Tuneful Tuesday: My Real Life

There are a handful of songs I have avoided featuring on “Tuneful Tuesday” because, quite frankly, they cut a little too close to the bone. They dig down past my simply liking the song or feeling as if the words were significant to a place inside me that is not comfortable anymore. They make me squirm a little. They almost act as mirrors of things I am feeling or have felt in my heart and soul at one time or another.

One of those songs is Colin Hay’s “Waiting For My Real Life to Begin.” Most people are familiar with Hay as the lead vocalist of Men at Work, whose hits included “Overkill,” “Who Can It Be Now?”, and, of course, “Down Under.” What most people don’t realize is that he’s been recording music as a solo artist ever since the band broke up in 1985. Apparently, actor and director Zach Braff is a fan, as Hay’s music was featured in both the television series Scrubs and the film Garden State.

I’ve seen people list this song among those they find very hopeful and encouraging, but I’ve never quite taken it that way. To me, it represents all those hopes in life that never quite come true, no matter how optimistic our outlook may be. Two lines, in particular, always get to me…

“Any minute now, my ship is coming in…”

“When I awoke today, suddenly nothing happened…”

To his credit, Hay doesn’t wallow in self-pity in the song. Those two wistful lines are actually followed by ones of optimism, although it’s difficult for me to tell sometimes if he is actually attempting to be optimistic or if he is merely being sarcastic. In fact, I’ve never actually figured out if this song is about hope or denial. It’s obvious the singer’s hopes have been dashed time and again, but he keeps spouting lines that appear to ring of hope. Is he really staying that positive, or is he so sick of hearing cheery sayings tossed at him that this song represents a kiss-off to all those who keep telling him things will get better?

“Just let me throw one more dice
I know that I can win
I’m waiting for my real life to begin”

I am a year past 40 years old now, and I still don’t feel as if my real life has begun. I haven’t found my niche. I haven’t gotten any big breaks. The things I dream of doing haven’t happened yet. And there are many, many days now where I wonder if they ever will. I’ve been waiting a long time. Is the fault with me? Is it just not God’s timing yet? Have I been dealt an unfair hand? I don’t know the answers to those questions. So when Hay sings “suddenly nothing happened,” I get a knot in my stomach and, if the day is bad enough, a lump in my throat.

The song finishes up with the line “On a clear day, I can see, see for a long way,” repeated once. I’ve had those days, too, where I felt as if I was bulletproof and that nothing in the world could bring me down. Unfortunately, that hasn’t turned out to be real life. I’m still waiting for that to begin.

Tuneful Tuesday: Everything Has Changed

In May, for my job, I attended a concert featuring contemporary Christian bands The Afters and Hawk Nelson. It was a pretty decent show, even though neither of those bands are exactly on my list of favorites. The Afters probably had the more polished sound, but Hawk Nelson brought more energy to their stage show. Plus, I would up downloading a Hawk Nelson song after the concert, so I guess they won the night.

Except they didn’t, really. The opening act of the concert was advertised as Dan Bremnes, but when we arrived we noticed banners up for Justin McRoberts. I was familiar with one of Bremnes’s songs, but I had never heard of McRoberts. Turns out, he’s been around for quite a while, but has stuck mostly to the independent circuit. After a few notes of his first song, though, I was hooked. This dude could sing, and he was a fiery and passionate singer and storyteller as well. He performed with only an acoustic guitar, but for me he stole the show.

Since that night (and a few additional downloads of his music), I keep an eye out for mentions of McRoberts. I caught one this weekend on the NoiseTrade.com website. For anyone who is not familiar with it, NoiseTrade offers music for free downloads, with the option of leaving a “tip” for the artist. McRoberts had a song titled “Everything Has Changed” on a sampler from the syndicated radio program Under the Radar titled Escape to the Lake. Under the Radar features music from Christian artists who do not receive the type of radio airplay of, say, The Afters or Hawk Nelson.

I am not having the greatest of weeks so far (Read yesterday’s post for further explanation.). Right now, as I’m typing this, I don’t feel as if there is anything in the world I can actually do right. I feel as if all the progress I thought I had made recently was merely an apparition and that I am going to forever cycle in and out of feeling like there is no hope in even trying. I don’t want to just change small parts of me; I want to change everything.

This song by McRoberts is a mighty realization and coming to terms with who someone is and the changes they have made to become, in their eyes at least, a better person. It’s about freedom, or, more specifically, getting free from yourself. It really is a song about everything changing. I have listened to it five times now just in the course of typing this blog. It is where I want to be. It is who I want to be.

Everything will change. That’s what I need to hold onto right now. Everything will change.

(Unfortunately, I could not find a video for this song, so I am including the link to the NoiseTrade page with the sampler. It is well worth the download.)

http://noisetrade.com/escapetothelake/escape-to-the-lake-2015-22-artist

Who Are You Working For?

“Who exactly do you feel like you’re letting down?”

I had never really dwelt on the question before. I just knew I felt as if I wasn’t getting the job done. All my efforts felt scattershot, pecking away a little bit here and there. I could always look back at something I did and blame that for my not finishing something important. This was particularly true in instances where I had done something of no lasting consequence, such as playing a video game or lying down for a nap. I knew I was failing … but who, exactly, was I failing?

I’ve written here before about dichotomous thinking. This is when a person sees nearly everything in terms of black and white. There is no gray. Something is either right or it is wrong. How does this manifest in my life? Well, one area is work. Now, “work” for me can mean a great many things, which is actually part of the problem here. Going to my job every day is work, but I also somehow manage to turn writing this recreational blog into work as well. Therefore, I am very much driven by what I am supposed to be doing.

Here’s an example: I consider myself – correctly or incorrectly – a writer. What is the pinnacle for a writer’s work? Well, writing a book, of course. I have some ideas. Heck, I probably have enough material from this blog to get a pretty good jump on a book of essays. I just can’t seem to get anywhere on it. I have several theories for this – poor time management, lack of strong material, intimidated by the process of putting everything together, etc., etc. – but the bottom line is always this: I don’t get it done, and I squander the writing ability I have in the process, thereby making me a failure.

This brings the issue full circle, though. Who exactly am I letting down by not getting this done? I mean, is it potential readers? Is it my family? Is it myself? The only answer I could come with will sound a bit lofty: God. I have these abilities that were placed in me, and I do nothing with them. At least, I don’t use them to their full capabilities, and that absolutely fills me with guilt.

Another component of my guilt is a profound feeling of selfishness, and even though several people have tried to impress upon me the fact that I really don’t do many things strictly with myself in mind, I generally view myself as an extremely selfish person. In fact, I sort of view myself as a product of the society we live in today. Everyone is trying to get theirs, and even the people giving only seem to be doing it so they can be seen by others. Our hobbies are expensive, and our universes seem to be focused almost entirely on our own orbits.

What if, though, we’re all just trying to escape our own guilt? What if we’re all chasing these ridiculous dreams and notions around in the hopes that one of them will eventually allow us to look in the mirror and say, “Okay, that is the one that hit the mark!”? Could there be some kind of guilt hidden in the Kardashians of the world? Could the Kanye Wests be trying to meet some mark the rest of us don’t know about? Okay, I’m stretching now, but maybe you get the point. Is it possible that we’re all just trying to please someone?

So let me finish the way I started: Who exactly do you feel like you’re letting down?

Tuneful Tuesday: The Mellow Zone

I had the opportunity to eat lunch at the Mellow Mushroom in Nashville on Father’s Day. I would highly recommend it. They have some really awesome pizzas there, and the service was great, too. Lots of music stuff inside, which is right up my alley, of course. Just an overall pleasant experience.

It’s been a while since I’ve actually focused much on the music playing inside a restaurant I was eating at. There are usually so many other distractions around, particularly now that every restaurant seems to have at least five different televisions all playing five different things at the same time.

(Pet peeve: Why do restaurants put a television on a sitcom or newscast or something, turn the volume all the way down, and not turn on the closed captions? You’ve reduced the viewing experience to basically watching mimes.)

For some reason, though, on this particular day, I was listening to the songs being played with some degree of attention. As a string of ’90s alternative tunes reeled off, I had a realization: Even though some of those songs came out during really difficult periods of my life, when my depression was at some of its lowest points, I smiled after the first few notes of each of them played. It was like I was running into a bunch of old friends again.

With iPods and digital music, I think we’ve sort of lost the value of hearing a song from long ago played over a distant speaker. We can put our whole libraries on something the size of a notepad (or smaller). There are still those moments, though, when the past comes creeping in and taps you on the shoulder, just as it did for me Sunday. Counting Crows’ album Recovering the Satellites was like a depression soundtrack for me, but I sang nearly all the words to “Angels of the Silences” when I heard them. I don’t know what I was doing when Cherry Poppin’ Daddies “Zoot Suit Riot” came out, but I know I was diggin’ it Sunday. And even though I only know two words of Blur’s “Song 2” (“woo” and “hoo”), the energy of it made me sit up and take notice.

There may have been songs that took us to the depths of despair, but, man, aren’t we glad later on they were there? They came through when the happy, poppy stuff didn’t, then they came back years later to share war stories. Sad songs don’t always have to make you cry; sometimes they can make you smile because you’re not in the place you first heard them anymore.

That, my friends, is a pretty mellow trip, indeed.

Tuneful Tuesday: Sad No More

What seems like a lifetime ago, I used to have a blog titled Half-Empty: Confessions of a Pessimist (Who’s Trying To Do Better). I still love that title, but the blog itself was sort of a mess. It didn’t really have any theme, and I just sort of wrote about whatever I happened to be thinking about that day. It didn’t really start to take shape until I started writing about depression, but it would have been weird to keep the title and make the blog about something different, so I kind of retired it.

I say “kind of retired it,” though, because it is actually still up online, and it occasionally still gets a view or two. One of the most popular posts I ever wrote there was titled “The Sad and Wonderful Mumford & Sons.” The whole point of it was that while I enjoyed listening to Mumford & Sons, I felt like a lot of their songs sounded the same. Their success, I contended, was both a sad and wonderful thing; wonderful, because their sound definitely was different from what was being played on the radio at the time, and, sad, because there wasn’t much diversity to what they were doing on their first two albums.

Well, Marcus Mumford and Co., I owe you guys a straight-up apology.

With the release in May of Wilder Mind, Mumford & Sons blasted their way back into the public’s musical consciousness with an album filled not with banjos and acoustic guitars but electronic beats and amplifiers turned up to 11. This album doesn’t sound like their other two at all, prompting me to wonder if maybe they got tired of people like me complaining about their lack of creativity. I’ve only listened to the album a couple of times, so I can’t really give it a thumbs up or thumbs down yet, but there’s no denying it is a bold sonic statement by the band.

Even if this album tanks, I can’t express enough how much admiration I have for Mumford & Sons trying something like this. In essence, it is a huge risk. Their last album, Babel, won a Grammy award and inspired a slew of imitators, from secular (Looking at you, Lumineers.) to Christian (Stand up, Rend Collective.). With the success of the single “I Will Wait,” they proved they could get radio airplay without compromising their sound. They could have stayed the course, but they didn’t.

There are so many instances in life where we can stand back and wonder what might have been if we only did something a little out of character for us. What might that different decision have brought us? What if we had spoken up when we remained quiet? What if we had turned right instead of left? Depression can cause crippling effects when it comes to decision making and taking chances. Those of us who have it tend to want to cling to the island pretty tightly sometimes. We rarely crank our guitars to 11 and rock out.

So far, my favorite track from the new album is “The Wolf,” which features those loud guitars I was talking about. Turn it up, be happy, and celebrate the wonderful Mumford & Sons.

Tuneful Tuesday: What I Like About You

Okay, first of all, this song really has nothing to do with depression, nor have I ever associated it with any particular feelings of melancholy I may have had. In fact, it’s one of the few songs I can simply shut my brain off and enjoy simply for the heck of it. It’s got energy, it’s easy to sing, and it has a rippin’ harmonica solo. What more could you ask for?

The website www.bebraveandtalk.com published an article in April of this year titled “10 Depression Symptom Analogies For Those Who Have Trouble Understanding.” It contained some remarkably profound observations on how living with depression might be described to someone who has never dealt with it. My favorite analogy had to do with self-loathing (Yes, I realize how ridiculous that sentence is.). Here is how this feeling was described…

“What if that person you can’t stand being around, that person you have a hard time finding good qualities in, that person you just can’t seem to like, was tied to you with a three-foot long rope for an entire day? ‘No way in hell,’ you are probably thinking. Well, if you suffer depression, that person is tied to you permanently. That person is yourself. It is a very sad, but very true, reality of depression. The majority of the time during a depressive episode the sufferer thinks very negatively about themselves, and they might even have feelings of self-hatred.”

Every now and then, I’ll be given a worksheet or an exercise asking me to identify positive qualities about myself. You would think I had been handed the algebra portion of the SAT test (Please, math geeks, do not shrug your shoulders and cockily ask, “What’s so bad about that?”. Things will turn ugly very quickly.). I can usually hit on a couple of obvious points – “I write well” or “I’m a good bass guitar player” – but, for the most part, I struggle to come up with answers. And even if I do believe I am good at something, I usually feel as if no one cares; it’s not useful; a billion other people are better at it than me; or I’m never going to be able to use it for anything.

This song is basically a guy listing all the things he likes about a girl. I’ve always found it easier to list good qualities about other people than about myself. I wondered today, though, what if that guy had to write a song about all the things he liked about himself. Would it come that easily? Would it be that positive? And would there be a harmonica solo?

Yes, once again, I seem to have successfully taken a fun song and analyzed most of the fun out of it. Another of those qualities I don’t like about myself all that much. The good thing is, I think this song is strong enough to withstand it. I guess it’s time I wrote one of my own that can, too.

We Lost The Story

I have a book beneath my bathroom sink titled Bass Heroes. It is compiled of interviews from the 1970s and 1980s with famous bass players pulled from the pages of Guitar Player magazine. The roster of interviewees is a veritable Who’s Who of elite bass players, including Billy Sheehan, Geddy Lee, Jaco Pastorius, Stanley Clarke, John Entwistle, Bill Wyman, and Paul McCartney. I bought the book in Nashville several years ago in a music store. It was long enough ago I couldn’t even tell you the name of the store.

Why is this book beneath my bathroom sink, you may ask? Mainly for ease of accessibility. If I could compile a Bible of bass playing, this book would be it for me. It has been an invaluable resource, and even though it was published over 20 years ago and some of the players featured in it are now deceased, I still pull it out and read it from time to time. Its edges have become frayed, and I’m actually quite shocked it’s held together this long, but I imagine I will hold onto it until it crumbles into dust one day.

There are definitely tons of tips and discussions on bass playing techniques and instruments and amplification and even a touch of music theory here and there, but that is not what keeps me coming back to this book over and over again. What compels me to keep reading it is the stories it contains. Clarke struck out from Philadelphia for New York in the early 1970s with basically nothing to his name but his electric bass and some clothes. Wyman once tried to reach out to high-five a fan and fell off the stage, colliding with the concrete floor seven feet below. Noted blues bassist Jerry Jemmott, who played several sessions with the late B. B. King, nearly lost his ability to play at all after an automobile accident in 1972 left him severely injured.

To me, a person’s story is just as (if not more) important than what they have accomplished or how they managed to accomplish it. The story makes up the fiber of their being. How did they get from Point A to Point B? How did that journey influence them? What was their point of decision, the path that changed their trajectory? What was it that elevated them from a normal to an extraordinary life? These are the factors which drive ingenuity and encourage individual thought, and they are also the sparks that leap from art to encourage others to strike out on their own journeys.

Unfortunately, this type of book would be difficult to compile today. The majority of guitar and bass publications I pick up now are made up of at least 75 percent product reviews, which really sucks for a guy like me on a limited budget. More than that, though, the stories have been pushed to the side. Even if an artist is chosen for a feature interview, the majority of it focuses on either that artist’s latest project or the instruments and equipment they used to record it. My heart sinks nearly every time I pick up one of these publications these days. I can actually find better interviews free on the internet.

The point I’m getting at is this: Our stories are vitally important, not just to us, but to others who may get to hear them later on. When we lose our stories, we lose our emotional connections with each other. When we become more about gear and machinery and impersonal objects, we lose our ability to inspire. The newest effects pedal on the market never inspired me to get better at my instrument, but hearing Sheehan talk about learning all of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar parts on the bass makes my wheels start turning. Could I do that? And, if I couldn’t, what would my story be?

The human experience is what makes us what we are, not the tools of the trade. It would be like asking what kind of hammer John Henry used or what brand of gasoline Evel Knievel filled up his motorcycles with. Toys are cool, but stories stand the test of time.

What’s yours?

Tuneful Tuesday: Where Were They Going Anyway?

“But where were they going without ever knowing the way…?”

One-hit wonders are a curious thing to me. What is it about that one particular song that made it a hit, while everything else they tried to do was largely ignored? Maybe it was just a particular moment in time when the stars aligned perfectly and public taste met in a divine encounter with one uniquely written and produced piece of music to create a piece of melodic history that would never be replicated again.

Or maybe it was just dumb luck.

Whatever the case may be, the musical landscape is littered with one-hit wonders who enjoyed their 15 minutes of fame and then vanished from sight. To be honest, a lot of them deserved better. Many of them had songs that were just as good or better than the ones they became known for. For example, when a friend of mine played Deep Blue Something’s Home for me, I thought there were several tracks just as strong as “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Of course, Deep Blue Something then went on to have another hit with … um … yeah, that…

The thing many one-hit wonders’, um, one hit (er, hits) is that it is played so many times on the radio and on television and in department stores and anywhere else music can be piped into, we all eventually become sick of it (um, them). The songs just become inescapable, and we all wind up just wanting them to go away. Of course, then we hear them several years later and think to ourselves, “Huh. I wonder what ever happened to those guys…?”.

It was nearly impossible to go anywhere in 1998, for example, with hearing Fastball’s “The Way.” In reality, it’s a very catchy song with very interesting lyrics (More on that later…), but after a while I stopped even caring what it was about. I didn’t care where those people were going or whether they knew how to get there or not. I was greatly relieved when the follow-up single “Fire Escape” was released, but I couldn’t tell you today how that song went at all. I sure do remember “The Way,” though.

Even though “The Way” seemed to be emanating from every possible speaker it could that year, I don’t know if many people knew (or even know now) where the idea for the song came from. Vocalist and bass player Tony Scalzo got the idea for the song after reading several articles about Lela and Raymond Howard of Salado, Texas. Unfortunately, the Howards’ story is not a happy one. Despite Lela suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease and Raymond recovering from brain surgery, the elderly couple decided in June 1997 to leave home and set out for the Pioneer Day festival in nearby Temple, Texas.

They never arrived. Their lifeless bodies were found two weeks later at the bottom of a ravine in Hot Springs, Arkansas. They were nowhere near Temple, Texas, or the Pioneer Day festival.

Scalzo, however, decided to take the concept of a couple just dropping everything, no matter the circumstances, and taking off and romanticized it a bit. The couple in the song is apparently a bit older, although that’s never addressed specifically. They don’t tell their children where they’re going. In fact, they don’t even know where they’re going themselves, and, as the chorus succinctly puts it, “they really don’t care.” Wherever they wind up, “they’re happier there today.”

Why did “The Way” become so popular for Fastball? I don’t know if anyone will ever really know for sure, but here’s my theory: Everyone, at some point in their lives, has wanted to just to drop everything and take off. No responsibilities, no one to answer to, no worrying about how expensive everything is going to be or who is going to take of care of things at home. As irresponsible and dangerous as the couple in the song’s trip may seem, they are obviously quite happy in what they are doing. That kind of freedom seems elusive to so many of us. We would like to run away, too, but we just can’t.

Even though I’m way too much of a flat-foot to ever find running enjoyable, I always thought it would be kind of cool to pull a Forrest Gump and just take off one day. No destination. Just see how far I can get. Yeah, it probably wouldn’t be the brightest decision I ever made. Sure might be fun, though.

The Dark Side

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

– Martin Niemöller

Even before I worked as a newspaper report several years ago, I had a real dislike of people who did not at least make an attempt to follow the news. The most common excuse I heard for this was “The news is so depressing.” There’s really no arguing with that statement; the news is depressing. Countries are at war with one another, people are shooting each other, companies are scamming their customers, politicians are caught stealing and lying… Yeah, watching the nightly news is not usually a yuckfest.

Just for a moment, though, stop and think about all the “real” things that happen in life every day. Think about the events in your own life that have had a profound impact on you. Maybe someone close to you passed away. Maybe you were involved in an accident of some sort. Maybe you were abused verbally or physically by someone. Maybe someone dealt dishonestly with you.

Sounds like some pretty depressing stuff to me.

There is a great emphasis being placed these days on “positivity” and “encouragement.” There’s nothing particularly wrong with that. This week, I’m supposed to be keeping a self-esteem journal, recording positive things that happen to me each day. This is in an effort to keep my mind off of the negative aspects of myself and my daily experiences. Avoiding negativity and depressing subject matter is often a wise course of action, most definitely.

The sum experience of “real” life, however, is not always positive or encouraging. People lose their jobs. Earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, and typhoons lay waste to entire cities. Children are sold into modern-day slavery. Dictators carry out atrocities on their own people. And money… Good Lord, we never seem to have enough money, do we?

Why we should watch the news, though, is not so we can drown ourselves in the miseries of the world. We should watch the news because the news is part of the world we live in, and, occasionally, as with the Nazi Germany Martin Niemöller described in the opening quote of this post, that world comes knocking our front doors. For instance, the local city council may be talking about raising your taxes, but if you don’t know that, you’re not going to show up at their next meeting to oppose it. On a larger scale, if you oppose abortion, for instance, and legislation is proposed to make the procedure easier to have performed, you won’t be able to write or call your elected representatives to voice your opinion on the matter.

I am the world’s worst about listening to depressing music, reading depressing literature, and watching depressing movies and television shows which just feed into my melancholy, but I don’t put watching or reading the news into the same category as those things. Listening to talk radio, yes, but not watching or reading the news. I suppose I subscribe to the philosophy of the yin and the yang when it comes to this; there’s a little darkness in the light and a little light in the darkness. That’s life … and that’s the news.

Doin’ It

Followers of this blog may have noticed that I didn’t post a “Tuneful Tuesdays” entry yesterday. For those who don’t follow this blog, “Tuneful Tuesdays” is when I pick out a song that has either helped me through a difficult time in my depression or one that accurately describes some of the feelings that come from having it. My musical tastes have always been very eclectic, and it’s fun to be able to be able to sit down and over-analyze the crap out of the music I enjoy listening to so much.

I didn’t have time to write anything yesterday, though, because I went out last night and did something I haven’t done in a very long time: I played my bass and jammed with a couple of other guys.

Well, actually, there wasn’t that much jamming. It was more like noodling and sitting around talking about songs we liked or wanted to learn together. We didn’t really accomplish very much, and I wound up staying up so late that I took a nap this afternoon, which I hardly ever do anymore because afternoon naps have a tendency to make it hard for me to fall asleep at night.

You know what, though? Who cares? I had fun.

Here’s a brief history of my relationship with the bass guitar. Around my senior year of high school, I decided I wanted to learn how to play the guitar. I was a huge fan of Eddie Van Halen at the time, so that was the kind of guitar player I wanted to be. I am not being pessimistic or short-changing myself at all when I say, however, it became almost immediately evident that I was not going to be that kind of guitar player. My hands are not that big, and my fingers don’t move that fast. I was getting the hang of chords and chord progressions, but I couldn’t solo worth anything.

So I decided to do what any struggling guitar player would do: I decided to pick up the bass.

I know that last statement might seem counterintuitive to what I said in the paragraph before. I mean, playing bass is sort of like soloing all the time, and your hands have to be fairly strong to be good at. For some reason, though, me and the bass guitar just clicked. I had a feel for it I couldn’t explain, and I progressed fairly rapidly on it. Probably more than anything, though, people actually told me I was good at it, so even though the guitar still remains my instrument of choice for writing and leading songs with, the bass is the instrument that truly feels like home to me.

The only problem with being a bass player, though, is that unless you are a truly unique talent like a Michael Manring or a Victor Wooten, playing it by yourself is really not that much fun. It’s good for practice, but there’s no live drummer to lock in with rhythmically and no guitar player to provide support for. Maybe that’s why I like the bass so much: You can attract attention, but you don’t have to be the center of what’s going on. I’ve always felt more comfortable in a support role anyway.

So I sat in a chair in a friend’s garage last night and noodled away for probably a couple of hours, surprising myself at how well I was able to play for a guy who had only picked up the instrument sporadically the past few years. I felt all that love for making music and being the backbone of what was going on return, even though I don’t think we ever finished a song the entire night. It was a feeling I hadn’t experienced in a long time, and I liked it.

We have plans to start getting together regularly, but you know how life goes. It may be another couple of years before I find myself in that situation again. For one night, though, I wasn’t sitting at a computer writing about music; I was doing it.