’d been carrying. It gave me a way to externalize what I’d experienced so I could understand what had attracted me to the music business and what had ultimately repelled me from it. I fell in love with writing characters– the way I could allow them to just be who they wanted to be. They could do and say things I didn’t have the courage to. I could infuse them with secret parts of myself, my experiences, and observations of the world. I think the process allowed me to forgive myself for failing to live up to the aspirations of a fifteen-year-old kid. So, writing fiction became my new drug of choice.

The act of creating is its own reward. In the flow, there is no need, no desire for anything more. The challenge comes when the thing is finished and you must decide what to do with it. This is the place in the story where most artists step off the path and enter into the wilderness never to be seen again. I suppose there are some who never fall prey to the compulsion to put their art out into the world. They finish a painting and lean it in the back of a closet or complete a novel and put it in a shoebox under the bed. But I think most of us feel the thing we made calling to us, saying: “You’ve had your fun, now it’s my turn.”

The reason any artist decides to step into the treacherous woods in search of commercial success is a mystery. There’s ego of course, wanting to be praised for this thing we’ve done. There’s the truly delusional belief that there’s a fortune to be made. There’s an OCD angle– a gnawing itch that can only be satisfied by the closure of publishing. But I think the fundamental reason for most of us is the need to complete the cycle, to close the loop by giving our art over to someone else so they can absorb it, decompose it, and recompose it in their own lives. In short, it’s about connection. Without that urge to connect, there would be no art because art is the primary ingredient for more art.

So here I am, five novels later, still writing in the margins of my life, still about 9,994 copies shy this week of being a best-selling author. So what’s different now than when I was 40 staring back at five albums with about the same level of commercial success? Not a lot, if I’m being honest. Some days I’m still plagued by crippling doubts about the value of my work. I still feel like the opening act. I still feel gross about self-promotion and am easily disappointed when my efforts at it fall into the abyss. But all that seems to matter much less now because I feel a deep, satisfying connection to what I’m writing. I’m literally and figuratively not performing anymore. I’m not trying to please or curry favor with an audience. I’m writing about themes and characters that move me. So when readers connect with my work, it’s a real connection based on mutual love of some idea or place or feeling.

In the final essay of this series next week, I’ll explore this idea of connection as the only metric for success that ultimately matters. Thanks for being here.

What About You?

If you’re artist in the machine, I’d love to hear about how you’ve managed to keep the pilot light on or maybe what happened when you allowed it to go out. These posts are always more fun when they become a conversation.

Bonus Track: My Interview with Shawn Mullins in 2010

Among many other restless creative experiments I did over the years that never amounted to much, in 2009, I started a podcast called Take Me to the Bridge where I interviewed songwriters about the craft. I got to speak with some incredible artists like Colin Haye of Men at Work,

Richard Shindell

, Glenn Phillips, and Vienna Teng among others. I was a little a head of my time with the whole podcasting thing. Who knew it would be such a thing now? If you’re a paid subscriber, you can listen to the episode where I interviewed Shawn Mullins back in 2010 below.