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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
…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).
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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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