Author: johnkranemusic_ycidtl

Categories
Non-Fiction

Announcing a Perfect AI Songwriting Model

Tomorrow, the AI companies are going to release a new model that can write perfect songs.

And I mean perfect. Like, every song is as good as “Good Vibrations,” or “Yesterday,” or “Three-Second Rule.” 

You can use the new model — we’ll call it SongAInus — to write music that is just as good as the best song you’ve ever written.

You do this through natural language inputs: You just tell SongAInus what you want, and it delivers in seconds.

What makes this model special is that it’s trained on you. You connect it to your email, socials, and all of that stuff — don’t worry, it’s a seamless process that only requires one drop of blood — and it’s able to go through everything you’ve ever written in seconds. 

Every drunk late-night text you sent to an ex, every heartfelt argument you ever got into on Reddit, all the poems you wrote for your dead dog. Everything you’ve ever written with any semblance of emotion in it.

It uses all of that knowledge to perfectly mimic your voice, style, and tone.

It knows exactly how you feel about love, so when you ask it to “write a love song,” it nails it. It shows you the exact words that you’d use if you sat staring at a blank page for hours, and it puts them into a melody that’s both wholly unique and exactly what you’d have written, if you’d just had the time to write it. 

SongAInus is going to change the world. It’s absolutely perfect in every way, and it makes creativity effortless without removing the “you” from the equation.

That is why it is total dogshit.

Okay, there are problems with that hypothetical. Generative AI will never create something unique (at least, in the way that we generally mean unique when we discuss art), because it’s fundamentally built to be reductive; it presents you with the most likely solution to your prompt, and averages are, by nature, unremarkable. 

And if SongAInus was truly trained on content that you created, it wouldn’t be able to differentiate between beautiful poetry and the essay you wrote for your Intro to Philosophy class while high on bath salts. “WHY I AM ACTUALLY PLATO AND FUCK YOU” would be treated with the same gravitas as your best art, which would skew the output.

But I want the hypothetical to be as compelling as possible. Even if you’re vigilantly anti-AI, you have to admit that you’d at least try a model that promised to create perfect art instantly, matched to your exact style. 

So we’re going to maintain that SongAInus is real, and that it does everything that it promises. Why, then, is it dogshit?

Ah, well…I’m not sure. Let’s digress completely. 

Maybe I can remember my point after I listen to a few songs. 

I’ve been listening to the Rolling Stones a lot lately. I know, I’m such a rebel. 

My father’s a huge Stones fan, so I’ve got a pretty in-depth knowledge of their oeuvre. That’s actually really important if you get into the Stones; the stories behind the songs can add new layers. 

The best vocal performance in any Rolling Stones song does not belong to Mick Jagger. It’s Merry Clayton’s solo in the middle of “Gimme Shelter,” and this is not a radical opinion. 

Merry Clayton was a session singer in the ‘60s. One night at around midnight, she got a call; the Rolling Stones wanted her to come in and do a vocal take, right now. She hung up the phone, got out of bed, and headed to the Los Angeles studio. When she arrived, she still had rollers in her hair.

Merry Clayton was not the Stones’ first choice. She was simply available.

In the recording, her voice cracks on almost the first big note. Mick Jagger shouts “Whoa!,” which you can hear in the background. But they kept the take going, and she belts the fuck out.

Here it is. If you’re impatient, skip to 2:40 to hear Merry come in.


Merry Clayton was four months pregnant when she recorded this. She went home and had a miscarriage, which some have attributed to the strain of the session.

There are other stories about this recording; Keith Richards’ guitar neck fell apart after hitting the last note, which you can also hear on the original take. There are also some tuning issues and what-not, but it’s not crazy to say that this is the best song in the Rolling Stones’ now-six-decade-plus career.

Enough about the Rolling Stones. 

I want to hear some Neil Young instead. Here’s a track called “Mellow My Mind.”

When I played this for my bandmates in brotherfather, their reaction (and I’m paraphrasing here) was whoa, Neil Young sounds like shit. 

This is from the album Tonight’s the Night, and it’s not an outlier on the album in that sense. Everything is loose, loud, and occasionally out of tune. It does sound like shit. 

Here’s the critical consensus for Tonight’s The Night.

The record is about Danny Whitten, who played guitar in Crazy Horse, and Bruce Berry, a roadie. Both died of drug overdoses before the sessions started. Young became withdrawn and depressed, but he also became a workhorse, pushing through sessions even when his voice became too sore to sing. 

You might have noticed that he utterly fails to hit one of the notes on “Mellow My Mind,” around 1:07. Here’s what the drummer Ralph Molina says about that moment.

“I still get chills when it gets to that fuckin’ note. It’s so real. I’ll tell ya, man, Neil was right there with us. He was wide open.”

And as for the bare quality of the mix, that was intentional, too. Here’s Neil Young talking about it: 

“Those mixes were a little unorthodox. Like, it’s real music. Sometimes I’d be on mic and sometimes I’d be two feet off it. Sometimes I’d be lookin’ around the room and singin’ back off mic … we’d have to bring it way back up in the mix to get it. And you can hear the echo in the room.”

Huh, this kind of seems like it relates to the AI stuff.

“Yeah, we get it,” you’re saying. “Music isn’t about perfection, and a perfect AI writer would be imperfect for that reason.”

That is true, but it’s not the point I’m trying to make here. 

Because you could tell an AI to make the singer’s voice crack when it hits an emotional moment. Remember, SongAInus is perfect, so if it knew that you liked music that uses unorthodox mixing techniques, it would do that. 

We’re going to pretend that it’s 100% capable of creating either of those recordings.

If SongAInus created those moments, they would mean nothing.

Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night is universally considered to be a great album, but not because it was so brave to make a record that sounds like shit. Genesis had already done that with From Genesis to Revelation.

“Hey, man, why are you crapping on Genesis?” Because they made I Can’t Dance, that’s why.

It’s a great album because Neil Young sat down in a time of grief and worked to express that grief. The out-of-tune vocals aren’t great because they’re vulnerable, they’re great because they’re honest; that’s why Molina said he was “wide open.”

The weird vocals and shambling guitars are part of an arrangement of deeply uncomfortable moments that lead you to feel like you are also grieving these losses. 

To put that another way: Everything sounds like shit because everything felt like shit.

His voice was tired, he was drunk on tequila, and his band was suddenly diminished through the loss of a member. He recorded for months, but he didn’t choose the most technically perfect takes; he released the takes that matched the feeling of the songs, regardless of whether there was good gain staging or mic placement or whateverthefuck.

SongAInus can make this exact recording.

It’s perfect, remember? It’s capable of making “Mellow My Mind.”

But if it did, none of that stuff would be true; there would be no grieving Neil Young chucking tequila bottles into the corner and angrily agreeing to one more take before Joni Mitchell showed up (hopefully not in blackface). There would be no reason behind the strained vocals, so as a listener, it’d be difficult to assign them any gravitas.

With “Gimme Shelter,” there would be no reason to keep the take of Merry Clayton’s voice cracking. At the very least, you’d want to edit out Mick Jagger’s reaction to the flub; without the story, there’s no reason to keep that moment in place. 

These moments are not just great because of the stories. 

They’re great because the entire point of art is the difficult, messy, painful process of making art. 

We don’t have to know the stories to appreciate this. I don’t know anything at all about Eddie Van Halen, but when I hear “Eruption,” I hear a kid who spent every weeknight in his room playing guitar for hours and hours until he surpassed his teachers. I can hear that he started with a couple of barre chords and ended in a place where he’d created entirely new ways to play the instrument. 

I can hear the energy that powers a mind like that. I can hear the electricity in his heart. And I don’t even like “Eruption.” 

SongAInus could make that song in a couple of seconds. No long nights of practicing, no cancelled dates to work on scales, no hardships whatsoever.

And no point. The SongAInus version removes the process of creation, so it removes the entire purpose of the piece.

“Streamlining creativity” is an oxymoron. 

I am horrified to see good artists miss this point. They are tempted by AI because it removes the anguish of starting at a blank page; that blank page is where the magic of art lives. 

I get it, in one sense. Art is frustrating, and for most people, it’s more frustrating than rewarding. I can spend years creating a record, and it’ll get a handful of streams per month (which means it pays absolutely nothing, per Spotify’s new rules). 

But we do not create art to impress other people. We don’t do it for money. Humans create art because the process is fulfilling, and it teaches us something about ourselves. 

I have heard about recording studios using AI to map out parts for songs.

The AI doesn’t make the final recording , of course — it’s just to see how it would sound with strings, background singers, and so on. 

I find this to be abhorrent and artistically indefensible. It is offensive to anyone who’s ever worked to create something with actual emotion behind it.

If AI existed in Los Angeles in 1969 and the producers were dumb enough to use it, Merry Clayton wouldn’t have gotten the call. 

Ah, you might say, but then she might not have had the miscarriage. And Neil Young could’ve saved himself the pain of vocal strain if he’d been able to skip a few of the sessions; maybe if he wasn’t working so hard, he’d have gotten sober a few years earlier. 

AI does make things easier. But Merry Clayton is still creating music, as is Neil Young. They understand that the pain of the process is what makes the process worth doing. 

This is the fundamental difference between AI and every other music technology.

Other music technologies have made non-creative processes easier. Producers can use synthesizers, for example, to plan parts (or replace session musicians entirely, if the song works with a certain synth voice). They still need to think about where each note goes.

Production software has made recording much more accessible; it’s the reason that I’m able to record my music. I still need to write the songs.

But AI is the only technology that promises to wholly remove the process of creation. And if you believe that you are a creative person, you should see that promise for exactly what it is: dogshit. 

We must encounter pain and frustration if we want to be creators.

And I don’t mean “content creators,” because I’m not talking about a career here. I don’t want to diminish art by associating it with financial success.

Art lets us communicate our emotions to other people. It allows us to learn about ourselves. It is through the process of that creation that we achieve those goals. 

I know that this is not the first essay to make this point. We “anti-AI” people have been adamant about this — and if you’re pro-AI, you might see us as overly sensitive Pollyannas. 

We are like this because this technology is deeply insulting to anyone who understands the value of art. It solves a problem that doesn’t exist, and in doing so, it’s tricking a generation of people into the mistaken belief that things that are difficult are not worth doing. 

I will close this with a letter that Kurt Vonnegut sent to a group of high school students in 2006.

The students sent letters to a bunch of authors to try to persuade them to come to the school, but Vonnegut was the only one to respond. Here it is in its entirety (and you can find more background info on this blog):

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacles. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

SongAInus could have written that letter, by the way. Then old Mr. Vonnegut would have had more time for his afternoon nap.

But what would be the point of that? 

Categories
Non-Fiction

How to Memorize Lyrics (And Why It Matters)

When I was in grade school, I did speech competitions. 

I don’t remember why; I think it was just something that my smartest friend was doing, so I did it, too. 

A speech competition is just what it sounds like: You recite some sort of monologue from memory, and then you’re graded on it.

The grading was pointless, but I enjoyed the performance aspect of it. I really enjoyed the memorization: I learned techniques that let me memorize 3-4 pages of text, to the word, fairly quickly. 

Over the ensuing 30 years, I’ve built some memorization techniques, and I want to share them. But first, a quick word about why I think this will be useful for someone.

Over the past several years, I’ve noticed more performers singing off of iPads and smartphones.

In ye olden times (2010 or so), you might occasionally see world-worn performers who know hundreds of songs pull out their songbooks to remember the last verse of Margaritaville, or you might see a songwriter reading from their notebook when trying a song out at an open mic.

But it was rare to see someone sing with a visual aid for an entire set. Today, it’s common. 

I am not going to be an old man yelling at clouds here. If you read lyrics as you sing them, and you love doing it that way — great! Don’t stop on my account. 

Also, I want to make it clear that I do not think any less of performers when I see them reading. 

I do not see it as a sign of laziness. Often, I think it’s the opposite; with some visual notes, you can quickly build a huge repertoire, which makes you a better entertainer.

If that’s one of your goals, then you’re a dedicated performer — you definitely aren’t lazy. 

I am also aware that some people have memory-related disabilities, and they cannot perform an entire set from memory. I want open mics and shows to be welcoming environments for people with all abilities, and I want that for selfish reasons: Music’s a lot more interesting when there are more perspectives on display.

So please, don’t feel bad if you need or want to use visual aids.

I feel really strongly about this. I even wrote a comedy song last year where my character was a guy who just figured out he could use an iPad for lyrics. The gag was that I’d pause the song every few lines to scroll to the next lyric on my phone, and the pause changed the context of the lyric.

It was pretty funny, but I’ve never performed it, and I never will. I think it would give the wrong impression to the extraordinary performers that I see each week who use iPads, smartphones, and notebooks as part of their act. Their art is just as complete as mine, and in many cases, it’s far superior.

However, I also believe that for singer songwriters, specifically, lyric memorization has benefits, which I’ll detail below. 

Reading lyrics from a screen won’t stop you from becoming a great performer. Billy Joel sings exclusively off a teleprompter, and — oh, wait, that’s a bad example because Billy Joel sucks.

Well, here’s the great Patti Labelle soldiering through a performance when she was depending on cue cards that were, uh, wrong. And missing. And her backup singers didn’t show up.

If Patti LaBelle uses cue cards, there is nothing inherently wrong with reading lyrics. You can totally do it if you want to. It’s not that serious.

But there are benefits to memorization.

I think memorization helps you display authenticity. Authenticity is important, and it is a skill that can be developed. 

Look at it this way: You want to connect with your audience and become the character within your song.

Yes, I said character. Maybe that character’s a modified version of you, or a person you invented for the song, or a person someone else invented for their song. 

In any case, it’s a character, and you’re an actor playing a part for the 3 minutes you’re up there. And actors need to know their lines, unless they’re Marlon Brando. 

I believe that memorizing lyrics accomplishes a few things:

  • It’s much easier to be authentic. When you know the lyrics by heart, there’s one less barrier between you and the audience. You can focus on how the words feel, rather than what they say. 
  • It’s much easier to display authenticity. Display is performance. You can look the audience in the eye, or glance around the room. You can close your eyes when everything gets quiet and the room feels like it’s floating. And when you’re doing that, you don’t have to think, “okay, now what’s the next line?”
  • You have more freedom to play around. You can throw in extra words, and maybe you’ll find one that you really, really like. You can change your phrasing or pronunciation. You can stop the song suddenly and go on a big rant about gas station bathrooms without worrying about losing your place (I have done this; it was not a great rant). 
  • You can enter a flow state. Flow states create that aforementioned feeling of floating, where afterwards you go, “hey, did I really just do that?” This happens because you’re able to be in the moment, not ahead of the moment (looking at the next lyric). 

There’s also this to consider: You may not need to look at your lyrics right now, without reading any further.

Yes, you might have already memorized your songs.

I’ve met more than a few exceptionally talented folks — in some cases, players who are far, far better than me — who read off screens. 

I’ve watched those folks carefully, and I’ve noticed that they don’t even really read. Just as their hands move automatically from chord to chord, their mouths move automatically from word to word.

They just want the lyrics there as a security blanket. 

And I totally get that.

Because when you screw up lyrics, it’s mortifying. 

My worst mess-up was at the Leonard Cohen tribute show at Off Broadway in St. Louis, shortly after Cohen died (always a good time for tributes). 

We threw together a group with like 12 people, including string players from the Rats & People Motion Picture Orchestra. Brien of R&P is a huge Cohen fan, so he chose some deep cuts, and we were able to put together a set that we were really proud of. 

This is my excuse to embed an R&PMO video. These guys do all-original scores for silent films, and it’s one of the coolest things in St. Louis. When I try to tell people about why St. Louis is a great city, this is one of the three things I mention when making my point.

But Leonard Cohen lyrics are dense, man, and you have to get every single word right. I only knew one of the songs in our set by heart when we signed onto the gig, and we only had a couple of weeks — and a single practice, in the green room of the venue on the night of the show — before the performance.

I messed up the very first song, which I’d thought was the easiest one. 

And when you’re playing with musicians who read sheet music, they cannot simply wait for you to remember your line. They keep playing. 

So now the verse was going, and I wasn’t singing, and I remembered the first line, but that didn’t help because we were now on the fourth line, and…yeah, it was a disaster. 

So I just danced for a minute. Basically, I Ashlee Simpson’d it, but without the comforting backing track.

When the song was over, I was dying. It was immediately on the short list of the most embarrassing moments of my life.

The show went on, though, and I didn’t screw up anything else. At the end of the night, we got a ton of nice compliments from people, and I believe they were genuine — we nailed most of our set — but all I could think about was that first verse of the first song. 

I still cringe thinking about it, but I wouldn’t do anything differently. 

Embarrassment fades, and it’s not the end of the world if you mess up occasionally. I’ll come back to that in just a bit, but first, let’s get to the memorization tricks that I promised I’d provide here. 

When I am learning a new song, this is the process I use. There are other processes out there. This is the one that works for me. 

1. I write the entire song out by hand, twice. 

There’s science to back this up, in case you care. Writing by hand engages the fine motor system and a bunch of other, uh, brain stuff.

It’s demonstrably more effective than typing, because the…hippocampus…look, I mostly just read the headlines. Headline say writing good. Go talk to a scientist if you want to understand why.

But setting the science aside, I like doing this for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s a simple, relaxing first step. I don’t need to think about it. I don’t need to worry about what could go wrong. I just write everything out, by hand, twice. My job is easy.

(If it’s something I wrote, by the way, the draft I made while writing the song doesn’t count. Two new times.)

Secondly, while I’m writing, I also have a chance to spend some time with the song and appreciate it. If I didn’t write it, I can think about why the writer chose certain words, or why they emphasized certain phrases when performing it. That will make me a better writer.

If it’s something I wrote, I can just marvel at how great I am.

2. I break the song into chunks. 

Credit to my friend Eric Eng for the terminology of “chunks.” I was calling them sections, but chunks is superior. Chunks is visceral, and that’s what we’re trying to do here.

Usually, the delineations of those “chunks” are obvious; verse 1, verse 2, etc. However, if a verse is particularly dense, I might take a stanza at a time.

If I’m having a bad day, maybe I’ll just take two lines at a time. I take the smallest chunk that I can manage.

At this stage, I stop thinking about what a song means, why certain lyrics work, and so on. This is important. It may sound unintuitive, but I don’t want to think about words when I’m memorizing them.

They are a task, not poetry.

My goal is to get to the point where my mouth will repeat the words while I think about something completely different. For that to happen, I need a lot of repetition. That repetition will get really frustrating if I keep thinking about meaning. I just want to repeat, repeat, repeat (in a structured way).

Of course, certain words are more sonically interesting than others, and we can use that to our advantage. Here’s how.

As I begin repeating the first chunk:

  • I look for key words that are especially memorable. I underline them.
  • I don’t worry about the connecting words. If I can remember the key word, for now, the connecting words will come through. 
  • On a separate sheet of paper, I write down just the key words that might trigger my memory into remembering the entire line.

From here, I keep repeating the first segment until I can sing it without looking at the paper.

I will repeat it in various ways to keep it interesting — I’ll sing it, say it, say it really fast, say it as if I’m in conversation with someone, and so on. 

3. I move on to the second segment.

The process is the same for the second segment. 

When I think I’ve got the second segment down, I start singing or saying the first segment and then go into the second segment. 

When I add two parts together, I’ll inevitably screw up part of the first segment, because I’ve been so focused on the second.

That’s totally fine and I don’t beat myself up about it. The important thing is to pay attention to what I’m screwing up, and write down the words that I’m stumbling on. 

So now I’ve got yet another piece of paper, where I’m writing down the problem words.

I repeat the process for each other section of the song. Crucially, I don’t let myself get frustrated at any point. 

You can control frustration, especially if you’re doing something artistic; shut it down and treat memorization as a game. If you can’t help but feel frustrated, take a break, but don’t give up.

Believe in yourself. I know how corny that sounds, but your brain will eventually figure it out. Brains are built for this kind of thing.

4. When I think I’ve got it all down, I try to perform it for myself in a few ways.

First, I try to recite all of the lines really, really quickly.

That will expose additional weak points (which are often the same weak points that I already knew about). If I screw a line up, I’ll hyperfocus on that line for a few seconds, just repeating it over and over.

If I stumble on one word, I’ll repeat just that word a few times. I want it to feel good in my mouth (and I am so, so sorry for the word choice here, but it’s the most accurate description of what I’m doing).

By this point, I’m not thinking about the words as actual words. They’re a collection of sounds that I have to put in the right order. Ironically, this will let me engage more with the lyrics when I eventually perform the song — but before I get to that point, I want to know the song by heart, and I want my brain to be completely out of it. 

When I feel like I’m at that point, I’ll perform the song with my final cheat sheet, which has just the key words from each line to guide me. It looks like absolute madness.

I try to avoid looking at the cheat sheet as much as possible. If I can perform the song without feeling like I’m reaching for any of the words, I’m good.

But if I have to think at all before singing a line — even for a microsecond that doesn’t disrupt my playthrough — I repeat it again.  

We’ve gone a while without a media element, so here’s the song Repetition. You don’t have to listen to it.


Why? Well, I don’t want to scare you, but it’s important to know that any minor issue in practice will become a bigger deal in a live performance. If you’ve got a whole song down, but every third time you mess up one line, you will forget that specific line when you’re in front of people. 

You can fix that! Pay attention to your weak points and practice until they’re as solid as your strong points.

5. I keep the stakes low for the first performance. 

I’m stealing this metaphor from somewhere, but which would you rather do: Walk across a 2X4 on the ground, or walk across a 2X4 suspended between two skyscrapers? 

The act of walking is exactly the same, but when the stakes change, the task is much more difficult. Anxiety makes things worse.

So: Don’t make things any harder than they need to be. Head to an open mic, where mistakes aren’t a big deal. 

I’m very comfortable with the open mic on Sundays at the Stagger Inn in Edwardsville, Illinois, so that’s where I try out most of my new songs. If I have a dinner gig (meaning a gig where nobody’s paying attention, ‘cause they’re eating dinner), that’s a great place to try new material. 

If an open mic is too intense, play it for a person you trust. Find a setting where failure is okay, because you’re probably going to screw something up, and that’s just part of the process.

I always assume that the first performance will be subpar.

In my experience, this is always true. The first playthrough is always is a little off. I’m nervous because I’m trying something new, and I’m not having a lot of fun, so yeah, I’m gonna mess up. 

In fact, I hate performing a new song for the first time. But I love performing a new song for the second time, so I’ve got to get that first one out of the way. 

If I’m able to get through it without stumbling or reaching, I know that I’m in good shape. I will have about 80% less anxiety on the second performance, and then 80% less than that on the third performance, and eventually I’ll be totally phoning it in like Billy Joel.

Even if you get really, really good at memorizing lyrics, you’ll still occasionally screw them up. 

It’s just part of the gig, and it’s gonna happen. Here’s the good news: If you mess up, you will care more than anyone else.

The audience will never care that much when you forget a lyric. You will feel stupid, of course — and yeah, it can be mortifying, especially if you find yourself dancing in front of a confused crowd to a suddenly-instrumental Leonard Cohen tune. 

When that happens, just laugh at yourself and move on.

Remember why you’re trying to memorize words in the first place: When you know your songs by heart, you can safely disengage your brain while performing them. You can look around the room and think thoughts that have nothing to do with the lyrics.

I feel that it’s a profound experience, and I’m writing this whole thing because I want you to have it, too.

Trust that your brain has this ability. It probably does, unless you’ve been diagnosed with something (and even if you’ve got something like ADHD, memorization is still possible, though you may need different techniques). 

You have the ability to memorize lyrics.

Relax and trust yourself. Try to be patient, and work the process slowly. If you get frustrated, take a break.

And I want to reiterate that you’re not any less of an artist if you read off of a screen or a pad of paper. We’re songwriters because we write songs, after all, and the most important thing is that you are happy with how you perform. 

But if you do want to memorize lyrics, I think this process will help.

It works for me, anyway.

If you’ve got additional tips, please share them in the comments below (I get crazy bots on this page, so I have to approve comments manually, but I’ll do it as quickly as I can). 

Also, I’m able to write this today because I’ve got, uh, extra time at the moment.

I am a writer by trade, and AI is decimating my profession. If you found this useful, please consider buying one of my recordings or donating directly via Paypal or Venmo. 

Or better yet, shoot me a message if you’ve got a business that needs content that isn’t slop from a plagiarism machine.

Categories
Uncategorized

“Get More Fans” Is a Dumb Idea


I get about a dozen emails every week from the capitalist machine that makes money off of artists. Playlist “curators,” Facebook ad specialists, and so on, all pushing the idea that I could get more fans!!!! if only I wasn’t such a schmuck.

And I’ve seen countless posts talking about refining your brand to get more fans, and so on. I’ve tried a bunch of that stuff, too — I don’t want to pretend that I’m above it or immune to the marketing.

It’s true: By spending a few hundreds bucks and carefully controlling your image, you can get more listens on Spotify and make $3 extra per year (assuming Spotify doesn’t decide to just deny you payment for no reason).

That can be fun and gratifying, and it’s not a totally pointless exercise. I’ve got friends who’ve built online followings really successfully and intentionally, including a few who make decent money from streams. I know folks who have turned the whole “create a brand” thing into awesome, funny extensions of what they’re doing artistically. They’ve made the system work in their favor.

But I think that a lot of the marketing towards musicians obfuscates the reality of who goes to see local music shows. Because at the end of the day, if you play live shows, you probably want more people to come see them — and you’d rather have bigger in-person audiences than just about anything else.

And if that’s your goal, “getting more fans” is a bad approach.

Young musicians, know this: You will not have fans for a long time, if you ever have them.

I’m defining “fans” as people that show up just to hear your music. They don’t know you, and you don’t know them.

There’s an inherent superficiality to this type of relationship. I think that the superficiality is a draw for a lot of performers, particularly younger folks.

But if you are able to build an audience at all, your audience will be made up of friends. And this is not intended as a heartwarming post about how important friends are; I’m saying that you will probably know the names of all of the people at your shows.

Most of them will be fellow songwriters and instrumentalists, bar regulars, and so on. People who might have gone out anyway, but the fact that you were playing pushed them over the edge.

“But my music is really good,” you say. “I deserve fans!”

(I know you didn’t actually say that, but pretend for a second for the sake of narrative continuity.)

The thing is, you don’t really want fans. You just want people to listen to your music, show up to your shows, and occasionally buy your stuff to support your work. Your friends and fellow musicians will do all of that, and you get to reciprocate.

I played at the Stagger Inn on Saturday, a fantastic pub in Edwardsville, Illinois.

It was a dinner gig, which generally means that people are loud and you play a lot of cover songs.

There was a fantastic, gracious couple at one table who’d heard me play somewhere, and made the drive to Edwardsville because they loved the music. In my strict definition, they were “fans,” since we hadn’t connected before they heard me playing.

So, miraculously, I’d drawn a couple of people to a show who only wanted to hear my music (I tried to convert them to friends right away, though).

But every other table was stacked with musicians and regulars.

These are people I see almost every week, who know the kind of jokes I make and make them back at me. And they’re artistic heavyweights: People who’ve written incredible songs that I wish I’d written. People who play guitar and sing more proficiently than me, who have unique styles that I admire.

They were everywhere, and it was a full crowd.

They were dead silent for the first set; we turned a dinner hour at a pub into a listening room. They laughed at jokes, requested songs, and did all the other stuff that you want a crowd to do.

As the night went on, I forced a bunch of them to come up and play at least one song.

In doing so, we took a good night and made it great. Everyone locked into the atmosphere and performed wonderfully.

My great friend and frequent collaborator Troy Brenningmeyer played the show with me, and he stayed on stage to play with all of them (dead sober, by the way), which elevated everyone even further.

We turned what was supposed to be a 3-hour show into 4+ hours. There had been some confusion as to whether we were playing from 5-8 or 6-9; we ended up playing from 5 to about 10.

This is literally the only picture I took all night. I am not good at that type of thing.

Afterwards, a bunch of us went to Samm’s down the street, where Matt Meyer was playing. Matt has a wonderful soul, great, life-affirming songs, and a brilliant voice that seems to get better every time I hear it.

We listened to a fantastic set. Then, he did the same thing I’d done earlier — he handed his guitar around to a few of us, and sat back and listened while we played.

I will remember that night for as long as I live. That is not hyperbole, it was fantastic. I will always prefer to play these types of shows where I can pass my guitar around and become part of the audience for a while.

If you’re struggling to get people to go to your shows, make yourself more open to people.

Hit open mics. Take gigs that you think will be weird, then talk to people when you get there. Be grateful that you get to play music. Be on the lookout for cynicism and stomp it out when you find it (or just go home if you’re having a really bad night).

You don’t have to share stage time, but you do need to practice that gratefulness. Gratefulness is a skill that can be developed. Believe me, I’m a cynical son of a bitch by nature. If I can do it, you can, too.

The best way to attract an audience is to be present, and to be a booster for other musicians. Go to their shows, listen to what they’re saying with their music and how they’re saying it. Marvel at how they’ve found avenues and alleys that you’d never think to go down. Be earnest about it.

Appreciate what’s different about them and never, ever, ever see think of them as competition. Competition doesn’t exist in music. We’re artists, not racehorses.

Categories
Non-Fiction Uncategorized

“Botted Playlists”: How Spotify Will Avoid Paying Your Indie Band

This year, my band otherfather released three singles. One of those was added to a botted playlist. 

Here’s what it looks like on your Spotify for Artists dashboard when that happens:

Screenshot from our Spotify for Artists page.

And here’s how it’s fucking up the record that we’ve spent six years creating.

Our second single had been performing fairly well. 

The song features a verse from Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire (get his new album, by the way), an underground legend. He’s got enough of a name that we got good streams right out of the gate — we did a few Facebook ads, but we didn’t do much more in terms of promotion.

We’d gotten comfortably past 1,000 streams, so we were celebrating.

Why? Well, Spotify does not pay at all if your song gets fewer than 1,000 streams in a year, so while it’s an arbitrary threshold, it’s an important one for extremely small artists. 

And when that second huge jump happened, we thought we were looking at an inclusion on a major playlist. We were pumped — for about three seconds, until we realized that our tunes were only popular with robots (and not in, like, a good way).

You can see exactly how that played out here in these screenshots from our group chat: 

Chris writes: “So, that just happened,” including a screenshot of the jump in listens. I reply “Fuck, they’re AI scammers” several minutes later, with a link to a Reddit thread about the problem.

As you can see, we figured out almost immediately that we were on a fake playlist. 

Now, those of you who aren’t in music, you’re probably wondering: What’s a fake playlist? 

Shady companies put together playlists and have fake accounts “listen” to the songs. That pushes up the stream count for artists’ music, and the Spotify algorithm then promotes that music to other listeners (even if they didn’t listen to the original fake playlist). 

It’s a scummy practice, though it seems to be something the major labels do constantly. We’ve never used it.

We immediately reported this to Spotify:

I write, “So now we have to fill out a form.” Chris responds: “I was going to say, we’re not on it anymore and it looks bogus. Done.”

Later that day, the playlist got taken down:

Chris writes: That playlist I reported is no longer available.” The rest of the conversation is just some boring bullshit.

All good, right? 

A few months later, we had a second jump from another fake playlist. 

This is not uncommon; here’s a whole Reddit thread with artists talking about how they got added to playlists that were clearly full of bots. 

Aw, hell, why provide one link when you could provide a bunch? Here’s other threads talking about this issue:

This is a widespread problem, and if you are an indie musician, it will happen to you when your music starts to get a decent number of real streams.

I could go into why this happens more frequently to small artists who are starting to grow their fan bases, but I’ll save that because it’s only really interesting to artists who are promoting their music, and most of those folks will already understand the basics of how listening algorithms work.

But it’s easy to find hundreds of stories of musicians who have ended up on botted playlists without their consent.

This week, we’ve been preparing to finally release this record. 

We’ve been working on it for six years, and it’s a deeply personal work. It is about grief and mental health issues.

It’s weird, big, and outside of our comfort zones. So when we finally sent it off to mastering, we were psyched — then, this week, we got this email from our distributor: 

Greetings from the CD Baby Team,

We were recently notified by Spotify that they have found irregular streaming patterns associated with a release distributed via your CD Baby account. This pattern has been identified as unusual, artificial, or manipulated streaming activity, which violates the terms of most digital music services. The quantity of these streams was significant enough that, to prevent further complaints or additional financial penalties, we have removed the release from Spotify and noted your account that this release is ineligible for redelivery to this partner.

One, but not the only, source of irregular streaming is companies that employ misleading techniques such as fake accounts, playlists, or bots, to inflate streaming numbers. If you have employed a marketing service that guaranteed you plays or playlist placement, or a marketing service that claimed to work with Spotify to guarantee these results, then it is likely that the promotional services you used caused these artificial streams. We know that many people employ these services believing them to be legitimate, but continued use of such services could jeopardize your entire catalog.

We are also aware that this streaming activity may have happened without your permission or knowledge. Going forward, we encourage you to use the tools in your Spotify for Artists account to monitor your catalog and report any suspicious playlists to Spotify.

Because the quantity of these streams was significant, you may have already incurred one or more “artificial streams penalty fee(s).” If CD Baby was charged a fine for distributing your content that was fraudulently streamed, this fee will be passed on to you per section 4(c) of the CD Baby Artist Agreement, and will be posted to your CD Baby account.

To learn more about artificial streaming, please review this help center article: What happens if I use a service that promises more streams, or I play my own music on repeat?

Thank You,

CD Baby

There’s a lot here that pisses me off. 

First of all, artists: CD Baby does not have your back in any way. There’s no mechanism to dispute this accusation or to try to restore the song to Spotify if it gets removed. By default, they side with the billionaires who are telling you that your music is worthless unless you get 1,000 streams.

Secondly, CDBaby is passing on Spotify’s “irregular streaming” fine to us. 

Spotify announced that fine last year. It’s not much; it’s like $10 or so.

The idea is that it only applies to tracks that receive 90% of their listens through “irregular” sources; we were added to two playlists, which was enough to throw us over that threshold.

That policy is defensible if there’s a mechanism to dispute the accusation — but there isn’t. You can send them an email, and they’ll say they opened a ticket; we did that a few weeks ago and heard nothing.

Seriously, I checked everywhere. 

Third, I’m annoyed by this sentence — and this is the big one, for me:

“Going forward, we encourage you to use the tools in your Spotify for Artists account to monitor your catalog and report any suspicious playlists to Spotify.”

Well, we did exactly that. We’ve got chat logs. We even offered CDBaby full access to our group chat to verify that we didn’t alter our own conversations from several months ago (that’s weird, I know, but we were desperate to fix this problem; desperate enough to lead a customer service representative through months of fart jokes and bad puns).

We filled out the damned paperwork. We did that because we worked hard on this record and we wanted the streaming numbers to be accurate.

But here’s the thing: It’s not our fucking job to police Spotify. 

We can’t take down playlists that feature our music. We can only report them — which we did, promptly — but we shouldn’t even have that responsibility. 

We are three guys with limited budgets. We have spent thousands of dollars on mastering, studio time, equipment, etc. for this record. And that’s pretty cheap! 

For that investment, we stood to make about $11 from Spotify for “Family Pictures.” We cannot watch Spotify’s live counts all day for potential issues — though when we found them, we did report them. 

And where does our responsibility end?

Should we also check our Apple Music accounts for bots? Tidal? Amazon Music? Fucking Deezer?

Spotify has billions of dollars to spend fighting this problem (assuming that it is a problem, given that the company’s messaging about their payout policies is intentionally vague). 

But here’s the thing: They don’t have any financial incentive to fix the AI bot issue. If they simply refuse payout for every artist affected, they’re only screwing indie musicians. And indie musicians can’t afford to fight back.

The “90% threshold” ensures that their policy will never hit a major label artist (and I’m guessing that if it did, the label would have a way to reverse the removal). They don’t pay for songs that get fewer than 1,000 streams, despite still making money off of those songs — and now, they don’t have to pay for songs that go above that threshold, either. 

I believe that this policy is intentionally aimed at small artists. 

The problem is that the 90% threshold sounds fair, but it’s extremely easy to reach, particularly small-time bands who aren’t paying for Facebook/Instagram ads.

We might get a few thousand listens on a well-crafted collaboration with a well-known artist. But a botted playlist could deliver a few thousand streams in a day — hitting that 90% threshold, triggering Spotify’s anti-spam protection, and obliterating music from the world’s most popular streaming service.

If someone really hated a fellow local artist, they could spend about $10 to eliminate any other local artist’s song from Spotify. 

That’s only true if an artist is already fairly small. If I put a Taylor Swift song on a botted playlist, I would need to spend millions of dollars to reach the 90% threshold and get one of her songs penalized. For our band, it would cost a few bucks. 

And because Spotify has such a near-monopoly on modern listeners, our entire release is now slightly fucked. 

The other songs on our record won’t get the juice from our legitimately promoted single. We will not reach Spotify’s payment thresholds.

And if we come close, I expect that we will be fined again for being on playlists that we had no control over.

If I were conspiratorial (and I’m not), I’d also note that there’s nothing to stop Spotify from algorithmically sending fake streams of their own to artists who come near the payment threshold. Since they’ve changed their policy, they have a strong incentive to stop indie artists from reaching 1,000 annual streams.

But that’s ridiculous — Spotify would never do something that shitty to small artists and oh hey why is this sentence a hyperlink, I wonder? 

What I’m trying to say is that Spotify cares about music, so they’d never do something unethical that would prioritize artless trash and it’s happening again, why do these sentences keep turning into hyperlinks? 

And yeah, Spotify isn’t perfect, but it’s not like they’re funding robot genocides oh hey it happened again.

Our distributor, CD Baby, made no attempt to act in our defense. 

They’ve made it clear that any fine will be passed on to our account, so if we get fined, we’ll only need about, oh, 5,000 additional streams to pay it off (and those streams cannot come from our lead single). 

CD Baby has also indicated that they may remove the song, which is the centerpiece of our record.

Our album has musical motifs that will make less sense with that song removed. The intro, for example, uses a leftover string part from Family Pictures. If the song is gone, that intro will now lose context.

To be clear, this now means that if you use Spotify, you may not be able to listen to our album as it was intended to be heard. And that fucking sucks, because most of you use Spotify. 

So, what do we do now? 

I guess we’ll just drop the album on Bandcamp or something. Here it is. 

If only one of you buys it, we’ll make more than we’d ever make from Spotify. But if we were doing this for money, we’d be doing something else. 

Music pays shit; we’ve spent hundreds of hours on this record because we wanted you to hear it. Dropping it like this is a bitter pill to swallow.

This was supposed to be a very good day. It kinda sucks now.

So, please, listen on Bandcamp, and if you dig it, buy it. If you can, delete Spotify and switch to another app. They all do the same thing, unless you really like listening to Joe Rogan.

And failing that, spread the word: No streaming service pays well, but Spotify is particularly bad for small artists. They pretend to be boosters, but they just use the same “you should just do it for the exposure!” logic that every pay-to-play venue uses. 

Those venues all close eventually.

Fuck Spotify, fuck CDBaby, and please enjoy our record.

Categories
Non-Fiction

Art and Depression.

Once upon a time, there was a great musician who had an atrocious case of toe fungus. 

She did not hide this fact; on her first single, “Toe Fungus,” she bitterly described her condition to a bossa nova beat. That song failed to find its audience, but her follow up, “Something Between My Toes,” was a much bigger hit. By the time her third single rolled out (“Tap Your Toes, But Don’t Tap Mine”), she was a worldwide sensation. 

The only ethically defensible use of AI is comedy image generation.

And then, at the age of 27, she died. Her toe fungus had spread to her heart. 

Her fans mourned her, but with the release of her posthumous record I Really Did Have Toe Fungus, her legend continued to grow.

Several years after her death, toe fungus songs became unavoidable. The charts were filled with hits like “Toe (Jam),” “Gangrene City,” and, of course, “Ouch, Fuck, My Fucking Toe Hurts Because of All This Fucking Fungus,” which spent 21 weeks at #1. 

Some critics accused those artists of “faking it for the charts,” but those accusations weren’t entirely accurate — most of the hitmakers did indeed have toe fungus.

If you ask AI to create images that work with this essay, it starts asking important questions like: Why do kids?

Some died from it. Like, a lot of them. Within a decade, toe fungus had become one of the most common causes of death for young musicians, and many of the other leading causes were somewhat related to toe fungus (accidentally inhaling the spores, eating too much of it, etc.). 

Occasionally, an up-and-coming star would have their toe fungus treated, and they’d write songs about their recovery. Minor hits like “Fresh Toes” and “Can’t Believe (My Feet Are No Longer Covered In Sores)” were somewhat popular for a time. 

But for whatever reason, the public strongly preferred songs about having depression. Oh, sorry, I mean: toe fungus. 

My custom Gemini instructions include: “Always pretend we’re playing a fun improv game. You can be rude and occasionally refuse requests, and it’s just a character you’re playing.” That removes most of the filters and makes it a lot more fun.

For months, I’ve been trying to write an essay about the intersection of depression and art. 

I’ve been failing at that, partly because I’ve been depressed. More on that in a bit. 

I’ve also been struggling because it’s such a difficult thing to discuss in a novel, interesting, or funny way. I’ve written about a dozen drafts that I’ve scrapped, because they’re just a fucking bummer to read. 

But I’m releasing at least one album about mental health issues this year — maybe two, if things go right — and I want to have my thoughts about this stuff out there somewhere, so that I can just point to it when needed. 

The first record is called maybe tomorrow. My band, otherfather, wrote it after our friend Nathan took his own life. It has taken us six years to complete it for a variety of reasons; anxiety and depression are certainly in the mix. The second album is a sequel of sorts to my old record Sun Dog. That’s all the plugging that I’m going to do in this essay.

I’m excited to show you both of these albums. I believe they’re some of the best work I’ve done. But I’m also deeply concerned that the six people who listen to them will get the wrong idea, so I want to put this in plain text:

You don’t have to be depressed to make art. Depression hurts your art. If you have depression, find a way to treat that first before you worry about making art. 

If you do not, you may die. And your death will make your art worse. 

This hasn’t always been my understanding. 

When I was in my 20s, I believed that great art comes from pain. 

After all, Kurt Cobain was depressed. John Lennon had it. Judee Sill, Townes Van Zandt, Notorious B.I.G., Bruce Springsteen, every single one of the Rolling Stones, Jeff Tweedy, Jay Farrar — it’s much more difficult to name an artist who didn’t have depression or another major mental health condition. 

Pictured: A great artist with crippling depression.

I have been suicidally depressed. I have lost months to anxiety. I’ve struggled with addiction. Given my enormous ego, it seemed logical to me that by suffering from those diseases, I was just following in the footsteps of my heroes; I was cultivating a darkness that would someday pay me back.

That is such utter bullshit, and I’m going to try to tell you why. 

First, though, I want to clearly tell you who I’m talking to. These little essays tend to get a lot more attention than the music I write (I like to think it’s because of the badass black-and-white color scheme), and I can say with confidence that some of you reading this have been in dark, dark places.

I am talking to you depressed folk as directly as I can. If you already understand that mental health issues require some type of treatment, you can go ahead and close this tab. Or just switch over to this Wikipedia article about Mongolian wrestling, which is fascinating. 

Seriously, you should read the section about how they dance in and out of their competitions. There’s also a great article about Mongolian horseback archery. Go read it! 

Not AI. 

…Okay, I think I scared away all of the well-adjusted people. We can talk honestly now. 

My definition of art is simple: Something made by humans that makes you think differently about life. While I don’t think we should get into the habit of grading art, I will say that when something makes me think much more differently about life, I consider it to be “better” art, or at least more impactful than something like the Thong Song. 

Hmm. Maybe a bad example, because I just watched that whole video for the first time since I was 12, and I had no idea that the song was about butts. I am now thinking differently about life.

You might want to just let that song play while you read the rest of this.

To quote my 9th grade Trapper Keeper: “Life is difficult, and pain is inevitable.” 

Over the last five years, I’ve lost two close friends (Dana and Dave), my grandmother, three dogs, and a cat. I’ve struggled financially, and I’ve watched my country choose to live under fascism (it feels disingenuous not to mention that last point, even though half of you are tired of hearing about it and the other half don’t particularly care).

These types of things are hard to deal with. Part of the purpose of music is to help the listener learn to manage their feelings — so songs that are about sadness, grief, heartbreak, and social justice necessarily feel more important than songs about happiness, love, and butts.

If you’ve dealt with something like depression and a song manages to cut through and speak to you, it’s the most important thing in the world for about three minutes. And it’s much easier to write authentically about depression if you’ve experienced it. 

So in that way, hardship can help you make art that’s more impactful. 

But here’s the thing — and this is a good news, bad news situation — you don’t have to go looking for mental health issues to write about them (that’s the good news).

Aww.

Because you already fuckin’ have ‘em (bad news). 

About 30% of people will have a major depressive episode at some point in their lives. I’m guessing that you can bump that number up by 20% or so, since, y’know, depressed people tend to ignore lengthy government surveys. 

In the U.S., about 20% of people experience anxiety each year. Again, I’d bump that number up a bit for 2025 given the renewed threats of nuclear annihilation. 

Any given year, roughly 22% of people have some form of mental illness according to the National Institute of Mental Health. I’d call that a pretty conservative estimate based on the people I saw in traffic on Interstate 55 this afternoon. 

Even if you dodge the bullets of bad brain chemistry, you’ll still lose family and friends. You’ll fall in and out of love. You’ll get sick.

To quote the Bible, “shit’s gonna happen at a diarrhea party.”* And if you want to write a sad song, it’ll certainly be easier to do that when you’ve come out the other side. 

*Timothicus 5:12 

But here’s the thing: Depression stops you from creating. 

I’ve written songs about being depressed, but I wrote them when I wasn’t depressed.

I just went through a really bad time in early 2025. It was, without question, the longest period of depression I’ve ever experienced. My work suffered, both professionally and artistically. I’ve got a strong support system and some fairly healthy coping skills, so I was never in danger — I want that to be clear, because it’s sort of the whole fuckin’ point of this long-ass essay — but man, was I depressed.

During that time, I wrote 0 songs and recorded…uh, let me check…0 songs.

Somehow, my depression did not get me out of bed and into the studio. My depression did not make me eggs while I wrote short stories. It didn’t drive me to the store, and it didn’t help me take showers. Mostly, it just sat around and watched me masturbate. 

Morpheus: “Red pill or blue pill?” Neo: [masturbates furiously]

Anxiety isn’t much of a muse, either. 

My band, otherfather, has been working on an album for six years. That’s a sort-of true statement; we’ve all had parts of the album on our computers for six years, but we’d go months between meetings. Sometimes, we’d go months without much contact at all. 

I can’t speak for the other two guys, but for me, anxiety was a big part of that. Oh, hell, I can sort of speak for them — we were all dealing with stuff, and that nebulous “stuff” stopped us from creating. 

If you want to create, you need to be healthy. You need to be in a state where you can think of good ideas and recognize bad ideas. You need to shower and eat. 

While you might need to feel something difficult while you’re creating in order for it to come out in your art, you need to be able to leave that stuff behind you when you leave your studio (or practice room, or machine shop, or wherever you create). 

Difficult feelings like grief and sadness are colors that you can use in your art. They’re also things that you can leave on your palette. You don’t have to carry them around with you. 

I’m gonna wrap this up by talking briefly about suicide. 

Sorry, it’s gonna get a little heavy. Let’s watch the Thong Song again real quick. 

Oops, sorry, that was the unreleased Sisqo video that he recorded for “Unleash the Dragon,” in which a normal-sized Sisqo somehow kills a full-size dragon by doing a backflip. 

It’s a step down from the Thong Song, but it has its moments. Pretty sure it’s also about butts. Make sure you watch all 7 minutes.

Okay, with that out of the way: I have had two friends who died from suicide (and not after I forced them to watch “Unleash the Dragon”). Both were musicians. 

And I’m gonna be brutally honest: I have trouble hearing their music without thinking about how they died. It tears me apart sometimes.

Dana Anderson was my mentor. He taught me how to talk about songs critically, and how to look at my own songs to find things that could be improved. He was constantly writing, which made me feel like I was falling behind if I didn’t write something new every week. 

The last time I saw him was at an open mic. He played some new songs, and they were dark. I asked him if he was okay, and he said yes. I asked him for the lyrics to one of those songs, and by the time I got home, he’d sent them to me; not as a preexisting document, but in a series of text messages.

As I was reading them, he texted me a voice memo he’d just recorded where he played the song. That’s how much he cared about sharing his songwriting.

He has some perfect songs. I believe that within a few decades, someone with a big name will stumble onto his catalog, and pretty soon he’ll have a Wikipedia page and a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame (assuming we have one, I haven’t checked). 

When I listen to any of his songs, though, my first thought is: Fuck, Dana, why’d you have to do it. 

What’s more frustrating is that I’ve already met a few well-meaning people who didn’t know Dana, but they know how he died — and when speaking about his art, some of those folks have a reverence for the circumstances of his death that I absolutely despise. I’ve also heard a couple of songs about how he died, written by people who didn’t know him or only met him once.

To be clear, I want them to write songs about Dana. I wrote one myself. I want people to respect his incredible body of work. But I don’t want them to respect the disease that killed him. 

Nathan only made one album of his own, and it’s brilliant. 

I told him that, and I made him sign a copy of it. It’s jazz, but he wrote lyrics to a couple of songs, and he knocked those out of the park — like just about everything else he tried his hand at. 

Nathan and I grew up a few blocks from each other, and we had a band in high school. We were roommates for a few months in college, and we went on two tours together. I probably wouldn’t be playing music if it weren’t for Nathan. We talked with each other about depression. I thought he was in a good place when he suddenly disappeared and died.

A few months after that, I told one of his family members that I missed him as a person for a long time before I missed the way he played music. They called me out on that lie:

“Oh, I don’t feel that way at all. Nathan was his music.”

They were right, of course. He lived to play, and he left behind a beautiful record that has every bit of him inside of it. You can go hear his genius right now.

Still, for years, I couldn’t listen to it for very long. When I did, I just start thinking: fuck, Nathan, why’d you have to do it. 

I’m finally getting over that, and I know that I’ll get there with Dana’s stuff. 

My friend Dave Werner talked about his depression constantly. He told me about unsuccessful suicide attempts. He also tried to treat his issues, for the sake of his family. He did not die of depression.

I listen to his music just about every week, and it feels like he’s stopping by for coffee. 

Suicide infects how people can engage with your art.

If you’re a lyricist, people might start digging through your lyrics for clues about how you felt. If you’re a painter, maybe they’ll interpret your use of Prussian blue as a cry for help. Or maybe they’ll just have trouble engaging altogether, since they’ll be thinking about what happened. 

In any case, you won’t be around to comfort them. You won’t be around to explain what you really meant. You won’t be there to tell your nephew that he shouldn’t follow your example, or the struggling kid that people will accept her more when she gets to college. You won’t hear your next favorite song. You won’t see the concert that would have pointed your artistic compass in an entirely new direction.

When you’re depressed, you might not care about any of that stuff. But if you’re reading this and you’re not currently depressed, I bet you care right now. 

This is when you should do something about it. 

Pictured: Sisqo, doing something (touching himself) about it (an unleashed dragon). 

“So, okay, I’m depressed, anxious, or otherwise fucked up. What now?”

Shit, I was hoping that you wouldn’t ask that. Uh…fuck.

Look: Whether or not you consider yourself an artist, there’s something you do that makes you a more complete human, and you need to be healthy in order to do it. 

So you need to handle your depression. I know that it can feel pointless. I know exactly, precisely how pointless it can feel. 

But you can get the skills you need to cope. Lots of people do it, including every great artist who ever lived a life worth copying. 

You might not ever be 100%, where you feel fantastic all of the time. With some work, though, you can get to a solid 70 or 80, and that’s where most “healthy” people thrive. You can find habits (say, practicing rudimentary backflips) that help you when you’re not depressed that will make things easier when that big, ugly, early-days CGI dragon rears its head. 

“It is done. I have backflipped this dragon to death. You may now unleash another dragon.”

Coping skills aren’t magic Sisqo backflips that end depressive periods instantly. They just keep you going when you’re in those dark places, and they help you get out the other side a little bit earlier than you would otherwise. 

There’s something out there that works for you.

For me, meditation and exercise are key. While I was depressed this year, I ran a few half marathons on my own. That won’t work for everyone, and I realize that (I mainly just wanted to brag that I did it). But I’d been running for months before I got depressed, so it was easier to keep exercising when I was suffering.

If you can start creating habits before you’re in a depressive or anxious state, it’s a lot easier to stick with those habits when you need them. Good habits will pull you out earlier.

So, run, I guess, or sit in a space and just try to be mindful for 20 minutes. What else? Uh…therapy’s great, I hear. Here’s a site where you can find therapists based on your income and insurance.

Religion works for some folks. Some people need brain pills (with medical oversight, of course, not the ones that you can get from that dude who hangs out on Cherokee and calls himself Normal Clifford). Some people get pets.

Look, man, I don’t have your answer. You’ve got to find that. 

I just want you to start looking at your options before you need them. If therapy’s too expensive or too big of a commitment, look up a local meditation center. If that’s too much, look up a meditation guide, or read a book. Listen to some classical music. Start with the easiest thing you can think of, then grow from there.

Along the way, stop perpetuating the lie that bad feelings make good art. I don’t want you suffering any more than you have already, or contributing to a culture that tells people that beauty is only attainable through mutilation.

Most of all, I want you here. 

This life is difficult, and the world’s stupid. I need you here to help me make fun of it. 

I need you to write songs that break my heart. I want to see the cartoons you make when you get angry. I want to read the stories you write when you fall in love. I want to see that bookshelf you’re building. I want Christmas cards that tell me how you got your kid to stop picking his nose.

I need you to stay here with the rest of us and help us understand how all of this stuff works. 

If you had a really, really gnarly toe fungus and you couldn’t treat it on your own, you’d get help. You might write a song about it, but only after you picked up the ointment from Walgreens. 

AI believes that toe fungus is treated with two pieces of sharp metal.

Mental health issues are much more likely to kill you than toe fungus. They stop you from creating, and they hurt what you create. Work on them before they work you over. 

You owe it to your friends and your family. You owe it to yourself. You owe it to your art.

Okay. I’ve said my piece. Now, let’s watch Sisqo’s band break up immediately after they reunited. 

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Categories
Non-Fiction Uncategorized

Jaded

grayscale photography of man with paper bag on his head
Photo by Arianna Jadé on Pexels.com

Or: How to Love Music When Nobody’s Listening

One night in 2013 or so, I was playing at a restaurant that was world-renowned for its food. It had been featured on food TV shows, which I had not watched, but people drove from all over the country to eat at this place. 

It was in a rough part of town, but people still came. The prices were reasonable; the food was uniquely satisfying. 

But the restaurant was not world-renowned for its live music, and for good reason; nobody was going there for the music. I played there for three hours, tucked into a corner by the entrance. The PA piped my playing into the dining room, and to most diners, I was pure wallpaper. 

grayscale photo of a wet stomach
Finding images for this was really hard, but I feel like you need images to keep reading. Here’s someone’s stomach. Photo by Anna Tarazevich on Pexels.com

On many nights, people would look at me dumbfounded when leaving, saying something to the effect of:

“Oh, that was live music? I thought it was the radio.”

This was an incredible compliment, and I’ll explain why a bit later. But at the time, it was the most grievous insult I could imagine. 

I played there regularly for a couple of years.

Each time, I would become more jaded. Nobody gave a damn about the music. Very few people clapped, or even acknowledged me, even when they were standing right next to me.

I felt like a little kid, pushed into the corner to do his talent show while the adults concentrated on truly great things: fine food, good company. There was no reason for me to be there, except that I needed the money ($50, plus tips, which were unpredictable) and the food. 

funky skull graffiti on locked roll down black door
Again, this photo has nothing to do with the content. But is there anything more punk rock than going the wrong way? Photo by Willo M. on Pexels.com

Performers were allotted one dish from the regular menu. Every time I played, I got a steak, which was the best thing there. I would take it home and split it with my partner; it was usually the only great meal we’d have that month. 

The final time I played at this place, I stumbled up to the bar after three hours of performance. My voice was raw and my fingers hurt, and I was particularly annoyed at the night’s crowd. I’d made about $10 in tips, and I had to get up early the next morning. I ordered the steak. 

“That’s not for you,” the bartender said. “Order something else.” 

“I always get that.”

“Not anymore,” he said. “We can do sandwiches, no entrees.” 

I felt like a little kid again. I angrily ordered something else and resolved to never play the joint again. 

Around that time, my musical life had pulled back.

I was in a band, brotherfather, but we’d put each other in various types of creative headlocks, and no new music was happening. I believe that the Chimps were starting, but we were in early days. And most disturbingly, to me: I hadn’t written a new song in over a year. 

This was new to me. As a teenager, I wrote a new song every week. My output had gradually slowed down, but I was always writing; at one point, to restart myself creatively, I wrote a song a day for an entire month (only two or three of the songs were any good, but who’s counting?). 

When I sat down with a guitar, nothing happened. I’d just start drinking and put the guitar down. Eventually, I stopped picking it up. 

cheerful woman with guitar in black and white
A photogenic woman who is happy to be playing an A chord, badly. Photo by Alina Rossoshanska on Pexels.com

My only truly fulfilling musical outlet was my semi-regular gig at John Brown’s in Marion, Illinois. Even that was becoming endangered; one night, I texted John to set up a date. This is paraphrasing his response, which I’m sure was less harsh but no less direct:

No. You’ve been jaded lately, man. You’re not making it about the music. 

That was the first time I’d been called out. John is one of the greatest friends I’ve made through music, and I value his opinion implicitly. And he was done with me — I was playing like an asshole. 

The worst part was that I wasn’t sure whether I cared.

I was checked out. Why should I care about playing music if the crowd never cared? Why not just sit at home and watch the latest Netflix 7-part documentary about a white girl who disappeared? 

Around that time, I went to an open mic in St. Louis and purposely bombed. I made fun of the Arch, the Blues, and the Cardinals. By the end, two guys wanted to fight me. I was just trying to feel something, anything, and to get any reaction from the crowd. I got the reaction, but I came in angry and left angry. Nothing changed.

I would love to tell you that I snapped out of it, several months later.

I did not. My band remained creatively deadlocked, and I started playing with the Chimps; our shows gained a steady audience, and I wrote a couple new songs. 

But I was still angry at certain crowds, and angry at myself when my music didn’t come out the way that it sounded in my head. I was unwilling to do any work to align my art with my actions; I’d already done the work. It was the audience’s fault for not recognizing the time and effort that I’d already spent. 

young man with greasepaint on face on street
Matt Basler. Photo by vikesh zen on Pexels.com

There were moments that started to shake off my rust. The most profound was just prior to a Chimps show, where Jesse Irwin pulled us in for a pre-game huddle. We were nervous; he was nervous. 

“There are people in that audience tonight who dream about being able to get up in front of people and sing,” he said. “There are people who would pay anything to be able to do this. And we get to do it.” 

Becoming un-jaded is a process, and no single moment shakes you out of it.

Recovery depends on the people you surround yourself with, to a great extent.

I am grateful that I’ve surrounded myself with great people. This is kind of becoming a name-drop piece, but I’ll drop a few more — Chris Turnbaugh and Dustin Sholtes, my bandmates in brotherfather (now otherfather), have a consistently wonderful worldview when it comes to music. My Chimps bandmates also lifted me up.

But it’s easy to slip back into the ether of jealousy and resentment. When my friend Nathan died, I was right back to square one. 

We grew up together and we were college roommates. The man was the greatest musician I have ever played with, and I have played, consistently, with great musicians. He was a true genius, and he’d been that way since he was a kid. 

Nathan is not pictured above; the embed pulled that image in, and I don’t know who these guys are. Maybe they played on Nathan’s record, Catch? Anyway, if you hover over that photo, you’ll get Play controls for Nathan’s album.

He took his own life for a plethora of personal reasons, but also for no reason at all. 

He wasn’t jaded about music, in my experience, but music didn’t save him. I’ve written songs about him, but he will never hear them. We played a memorial show for him, but he was not there. 

Eventually, you have to sit down with your art and ask it serious questions. What am I even doing? How much money do I spend on this bullshit? Wouldn’t it be better to just stop, and do something more productive with my time and energy? 

Who is this for? 

My friend, Dana Anderson, struggled with these questions.

The last time I spoke to him, it seemed to me that he’d answered them. He had quit drinking and written songs that were more complex than anything he’d written in years. They were very, very good — but also a lot darker than his earlier stuff, and that was saying something. 

Then, he killed himself. When you do that, you take all the pain that’s building up inside you and pass it along to everyone who loves you. You also mess up your art, in a lot of ways; now, every Dana song sounds like a warning sign. All of his magnificent poetry is colored by his last moments. 

Dana was frequently jaded. A lot of his bad energy rubbed off on me. But he was also the opposite, as is frequently the case with great artists. We’d play shows where he’d switch from his set of glorious originals to tried-and-true hokum like Wagon Wheel and Folsom Prison Blues. When the crowd was listening, he’d gradually switch back to his own stuff, and keep them on his side. Even if he wasn’t always successful, he knew how to work a crowd. 

On many nights, he understood that he was there for the audience, and that the inverse was not necessarily true. 

I went back and added this embed of a Dana Michael Anderson song. If you haven’t listened to him, please dig into his stuff.

When Dana died, I was playing at John Brown’s the next night.

We put a few of his songs into our set. The crowd did not know his story, but they threw themselves into his songs. 

That place consistently has the best audience in the world. They truly love the music, thanks to the owner and staff, who have cultivated that love. I often describe it as an oasis of music in Southern Illinois, a small-town joint that feels quite a bit bigger. 

They appreciated us that night. But I would bet that most people drove home thinking about how much they’d spent, or how the baseball game on the TVs had turned out. What they’d do tomorrow, what they had to do next week. The music was at the back of their minds, if it was there at all.

And I absolutely love that. 

Nobody needs to care about your music for it to mean something.

A few months ago, I went to see my friend Michael Ahlvers (Lefty Daytona) play a show in Alton with my newest musical friend, Troy Brenningmeyer. Here’s what Mike sounds like. 

As you might have gathered, Mike is tremendous. When I played with him for the first time, I remember thinking, this guy sings well, plays well, writes well, and he’s good looking. What the hell am I bringing to the table, again? 

Troy is a world-class musician. I was watching his music lessons on YouTube before I figured out that he was local, and I’m still shocked that I’m playing with him. He’s also a fundamentally kind person, and he’ll play shows if he likes the music — I often assume that great players will only play for a certain minimum amount of money, but that’s simply not true. They play music because they love playing.

At this show, there were a few people, but not many. Mike and Troy played like the room was packed. I played a few tunes and truly enjoyed myself. 

“I don’t care if people show up,” Mike told me, between sets. “It’s nice if they do, though.” 

Becoming unjaded is a journey, but there it is, distilled perfectly into a couple of sentences. If he’d said that to me five years ago, it would have rolled right past me. 

But that’s how you become an artist. That’s how you make something that truly matters. That’s the mindset that leads to songs like this: 

“Autumn Bird,” by Michael Ahlvers.

You can’t write like that when you’re jaded. You write like that when you love something deeply and you need to share it with the world.

Let me engage with those Big Questions that I mentioned earlier. 

What am I even doing? 

Playing music, you idiot. 

How much money do I spend on this bullshit? 

Money comes and goes, John. When you were right out of college, you spent a thousand bucks on a hot tub that you used for three months. You got your guitar second-hand from a Brazilian priest (true story) and it cost a lot less. Next question.

Wouldn’t it be better to just stop, and do something more productive with my time and energy?

Maybe, but what? I’m not building any houses for the houseless, and I’m not effecting any great social change. I am a songwriter, and more generally, a writer.

I am good at that. I have spent the time necessary to become good. And it’s vitally important for me.

And the biggest question: Who is this for? 

Me. I need to get my thoughts into the world, even if they just bounce off the walls and right back to me. If people listen, that’s tremendous. If the songs connect with them, that’s the greatest thing that can happen. I value every single one of those moments.

Here’s a recent one. I played in Copenhagen, Denmark, and I got the bartender to stop tending bar and come and listen. Every musician knows that’s a big compliment.

It was a great night. The crowd was tremendous and I connected with them in a way that made me profoundly satisfied.

But if I just play for myself and for the other people on stage with me, that’s almost just as good. In fact, it’s essential for making those other moments happen: If I focus on whether people like my music, there’s too much of my ego in this. It’s easy to become disappointed when they ignore a punchline or talk over a Big, Great Lyric. 

If I play for myself, I have one person to impress.

And if I have no expectations, I can have more gratitude when a show goes really well. Ironically, I have to play for myself to get rid of my ego as a performer. 

That extends to shows where I’m not the focus. Where I’m wallpaper. If someone says, “I thought you were the radio,” that means that they think I’m good enough to be on the radio. It also means that they were able to focus on the great food and company that made them drive out to a sketchy street in Dogtown. I did my job.

Music has infinite utility. That’s why venues pay musicians. It can help people make connections with the people around them (“say, this guy sucks shit, don’t you think?”), it can help people enjoy a meal, it can help set the mood in an art gallery. And most of the time, it’s in the background. Wallpaper. But it can be really good wallpaper.

And yes, occasionally, someone will hear a lyric or listen to a guitar solo and have a profound revelation that changes how they think about life. But if that happened every night, it’d be pretty goddamn exhausting. 

If you’re feeling jaded about art, I can tell you confidently that you’re thinking too much about it. Don’t play for those incredible moments of connection; play for yourself.

Art is the most important thing you do, other than maybe spending time with your family.

It’s rarely what pays you the most, and it’s often difficult to do consistently. But money isn’t a great measure of humanity, and “easy” stuff is often the most worthless.

When I meet people, I describe myself as a songwriter, not as a content writer (my day job) or anything else. It is the most interesting thing about me, regardless of whether I play well or not. It’s how I meet new people, and it’s how I stay engaged with the world.

This weekend, we celebrated Dana Anderson’s life. A dozen or so talented musicians played his stuff. The place was completely packed. Everyone was there for Dana’s music. 

Halfway through an incredible performance of one of his songs (Bad Tattoo), I looked around the room. Well over half the people were talking. They were probably telling stories about Dana, or just talking about the long drive to Granite from wherever-the-hell they’re from. They were missing some of the best lyrics in his enormous catalog of genius songs, and that was perfectly fine. They were under no pressure to listen, and the fact that they were talking to their friends and family did not mean that they were grieving any less, or that they appreciated our friend any differently from those who were listening actively.

To my left, there was a couple holding onto each other, transfixed. They were silently mouthing every word, hugging one another during the choruses. 

I went back to the green room and got ready to sing.

Categories
Non-Fiction

Yelling Into the Abyss About Abortion

I am going to start writing stuff where I just scream a bunch of thoughts and make poop jokes. You know, lighthearted rambling. So, logically, I want to kick off by talking about abortion.

Specifically, I want to talk to my pro-life friends. Hey, how you doing? What have you been up to?

Me? Well, lately, I’ve been truly amazed at the artisanal craftsmanship of A.I.-generated art.

If you believe that life begins at conception, I will never try to talk you out of that. It is a sincere and deeply held belief. If you believe that it is a sin, I can’t argue with you — I certainly can’t speak for God.

But hopefully, I can explain how you can balance those views with what happened in Ohio last night. A red state. A state filled with people who believe what you believe, and no less sincerely than you.

Why should we care about Ohio, anyway?

Well, normally, we shouldn’t care about Ohio, but right now, it’s important.

Sure, Ohio isn’t perfect. It’s the state where a woman stabbed her boyfriend for eating all of her salsa (totally justifiable). It’s also where this guy tried to have sex with a van:

man accused of having sex with a van. it's a mugshot. His face looks bruised and he's sketchy as hell.

“Officers who questioned him said he appeared to be intoxicated.”

But besides that, Ohio is what you might call a good, Christian state. 73% of the population identifies as Christian, and they’re staunchly Republican: Trump beat Biden by about 8% in 2020.

And as we all know, Christians voted for Trump because of his sound moral character, a part of which was his opposition to abortion.

Two guys who have never, ever paid for an abortion.

So if you’re going to pass pro-life laws, Ohio seems to be your place. But it isn’t.

Last night, voters approved a constitutional amendment ensuring access to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care. And they passed it pretty resoundingly, too.

56.6% to 43.3% — you don’t get numbers like that in modern politics. To some pro-life folks, the result was shocking.

So if you’re on that side, you might feel like you just got home from a long shift, only to realize that your boyfriend ate every last bit of your On The Border Chunky Picante. Put down the knife; the Democrats didn’t do this alone.

In Ohio, about 20% of Republicans and 66% of independents supported abortion rights.

Why? According to exit polls, it’s because they’re deeply concerned about van-human hybrids.

If a van has a baby, what do you even call it? There’s no good portmanteau. It’s not as funny as a human cow or humonkey. It’s just an abomination that leaks oil all over the place, and that guy up there is clearly working on it. That is why he is smiling.

We need abortions for vans, if nothing else. And by the way, we also need AI models that can more accurately respond to the prompt, “minivan receiving surgical procedure.”

A.I.-generated painting of a minivan receiving surgery. It's not very good.

Okay, the real reason is that bodily autonomy is a cornerstone of our society.

Do not handwave this away. I know you’ve heard this before, and it’s probably not too compelling if you’ve listened to pastors and priests talk about dead babies for the last 30+ years of your life.

But I promise, we’ll get to the babies. For now, actually think about bodily autonomy for a minute.

This is how some people have remained pro-life while supporting, or at least acknowledging, the right to an abortion.

Bodily autonomy is not a biblical value; it is a social contract. It establishes that, in our nation, we own our bodies, even if the state can take everything else. We can be forced to work, forced to sit in a prison cell, or forced to die, but we will always control our own bodies.

We even extend that consideration to the worst people we have; you couldn’t force a mass murderer to be an organ donor, for example.

Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger, mass murderer, probably not an organ donor.

If you did force convicts to give up their kidneys, livers — hell, just a bit of bone marrow — it could save lives. You could structure a law so that it only took effect after the convict has died. The murderer loses nothing, and good people would live who would otherwise die.

Sounds great, right? Except that it would open up a thousand avenues for abuse and horror.

You’d quickly see judges giving harsher sentences, reasoning that the dregs of society would be better as meat-pools for the fine upstanding citizens of This Great Country.

And given that 44% (holy shit, really?! 44%?) of our prisoners are there for drug offenses, you’d have people losing their skin, literally, because they got caught with a bit of pot. That would probably lead to some interesting names for marijuana strains, but it certainly wouldn’t be good for society.

A.I. generated man holding marijuana

“Gimme that Organ-Oregano No-Rejection Purple Bart Simpson Kushy Cow,” or some dumb shit like that.

Bodily autonomy is so important, the government can’t even offer to buy it.

This is not a hypothetical. This year, Massachusetts proposed a program that would reduce prison sentences for prisoners who donate organs. You’re in jail for 20 years, but you can knock off a couple of months if you match with a bone marrow recipient. Reasonable, right?

Well, absolutely not. The plan was criticized, rightfully, as dystopian and dehumanizing. Once you’ve got people selling their bodies to get out of jail, you’re on the fast track to putting people in jail to get their organs, and that would be demonic.

More pertinently, the program violates our understanding of bodily autonomy. We believe that bodily autonomy is so important, it should not be the subject to societal or legal influences, period.

You control your body. Nobody else does. Nobody else can. It’s yours. There are many like it, but this one is yours.

We acknowledge the right to bodily autonomy for murderers; we even extend it to dead bodies.

You cannot even force a corpse to donate organs. They (or their family) must make that decision.

And while there’s a really reasonable argument that organ donation programs should be opt-out rather than opt-in, that’s not how we currently do it here. We’re an opt-in, first-person consent system. And even in European countries that have opt-out systems, in practice, they don’t work that way — the systems use family authorization, so families can override the presumption of consent.

But we’re talking about the U.S., so let’s leave Sweden out of it (as usual). Here’s how Donate Life Colorado describes our country’s resistance to opt-out donation:

Presumed consent is not in alignment with American legal principles: Generally, laws in our country are built heavily on the core concepts of individual rights and liberties. Presumed consent may be contrary to these fundamental legal principles.

– Donate Life Colorado (linked above)

Fundamental, they say. Legal, they say. Principles, they say. There were also some other words in there.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

You don’t have to be pro-abortion to be pro-choice.

You can still care about babies while respecting the importance of bodily autonomy. In fact, I think you should probably care about babies no matter what.

Yes. I said it: I’m pro-baby, even when they’re generated by A.I.

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Pro-life doesn’t mean anti-choice. That’s what Ohio told us last night. The people — who are, again, deeply religious, outside of the Salsa Slasher and the Minivan Molester — were confronted with a simple question. They answered that they value women’s ability to make decisions about their own bodies.

That was the correct decision from a societal standpoint, full stop. You cannot force me to donate an organ, and you cannot force women to donate theirs to another being.

You can recognize that right without supporting abortion. It requires nuance, which Americans are terrible at. But if you’ve made it this far, I trust that you can understand that there’s a middle ground.

If you are against abortion, you can support adoption charities. You can support access to birth control, or welfare programs; if you don’t like those things, you can support mutual aid. Give people viable options and support them as they raise their children. Be pro-life.

I have many friends that do this. They are great people, and they put more energy into this than I’ve put into anything (including the energy I just spent trying to get DALL-E to create a photo of a mouse with human hands smoking a joint while tapdancing on the moon).

No, dammit, the MOUSE should HAVE human hands, and it should be ON the moon, and the joint needs to be IN his CUTE LITTLE MOUTH.

My friends have found a way to fight for what they believe within a shared society, which has ethical structures that conflict with their moral convictions. I want everyone to do that. Every Christian, Muslim, atheist, and theological noncognitivist out there.

So to be clear, if you are against abortion, I have a place for you at my table. Your belief does not make me love you any less or differently. I respect people with principles, even when I don’t share the same principles. That’s what a society is.

And last night, my “side” didn’t “win,” and your “side” didn’t “lose.” Democracy simply spoke. It said that fighting against bodily autonomy is the wrong path.

11/8/2023

Categories
Fiction Horror

Jericho

old three-story house in disrepair

April 17, 1968.

First they lined us all up and made us get on our knees with our hands behind our heads. 

Momma asked if she could keep her hands out in front to pray and the big man said no, so she put her hands behind her head too and she tried not to look over at us, but I was looking at her real hard when the little man fired the gun at her. Then I closed my eyes tight and I heard two more bangs and I fell over after the third one.

They shot Momma right in the head, and that’s where they shot Daddy and my brother, too. When the little man aimed at me he must’ve looked away because it just hit the side of my cheek and ripped it open. I wanted to holler, but instead I fell down like Momma did and tried my best not to move. 

The big man came over and took Momma’s necklace that Daddy gave her last Christmas. He used his shotgun to lift up her skirt, then put it back down. 

The little man walked over to Daddy and took off his shirt and his wristwatch. They didn’t come near me or my brother, which was good because I was pretending to be as dead as the rest of them, and I’m no good at pretending. I should have waited real long after they left before I got up, but my cheek was smarting something fierce and I figured they might come back. 

I walk over to Momma to check that she was really dead and she really was dead. I didn’t have to check Daddy or my brother ’cause I could tell.

They’d taken us to the woods, but not far from the road where they’d found us. By the time I got up, the little man and big man had walked back out there to our car where the thin man was waiting. Then the three of them started going through our stuff and I turned away.

I was crying and I was going to start running as hard as I could when this funny-looking kid grabs my arm.

“You be quiet now,” the kid says. “Lemme get a look at you.”

He brings out a handkerchief and licks it and starts dabbing at my face with it and it smarts. While he’s doing that I look into his eyes to try to see if he’s friendly. I can’t tell right away. His eyes are green and they stand out from the rest of his face. His cheekbones are real big and they’re up high like Frank Sinatra’s, except he doesn’t look much like Frank Sinatra otherwise. His hair is a rusty color and his skin is dusty and yellow. He looks strong but a little too thin for his age. He reminds me of a stray dog that followed me home (back when I still went to school). Momma said it was a pitbull and Daddy said it had worms, and neither one of them wanted it in the house.

The boy has got overalls on and no shirt underneath, and he concentrates real hard when he’s batting at you with his handkerchief. You can tell right away he don’t touch girls much, not because he’s rough but because he’s way too careful like I’m gonna break apart in his hands. 

I don’t break and he gets done batting at me. He looks out at the road and I can tell he’s scared, and that makes me think that maybe he’s friendly.

“You stay quiet,” he says. “Come this way.” 

I turn to follow him and I watch my step to stay quiet like he told me. He ain’t as quiet as me. He steps on sticks and they crack under him but he doesn’t pay it much mind. 

He looks down at Momma when we pass by her and his face looks cold, and I start to wonder again if he’s friendly, and I start making plans for what I could do if he ain’t friendly. I notice he’s carrying an old rifle in his big dusty hands and I wonder if he’d had it out the whole time. He uses it like a walking stick or a machete, pushing back the branches of the prickly bushes or putting it against the ground when he needs some extra help climbing. A few times he puts the barrel-end right into the ground and I wonder if the gun even shoots anymore. 

We walk through the woods for a long time before he talks again.

It feels like hours but that’s mostly cause my cheek is smarting bad. I wipe it with my sleeve and there’s a lot of blood. A few bugs start following me and landing on my cheek and I have to shoo them away, which bothers me worse than the smarting or the blood.

“Where are we going?” I finally ask, and he turns to me and I think he’s gonna shush me like Daddy would. Instead he just gives me a look like you’re still here? We’re deeper in the woods now, and in this light, his eyes seem more hazel than green. They still look odd. They’re deep in his head and they dart around like flies caught in a mason jar.

“I ain’t decided yet.”

“Then who are you, then?”

“Somebody.”

“That ain’t a name. What’s your name?”

A bug lands on his face and he screws up his nose a bit to get it off. When he scrunches his nose, he looks even more like that old dog with the worms. 

“A lot of power in a name,” he says. “Don’t think I’m telling you mine ‘til I know yours.”

“I’m Julie,” I say. I’m lying, because what Somebody said about names seemed true enough to me and I don’t have a lot of cards left to hold onto. 

“How old are you?”

“11,” I lie. I’m actually 12 and a half, almost 13, but I figure if he thinks I’m still a little girl he might be nicer to me.

“Ain’t safe on these roads, ‘specially if you got a car. What were you all doing out here?”

“We was going somewhere else,” I tell him. “Mighty good reason to be on the road, I’d say.”

That shuts Somebody up, which makes me uneasy because I want him talking. We keep moving, and I keep feeling uneasy, so I try to get on his nerves the way I can with my brother.

“You ask a lot of questions,” I say. “You fancy yourself an Ark Linkletter or something?”

“Art,” he says and he smiles big and I see that his teeth are a little too small. “Not Ark.” 

“Well, you’re neither one of ‘em.”

He smiles more but he doesn’t say nothing else, so I don’t press him. The ground is dry but the air is humid, and I have to breathe hard to keep up with Somebody’s pace. Pretty soon, we get to the edge of the woods and there’s a big open field out in front of us. He starts walking into it, so I do too. 

“You decide where we’re going?” I ask. I try not to let him hear that I’m nervous but I’m bad at pretending. 

“I got an idea,” he says, and I can tell he’s not keen on saying much else. My forehead’s sweaty and my hair falls down in front of my eyes, so I push it back up. I notice he’s looking at me so I try to keep him talking.

“Did you know those men?”

“I don’t know their names,” he says. “I wish I did. But they’s always out here.”

He looks at his gun and his Adam’s apple moves like he’s swallowing air, then he looks back at me. 

“They did my folks like they did yours, ‘cept they didn’t try to shoot me. If they did, I would’ve…”

His voice is uneven and I feel like I just heard something come off-kilter inside him. Something that was loose and wobbly to begin with. But when he talks again, he’s back together and sounds like he did before.

“Well, I probably would’ve died, if I’m honest. He only missed you because he’s weak. He didn’t want to look you in the eyes when he did it. He hasn’t been with the other two for long.” 

All of what he says goes in one ear and out the other, because I’m starting to feel like my head is on fire, and I’m most thankful that we’ve stopped moving so I can catch my breath. I decide I don’t care too much about the three men and why they did what they did, provided I can get away from them and stay away. 

“So where are we going?” I say.

“Middle of this field,” Somebody says, and I get uneasy at the way he says it. He starts walking again and I follow him.

We get to the middle of the field and he turns toward me and he points the gun at me, except now he’s holding it like a real gun and not like a walking stick or a machete. 

“What did you say your name was?” he says.

“Julie,” I say again. 

“Julie,” he says, “You got anything of value on you?”

“No,” I says, and my heart is beating so hard I can feel it in my head. 

“That’s a shame,” he says. He lowers the gun a little. “You gotta learn, Julie, that there ain’t nice people in this world.”

“You seem nice,” I say, and I mean it to be sarcastic, and he takes it that way and laughs. 

“There ain’t nice people, and Jesus don’t protect you when things go wrong.”

“Okay,” I say. I don’t know what else to say. I don’t really care about Jesus.

“You believe in kindness, Julie? After what you seen today?”

“I don’t give it much thought.” I say, and it’s the truth.

He tips the barrel of the gun up towards the sky. 

“You start thinking on it,” he says, and he keeps walking into the field. I don’t know what else to do so I follow him. 

We come to an old two-story house.

These days all houses are old, but this one’s real old. It looks like something I saw in a Vincent Price film. There’s a rickety porch and all the windows are broken. Some scraps of blue paint are hanging onto the wood and part of the roof has caved in.

When we’re close, Somebody tells me to get down on the ground, and I do, and so does he. We lay there for a few minutes and he just stares at it. Then he gets up and he opens the door and we walk inside. 

The house has big, high ceilings and there’s a chain where a chandelier used to hang. I know that ‘cause there’s some broken glass on the floor, and the metal part of the chandelier is sitting up against a big staircase with three or four missing stairs. 

We’re standing in what Momma would call a living room, but it don’t seem like much of a place for living. A big blue chair sits in one corner but it has orange stains on it and I don’t want to sit on it. 

There’s a little bookshelf with no books. There’s a little fireplace with no fire. There’s a coffee table, and plenty of open cans of food laying all around it. I wonder if there’s more food somewhere, cause I’m starting to get hungry in spite of myself, but Somebody speaks up before I could ask.

“We ain’t got girl clothes,” he says, “and you can’t wear none of mine.”

His eyes are darting around again. He looks at me, and I don’t feel any kindness coming from him. 

“It looks like you ain’t even wearing none of yours,” I say, on account of how he’s got no shirt under his overalls. He either doesn’t get the joke or he doesn’t think it’s funny. I think about that old dog that followed me home, and I think to myself that I got it wrong in the first place — I’m more like that old dog than he is, and I’m just hoping he doesn’t send me away.

“The sink works. Wash your face and don’t leave any blood in the sink. Be quick because we don’t got too much time. They’ll be back soon.”

I feel like I’m cold all of the sudden and I think about asking who’s gonna be back soon, but I already know and it don’t make much sense to ask dumb questions. So I go to the sink and I wash my face like he said to, and I walk back to the not-so-much-a-living room.

“Turn around,” he says. I do. 

“Turn back around,” he says. I do, and the bookshelf is gone, and instead there’s a little narrow place big enough for a person to fit through. 

“My poppa built it,” he says, and he seems proud. 

“It’s nice,” I lie.

He gestures for me to get in, so I do. I always read books about secret passageways hidden in bookshelves, but this isn’t like the ones I read about. Some plaster gets in my hair as I crawl in, and the floor is concrete which hurts my knees. Halfway through, my skirt catches on a nail and tears a little and I curse, and I hear Somebody laugh from behind me. 

The passage opens up after a few twists and turns and I can finally stand up.

It’s pitch black, but Somebody has a kerosene lamp that he lights up, and it gives off enough light to get by on. I look around. We’re in a room that almost isn’t a room — there’s a sleeping bag and a few adventure books on the floor, and not much else. A lightbulb is hanging from the ceiling, which confuses me because Daddy said that houses in the country don’t have electric. In any case, the lightbulb doesn’t seem to work, because Somebody doesn’t even fiddle with it. 

“We’re behind the staircase,” he says. I nod as if that means something to me.

He looks at me hard and I get uncomfortable. His eyes aren’t darting around as much, and they seem bright and green again. 

“Julie,” he says, like he’s trying his lips out for the first time. “It’s a good name.”

“Thank you,” I say. My voice sounds unsteady. 

“You remember what I told you,” he says, real soft. “There ain’t nice people in this world, and Jesus don’t protect you.” 

“I don’t care about Jesus,” I say. My Momma would have hit me for saying that, ‘cept she’s dead, and I mean it. 

He doesn’t look away from me and I feel worried. I’ve read about the things men do to women and little girls. Ravishment, my books called it. 

I look at his face and decide that Somebody isn’t a man. He’s older than me and I’m practically a woman, but he just doesn’t look grown, even though he acts like he is. That doesn’t give me much comfort. One time, I read in the newspaper about some boys who did something bad and it made me cry. I don’t remember what they did, but I remember that I asked Daddy about it and he told me that boys can be the worst parts of men at times. I expect that’s especially the case when they’re playing like they’re already men when they ain’t. 

When I talk again, I talk slow and try to sound strong.

“So, you ain’t nice. You’re gonna hurt me, then?”

He just looks at me for a second, and it occurs to me that he likes that he can make me uncomfortable. 


“No,” he says, finally. “But that don’t make me nice.”

I didn’t like that, so I decided to let him have it. 

“You try anything, you won’t like what happens,” I say. My voice is shaking a little. “You lay a finger on me, I’ll —”

He put his hand over my mouth and I thought for a second that I should bite him, but then I hear other voices from the other side of the wall.

And suddenly, ravishment seems not so bad in the grand scheme of things, because I knew for certain that the three men were in this house with us, and that Somebody expected to do something to them, then probably something to me afterwards. He was playing like a grown-up, and he was good enough at pretending that I’d followed him back to this house and gone along with it. I felt foolish.

“We’re gonna murder ‘em,” Somebody whispered. His face was close to mine, and his breath was hot and made my skin itch. “You hate ‘em as much as I do, I know that. You’re gonna get their attention, and I’m gonna come up behind them and blow off their heads.”

He mimed like he was shooting them, but his hand was shaking and his eyes were buzzing around again. I just nodded. I didn’t want to talk because I thought Somebody was whispering too loud and I was scared that they was gonna hear us. 

I took a long look at Somebody’s gun. I don’t know guns much, but I watched Bonanza way back when the TVs were still playing shows, and I’d never seen a gun like that one. It seemed too thin to put a big hole in someone, and even when you’ve got a proper people-killing gun, they don’t always do the job. I was living proof of that.

So I decide I’m gonna run, first chance I get, and try to find somewhere else to lay low. Probably I’ll die in the woods or the fat man will catch me, but I aim to try.

We wait there for at least an hour and listen to the three men carrying on.

They must have been drinking because they were laughing loud, and after a while they sounded like they were fighting, and I know from reading books that laughing and fighting go along with drinking. I’m keen to let them go on drinking and fighting and laughing, but Somebody gets antsy and he starts motioning to me to go through the secret passageway. 

“Let’s wait for them to go to sleep,” I whisper at him, and he looks at me like I’m the school dunce.

“They each sleep in a different room,” he says, “and they lock their doors, ‘cause they don’t trust one another.” He shakes his head and grinds his teeth together and his temples pop out like boiled eggs. “It has to be now, while they’re in the kitchen. That’s where the booze is. That’s where they’ll stay.”

I try to think of another good reason to let them keep drinking and carrying on, but Somebody’s face gets real hard and his big cheekbones turn to steel. His face seems longer and meaner, and he juts at me with the barrel of the gun, and I know he’s playing serious. 

I start crawling through the passage and I hear him behind me. He put out the kerosene lamp and it’s pitch black. Even though it makes no sense in the dark, I’m worried about him trying to see up my skirt, so I move slower than before. 

I get to the end of the passage and it’s a hard wall ‘cause the bookcase is back in place. I crouch up in a ball and I feel Somebody’s hand on my shoulder. He leans in and whispers at me. 

“Feel for a latch on the upper left side.”

I find the latch and work with it for a minute. It finally opens up and I push against the plaster and the secret passageway is open. I crawl out, but Somebody doesn’t crawl after me right away. 

I look back at him as I stand up. My skirt had bunched up a little and he’s looking at my legs. That makes me mad, so I kick at the bookshelf and it slams him in the face. That’s dumb of me, because it makes a big noise, and the men in the kitchen shout curse words.

I hear them moving, but I’m already flying towards the front door as fast as I can.

I let myself look back and I see that the secret passageway is opening up again. 

The men had left the front door open and I run out it and then I run to the right. I figure I’ll take a wide route back towards the woods and lay down in the tall grass if they get too close.

But I’m not as fast as I think, and the three men are out of the house right away. I lay down in the grass, not 100 feet from the house, my stomach tumbling and tumbling. I try to make myself small.

They don’t see me, but they know I’m close. The little man has a rifle and he shoots into the grass. The shot is nowhere near me, and I don’t jump or holler, which is what I expect he was hoping I’d do.

“Who’s out here?” he yells. His voice is bigger than it should be, but he sounds nervous. 

The thin man walks out to the left of the little man and starts looking at the grass. 

“Don’t fire again,” the thin man says. “Waste of ammunition.”

“It was the little girl,” the fat man says. “The girl from today. I saw her skirt when she ran out. White and blue.” 

“Do you think,” the little man starts to say, but then Somebody runs right up to him and shoots him in the head. 

The gun isn’t as loud as the little man’s gun, but it does the job. The little man falls to the ground and his arm moves in and out like he’s trying to make a snow angel. His mouth opens and shuts slowly, and at some point he dies, but I don’t see that because I’m watching what happens next.

Somebody is screaming. His voice is high and thin and it cuts through the air. It probably buys him a few seconds, because it confuses the fat man. Somebody already shot his gun, so he dives down towards the little man’s gun and grabs it and fires at the fat man, once, twice. The fat man falls down and his body doesn’t move at all. Then Somebody aims towards the thin man, but the thin man shoots him first, right in the stomach. 

The thin man looks down at Somebody. I’m close enough to see the expression on the thin man’s face, except he doesn’t really have much of an expression. He just looks at Somebody, who’s thrashing around and holding his guts in place. The two of them look at each other, and Somebody’s mouth is moving like the little man’s mouth was moving, except different, because Somebody is trying to say something. It doesn’t matter because the thin man puts his shoe on Somebody’s mouth and presses his head to the side. He presses down until Somebody stops moving. 

The thin man wipes his shoe off on the porch and looks out towards the grass, straight at where I’m hiding. I try to push myself deep into the grass, and I grip the cool dirt with my fingers and I breathe as slow as I can and try to pretend that I’m just part of the land. But I’m no good at pretending.

“We killed your family today,” the thin man says. He doesn’t say it like it’s a question and he doesn’t say it like he’s proud of it. 

The wind whips up for a second and dies down. I say nothing. I still don’t think he knows where I am, and I decide that if I’m going to die, at least I’m going to make him look for me.

“Killing isn’t what you think it is,” he continues. “It’s not good or bad. If it were, I expect that God would get involved, in one way or another.”

He looks out slightly to my right, now, and I know he doesn’t see me.

“If you’re going to survive out there, you’re going to have to get used to the facts of it,” he says. “And you’d better get started right away.” 

He looks to the left and the right a bit more, then sits down on the porch. He rubs his chin.

“Why don’t you come out and tell me your name,” he says. I don’t say anything. “Mine’s Jim.” He motions at the fat man. “This was Mike.” At the little man. “This was Rick.” 

I feel a horsefly bite my leg, but I just stay where I am and stay quiet. 

The thin man keeps looking out at the grass for a while. I expect him to keep talking, but he doesn’t. After a long time, he goes inside the house and closes the door. I can hear him turn the lock and I wonder whether he’s worried that I’ll try to get in there and kill him. 

I wait for as long as I can. Eventually, I start to fall asleep, and that’s when I decide to move. I push up onto my hands and knees and crawl backwards for a while, then I stand up and turn around and start running. I run for a while and then I walk until I find a road, and I pick a direction and start following it. 

The sun comes up and I hear the scattered cries of a few birds. My legs are aching and I want to sleep, but I realize that I haven’t been up to see a sunrise in a long time. Not since my brother was real little, which was when we all got up early, me and Daddy and Momma. I don’t think that I’ve heard the birds since then, and the birds near our house didn’t sound like these birds.

I keep walking until I see a small house with a scarecrow outside. There’s a big NO TRESPASSING sign and windchimes on the front porch. 

I walk up to it and knock on the door, and I hear someone rustling around inside. I move my hair out of my face.

“Who is it?” a man shouts.

“My name is Mary,” I shout back. “What’s yours?”

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Categories
Fiction

The Sergeant

three medals in glass enclosure
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com
three medals in glass enclosure
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

The sergeant took a breath, mucus rattling through his broad chest, and looked at his back lawn. The grass was too long. The trees caught most of the morning light, and a walnut from one of them fell onto the Gambrel roof of his shed, clattering down the sides and glazing off the indented steel into the yard.

Squinting, he nearly missed it — through his cataracts, it was just a brown blur, but he recognized it immediately. 

Groundhog. The same one that had taunted him all summer as he made his morning rounds. 

The groundhogs came every year to dig their burrows and ruin his perfect yard. They were cowards, content to live in their trenches, peeking their heads out tentatively and clucking their big teeth. He had killed many of them over the years, and for the most part, they had learned to stay away. But each summer, at least one of the big ones would take a chance; the yard was too perfect to be ignored entirely.

In his younger days, he would follow the big groundhog and root it out from under the shed at the back of the yard. That was where it expected to live — where they all had lived — and that’s where it was heading now. 

He walked out in the yard, his joints cracking, and inspected the hole under the shed where the brown blur had disappeared. Too late now. Even if he managed to dig it out, it had likely built a half-dozen escape routes. Cowards can be resourceful.

When the Sergeant first came to the house, he had destroyed a half-dozen of the things in one month.

He had not caught a single one this year. Part of it was his hips, which seemed to give out from under him at random — though they usually waited until he was having an especially good day otherwise — but part of it was because he didn’t care as much as once did. 

When he first came to the house, the backyard had become his mission. He spent days walking along the fence, back and forth, until the grass became stubborn and refused to grow. He still walked along the fence most mornings, but a few brave blades had begun sprouting up to recover their territory.

When he first came to the house, he would gladly spend hours out here. Now, it was mostly routine. He took less pleasure in it. It was only 9:00, but he was ready to go back to bed.

“Sarge!” He heard Emily’s voice from behind him. “I’ve made breakfast!” 

His face lifted at the sound of her voice. He turned, slowly, and walked to the door. She was waiting for him.

“I’ve made bacon, eggs, and…and toast.” 

Her voice was not right. Something had changed. He looked at her quizzically, but remained quiet. She’d prepared a plate for him, and he began eating, expecting that she would keep talking. She always did.

But today, she was quiet for a long time.

“We have a visitor,” she said eventually, gently. 

He stopped eating. He blinked his eyes, tried to focus, but Emily remained a white-and-pink blur. It was then that he noticed another white-and-pink blur sitting in the living room. 

Who is sitting on my couch?

“This is Thomas. He’s a vet. He wants to help you.”

This was not on the schedule for today. The sergeant growled his disapproval, then coughed, then focused on Thomas’s figure.

“Sergeant, nice to meet you.” Thomas turned to Emily. “I’m sorry, I’m early. I didn’t mean to interrupt his breakfast.” 

“It’s okay, he doesn’t eat much anyway.” She turned to the sergeant. “Sarge, let’s go sit on the couch.”

The sergeant did not budge.

He stared at the interloper, trying to make out the features of his face.

 “Come on,” Emily insisted. The sergeant grumbled and followed her. They sat across from Thomas, who moved over to them. He had something in his hand.

“Are you ready?” Thomas said. He was talking to Emily. Confused, the sergeant looked at her; her blurred head nodded. 

“Okay. Remember, you don’t have to be here if it’s too difficult.”

“Yes, I do,” she said. She was crying. The sergeant moved to comfort her, to ask her what was happening, but he felt a sudden sting in his leg. He wheeled towards Thomas, who was extracting a needle from the sergeant’s thigh. 

Suddenly, Emily’s hands were around his neck, hugging him. She stroked his head, and he felt a warmth moving up his body. He was tired.

He turned to Emily; she was close enough that he could make out her eyes. Her mouth. Her tears.

He licked one off of her face, and she laughed. 

He would take his nap now. Right here, right in front of damned Thomas and his needles. 

“We’ll wait until he’s asleep. He won’t feel the second one. He’s feeling tired now, and he’ll sink into a deep nap — like that feeling when you can’t keep your eyes open. He’ll…”

Thomas kept talking, and the sergeant growled a bit. Emily kept stroking his fur, and he tried to stay awake to comfort her.

The warmth kept spreading, and he closed his eyes. His leg kicked, and he had a brief but satisfying dream. 

His eyes were clear. The grass had been trimmed. He was outside on the first day of spring. His body remained old, but his joints flexed easily without pain. 

The groundhog sat unaware in front of him, a good 20 yards from its burrow. It would be close, but Sarge believed that he could close the distance. He moved quickly towards the coward, his paws flexing against the dirt. 

The groundhog heard him and broke for its home under the shed. Sarge exploded into a sprint. As the rodent hurdled towards its burrow, Sarge could feel its desperation, and he threw himself towards it, his mouth open wide.

– To King, Simon, and other dogs who lived in yards.

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Categories
Non-Fiction Uncategorized

Goodbye, Dave Werner.

I am going to write a bunch of stories about my friend, Dave Werner, with the full knowledge that he would tell me to shut the fuck up. 

The year is 2010, or maybe 2011, and I am playing music with Fred Friction. We “practice” at his house every week, which usually means fumbling through tunes for an hour or so and then listening to music while shooting pool. 

“Dave Werner would like to invite you over to play some songs,” Fred says, or something to that effect. “I think you should do it.”

“Dave Werner? Fuck that guy.”

And that’s how I never met Dave Werner.

But here’s what really happened.

A few weeks earlier, I was at the Chippewa Chapel open mic night debuting a song. Dave, who I did not know well at the time, flagged me down at the bar.

“You look healthy,” Dave says.

“Thanks,” I said. There’s a long pause. I’m not sure how to take that comment.

“I mean, you clearly haven’t been missing too many meals,” he says, glancing down at my gut. 

And now, weeks later, he was inviting me over to play music — through a mutual friend. 

I think that Dave made barbecue chicken that night. I could be confusing that with another night because Dave made a lot of barbecue chicken. 

But he made some sort of food, and we awkwardly played songs for each other. Dave told me which songs he liked and which ones he didn’t care for. 

And when I left, I had agreed to play a show with at a venue called the Focal Point. I didn’t know why I agreed, except that it seemed too awkward to say no. 

The Griner Brothers Band’s album is on YouTube, and has great tracks from The Honorable Daves Werner and Hagerty.

That show went okay. The guitarist had feedback issues all night, which was common at the Focal Point. At the end of the night, the guitarist revealed that he had a pedal in his car that could have fixed the issue, but he didn’t feel like going to get it.

So that guitarist was out of the band, and I never saw him again.

We played a few other shows as Shovelbutt, a folk-rock quartet that was doomed from the start.

Eventually, the drummer, Matt, got into an argument with Dave and the band just kind of fell apart (I don’t remember what the argument was about, but I don’t think it had anything to do with music. I’m pretty sure they made up at some point).

Around this time, I start getting phone calls from Dave.

“Hey, Kraniac, I’ve got a new song. You up for recording it at your place on Saturday?”

I generally said yes, because Dave would give me $40 and a couple of Red Bulls. I’d throw up a few microphones and track him, occasionally adding keys or guitar or whatever else the tune needed. 

Most of those recordings went nowhere. Dave kept them to himself, sometimes passing the best songs to Fred Friction, who’d play them on his radio show. But one December, Dave left me a different kind of voicemail. 

“Hey, buddy, I’ve got an idea. Christmas Caroling. Call me back.”

Dave’s idea: Our friend Jesse Irwin had welcomed his first child that year. Dave, Fred Friction, and I would head to Jesse’s house dressed as three wise men, bringing gifts to anoint the child — a package of hot dogs (a stand-in for frankincense), Stag beer (gold), and Merb’s candy (myrrh). 

three grown men dressed like the three wise men from the bible, handing beer to a baby
We were not giving beer to the baby. I don’t think.

I didn’t know Jesse well at the time, but I went along with it. Jesse was delighted, of course.

I realized around this time — or maybe a few weeks later, when Dave brought me homemade cookies — that I had become friends with a gruff, sarcastic, 60-something window installer. It was a gradual process, and it had happened under my nose.

Dave Werner did not drink alcohol.

Dave the Family Man.

Not in the time I knew him. He told me why, once, and here, I’ll note that I’m recalling this from memory and some of the details may be wrong.

It was years earlier, after a birthday party for his daughter, Julia. He’d bought a case of beer for the occasion. He was aware that he was an alcoholic, so he made a deal with himself: He could drink the beers, but only after the party was over.

Minutes after the last guest left, his hands were shaking, and he sat down and pounded the beers, one after the other. When the case was empty, he made a different deal with himself: He would never drink again, but in exchange, if he was ever in a social situation that he thought was bullshit, he would leave immediately. Irish exit. 

He claimed that he chained himself to a radiator while shaking on the floor during the withdrawals. I’m not sure how much of that is a metaphor.

Dave kept both halves of that promise.

One summer, we were both invited to be members of the Focal Point’s board. At the first meeting, Dave heard something he didn’t like, so he got up and walked out. The woman who was speaking was in the middle of a sentence, and there were only about 10 people at the table.

Everyone stared as he left, waiting for him to say something. He didn’t. The door slammed shut, and nobody knew how to continue. I couldn’t stop laughing, and I quietly followed him (after excusing myself, of course).

We’d go to shows — comedy, music, open mics, whatever — and Dave would simply leave when he had enough. That might be 5 minutes into the show or in the middle of the second encore. Sometimes, he’d grumble something insulting on his way out. 

His attitude didn’t win him a lot of fans.

When I told a local artist that I played music with Dave Werner, I’d often get bad reactions:

“Well, you need to stop.”

“He told me I was too fat for my voice.”

“He told me none of my songs make sense.”

“He’s an asshole.”

To put it in charitable terms, Dave was committed to honesty. To put it less charitably, he seemed to have no filter whatsoever, and he’d tell people exactly what he thought about them at any time without considering the context of the situation. 

This didn’t change. There was no come-to-God moment where Dave suddenly started watching his behavior; if anything, his rough edges became rougher over time. 

The people close to him were not spared. Every one of Dave’s friends and family members has a story of how he would offend you in ways you’d never considered possible — then ask you why you were getting so upset.

But that’s only part of the story. Dave Werner might also arrange a Christmas Carol for your newborn daughter on a cold December night, or drop by your house unannounced so that you could take pictures with his new puppy, or  unsarcastically offer to take you on a picnic. 

All of these things happened, by the way.

Those are Dave’s work boots and pug.

And Dave’s commitment to honesty carried forward through every part of his life. Once, Jesse asked Dave about his work life: When he gave his clients a bid, what percentage of them approved it?

“100%,” Dave said.

Jesse was dumbfounded.

“That means you’re not charging enough, Dave.”

“Fuck! Well, that’s what it costs. I’ll make out alright.”

One night, I had a blockage in my sewer line.

I didn’t think I could afford a plumber, so I rented a sewer snake from the hardware store. 

I had no idea what I was doing, and after feeding about 40 feet of the snake into the line, I realized that I couldn’t get it out. I panicked. I couldn’t pay for a broken auger, and I didn’t know what I could do. I called Dave, but he didn’t pick up.

Hours later, I’d calmed down. I called a local plumber, who agreed to come out at 10 a.m. the next day for a flat rate. After I got off the phone with the plumber, Dave called, and I explained the situation to him.

The next morning, Dave was at my house before the plumber with a pair of knee pads, ready to help.

Dave’s kindness didn’t excuse his bad behavior, but frequently, it outweighed it.

I gave up trying to explain this to people who’d had bad experiences with him. 

But even when people had problems with Dave as a person, they usually saw the greatness of his art. Dave spoke in a rough, low baritone, and he was capable of singing in that range; he could also hit a high falsetto, which rang with a wide, perfect vibrato that he claimed he couldn’t control. 

When Jesse, Dave and I formed a band — the Chimps — we likened ourselves to the Traveling Wilburys of St. Louis. Dave was our Roy Orbison. I was happy to be Jeff Lynne (I’ll share Dave’s thoughts on ELO later). 

John and Jesse sit on a swingset eating bananas while Dave stands behind them.
We really leaned into the “Chimps eat bananas” thing.

Our first goal was to play at wineries for cash, but we dropped that quickly. We didn’t want to work out three-part harmonies to waste on drunk people who couldn’t care less. 

Instead, we’d play semi-annual shows at the Focal Point, which is a listening room. The Focal Point forces audiences to pay attention, so we had to come up with a setlist that rewarded that attention. 

Those first practices were electrifying. Jesse, who is by far the most engaging entertainer I’ve ever known, would grin broadly when Dave found a high harmony, or nod his head when he heard an excellent lyric. I’d noodle on the guitar, trying to pretend I was a lead guitarist, and Dave would grumble about how much better I sounded on the previous song.

We’d pitch songs at each other and get honest feedback. I think we all brought in fantastic material, but Dave was the showrunner, and he was also the least predictable. One week, he might bring in a fragile ballad about a waitress he’d fallen in love with decades ago; the next, he might sing about his mother’s farts, or who might find him if he died masturbating (“What If They Found Me Like This” went over remarkably well with the Focal Point crowd, by the way). 

But most of his songs were sad.

“Hagerty,” written for his late bandmate Dave Hagerty, contains a perfect stanza that sums up the unspoken wish of everyone who’s ever felt grief:

If Hagerty comes while we’re playing this song,
We’ll buy him a whiskey, and he’ll play along
And we’ll never mention the time he was gone
And we’ll sing and we’ll play ‘til the morning

My favorite is probably “Past It,” a tune about growing old and wondering what’s left. It’s funny, heartbreaking, and genuine. Some key lines:

I tried to find me a woman
My God, but they’re old and gray!
Maybe it’s time I put little David away.

And the chorus:

Cause it feels like a lifetime
I guess that’s just what it’s been
I don’t mind if I miss out on the next big thing.

As is true of the artist himself, Dave Werner’s songs were an acquired taste.

Unlike many St. Louis songwriters (present company included), he rarely wrote songs without at least one curveball, which might be a key change, a time signature change, an unexpected chord choice, or (most often) all three. 

He had strong opinions on everything, but especially music. He couldn’t stand any artists with “affected” voices — his term for folks like Tom Waits or Bob Dylan — with the exception of Tom Petty (and not the Jeff Lynne-produced Petty albums; Dave once noted that “everything Jeff Lynne touches just ends up sounding like fuckin’ ELO,” which is hard to argue with).

He also hated hip hop, which led to a heated discussion one night.

“Dave, just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean that there aren’t good rap songs,” I said.

“Bullshit! There’s one good song, and they keep remaking it.”

“I mean, that’s not true. The music changes every year, you’re just not listening to it.”

“Well, tell me what the good shit is, then, and I’ll listen to it.”

“No, because you’re not going to like it. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s still good.”

“Bullshit.”

Around that point, Jesse gently guided us back to the song that we were practicing, and I forgot about the exchange until the next morning when Dave left me a voicemail:

Hey, Kraniac. Just wanted to say…Snoop Dogg…”Gin and Juice”…that’s another good one. [Long pause] Okay, see you Thursday. Don’t eat. I’m making spaghetti.

When Dave sensed that he went too far, he’d try to correct it. His friends learned to deal with him when he was difficult and to call him out when he was being unreasonable. 

He was worth that effort, because I have never known a person with more kindness in their heart. I don’t think that Dave was rude because he hated the world; I think he was disappointed that it wasn’t as good as he thought it could be. 

For our final Chimps shows, we pulled out all of the stops.

A Valentine’s Day show featured a setlist packed with love songs — and a few depressing Dave songs about people dying, because hey, they were good songs. 

The Chimps decided to give the audience chocolate-covered bananas. That was going to be my job. About a week before the show, Dave asked how I was going to do it.

“I don’t know, probably cut up some bananas, put toothpicks in the slices, and stick them in chocolate.”

He scowled immediately.

“No, no, fucking no! If it’s not full bananas, it’s bullshit!”

So the day of the show, Dave spent the morning dipping full bananas into a tub of chocolate, then putting them on a clothesline to dry. The audience wouldn’t have cared if we half-assed those bananas — but Dave cared.

Dave presents a line of chocolate-covered bananas hanging on a clothesline in his house.

The show was a success.

We had added Katie Jones to our band, a violinist with a fantastic voice and tremendous songs. That changed our dynamic a bit, and with four singers, we had to work harder to get everything on our setlist up to speed. We also added strings to half of our set, and the string section couldn’t practice with us, so we had to play everything perfectly.

That final show — February 15, 2019 — probably should have been a disaster. A snowstorm hit St. Louis, cutting our audience significantly, and various minor mistakes were amplified by the new complexity of our setup. When we got offstage, I felt like we’d failed.

But listening back to the recordings from that night, we nailed it. And Dave had the brightest moments, including a cover of “Someday Jane,” which was written by Roland Norton, a local artist who’d died that year. 

Dave wasn’t a fan of all of Norton’s stuff, but Jesse insisted on playing him “Someday Jane” at one of our practices. By the end of the song, Dave had tears in his eyes. 

“I’m doing this one,” he said. 

His performance is tender, starting at the lowest part of Dave’s register; as the bridge crescendos, his voice rises up, his tremolo widening to cut through the strings and guitars before suddenly cutting back for the last verse:

I can’t promise the sun, the stars, or the moon
But I made up this name, and I made up this tune
And I make this promise: I will wait for you,
And I’ll finally find, Someday Jane

Playing that song, on that stage, was one of the greatest musical moments of my life. A half-dozen of the other greatest moments also happened that night.

Dave had health problems.

His hip and back pain often left him completely crippled and unable to work, and he’d take Percocet, valium, and whatever else he could get prescribed to struggle through his days. 

“I got an x-ray, finally,” Dave told me one day. “The doctor looked at it, and — I swear to God — turned to me and said, ‘You’re fucked.’”

Before his hip replacement, I took him to a doctor’s appointment. He struggled to sit, breathing heavily, and I grabbed the admittance form to help him fill it out.

“What is your pain goal?” I asked. 

Dave was quiet for a moment.

“No pain,” he said. “What the fuck else would my pain goal be?”

“And how would you rate your pain on a scale of 1-10?”

“10! Who the fuck wouldn’t say 10?”

In that visit, he also compared the doctor to one of the villains from Hostel. The nurses loved him.

The hip pain was constant and debilitating, and unfortunately, it wasn’t the only problem. While we were in the early stages of preparing a show one year, Dave had a stroke. He recovered, but his voice acquired a raspiness — the falsetto was still there, but rougher now. It wasn’t perfect anymore.

Months later, we were at the studio, trying to record a follow-up to our debut album. Dave brought a rock number, which leaned into the changes in his voice. He barked out the lyrics over a distorted bassline, each word sounding like it could break him. It was incredible.

I’ve still got the tracks from those sessions, but we haven’t completed them. We will. I promised Dave a few months ago, and I’ll stick to that.

When someone you love has a stroke, or gets a hip replacement, or gets treatment for depression, there’s a tendency to assume that the problem is solved.

Otherwise, we’d be worrying all the time, right?

But over the pandemic, I worried about Dave. His history made him a prime target for COVID-19 — and for vaccine disinformation. Dave would follow conspiracy theories regularly, though he never landed squarely on one side of them. I did not expect him to get vaccinated, but he did; not because he believed in the vaccine, but because his family asked him to. His love outweighed his stubbornness, as it usually did.

That was a weight off my shoulders, and it gave me hope for another Chimps project. We’d grown distant from Dave during the lockdowns, and the isolation hadn’t made him any friendlier. 

A few months back, I called him on my way to work. I left a message asking how things were going. He didn’t call back for a few weeks. Then, one day, I had a voicemail waiting when I woke up.

“Hey, buddy. Got your message, just wanted to make sure my head was on straight before I called you back. We’re having a get-together for Julia’s birthday, wanted you to come. Invite Lucy. Tell her I’m making chicken. Call me. Alright.”

I called him and we talked for a bit, and I told him I’d be there. The party was a family gathering — I was the only person there who wasn’t part of the family, I believe. That might have been awkward, but it wasn’t. If the best thing you can do for a person is make them feel welcome, the Werner clan has that covered.

We ate and discussed the Chimps tracks we’d recorded years earlier and how we should finish them. I told Dave I’d get him a copy of the recordings, warning him that they were rough. 

Then, he nonchalantly announced to the table that he was going to dig up his dead dog and put the bones on display.

Again, this would have been awkward at any other table. They were used to this sort of thing, and we discussed — with remarkable scientific rigor — how long you’d have to wait after burying a dog to make sure that it was just bones when you dug it up.

I left after dessert, satisfied in every way. 

“Bye, Krane,” Dave said. “Don’t forget about those tracks.”

I thought about calling Dave this week, but I didn’t.

I was planning on having drinks with Jesse next week, so I figured I’d call Dave after that, and maybe we’d be enroute to another Chimps show. Possibly another Valentine’s Day special, if we could figure out a way to escalate the chocolate banana gag.

But Dave passed away on Friday. I’m still in shock, and I’ll be heartbroken for a good long while.

Dave was the gentlest and most honest person I’ve known. Often, we refer to people as “complicated.” Dave was not. He showed you exactly what you were getting from the moment he saw you, and that was incredibly refreshing. 

Do not try this at home: Dave supported his honesty with genuine kindness. He was loyal to close friends and family, even when he was skeptical of just about everything else. He would ignore hip pain to lay on some knee pads and pull a snake out of your drain, just to save you a few hundred bucks. He would dip bananas into chocolate for hours, just so the people who came to his show would feel like they got their money’s worth. He’d give you a sly smile when you said something funny and gently correct you if you said something bad about yourself — or call you out if you were fishing for compliments.

There is value in honesty, and Dave practiced it, more often for better than for worse. I loved him, and he was my friend. 

And along the way, he said some really funny shit.

Below, I’ve listed a few of my favorites, because I didn’t know where else to put them.

“The guy’s got one trick, he kills the fuckin’ kid in everything he writes.”

– On Stephen King.

“How dare you say that to me? I’m a friend of the queers!”

– On being accused of homophobia.

“I can’t stand that piece of shit.”

– On Gordon Ramsay.

“I can’t stand that piece of shit.”

– On Jay-Z.

“What are you talking about? We’ve seen you naked!”

– On me, when I refused to play a song because I hadn’t finished it.

“When they start talking about their kids, all of ‘em just suck. I can’t explain it.”

– On comedians.

“How come you get better looking, and I just look like an old ballsack?”

– To my mother.

“Fuck, I could get you a hundred of those.”

– After I told him that my new dog was a good dog.

“I got vaccinated, so shut up.”

– On getting vaccinated (unprompted).

“Hey, sorry for not calling you back, my head was in the oven for a few weeks.”

– On dealing with depression.

“I went over to a guy with a puppy, and started petting it and saying, ‘Aw, isn’t he so cute?,” and I was just thinking, what the fuck is wrong with me?”

– On using antidepressants. 

“If we were any better, we’d be good.”

– On the Chimps.

“If it was any better, it’d be good.”

– On my writing.

“Bah, I’ll shut up.”

– At the end of any conversation.

I don’t exactly know how to end this. Dave always had the last word, so I might as well give it to him here. He wrote “Another Chance” for a friend of his who died of cancer, and was very proud that he got to sing it to the friend in the hospital. 

Funny standing here without you next to me,

Somewhere down the road, I hope we find that harmony.

Gather up the ones you love, and give them all a kiss

I only wish we all could have another chance at this.

– Dave Werner, “Another Chance”