calling

originally released elsewhere october 2022, lightly edited for content and context.

click here to watch rusty fingers, a 2023 live performance of the opening guitar licks to calling, on youtube shorts.

i started working on the song calling my last semester of high school. songs are funny things. sometimes the songs come together in a really short time, and other times they…don’t. the ones that don’t often come in and out of focus for years, are abandoned, forgotten, and picked up again later. get a nice melody, a catchy riff, a hook, a bass lick or a drum pattern that doesn’t go anywhere right away, and it gets stored in the back on the brain meats for a while, to re-emerge when the time is right.

calling wasn’t like most songs. it didn’t come together right away, but i also didn’t let it out of my sight for over two years. i played it, worked on it, thought about it almost every day from when that opening riff came to me until the recording was finished. i had something to prove with this song—i started writing it in the year 2000 and, as i noted in the previous entry, this was a year that will remain utterly unforgettable to me. i recorded a new version of calling this past summer, and the new version is closer to the earlier original vision of the song which i actually (if you can believe it) decided to cut short because at over 10 minutes long, it dragged a bit. some would say the album version at just over 8 and a half minutes, is still excessive, but if i can be a pretentious, self-absorbed artist for a moment: i wanted to stay true to the original; and there’s an essence to be captured and i just can’t make the same song in less than that. the new version is really close to the old one, lengthwise, but is closer to the original vision (and cleaned up quite a bit, production-wise). i took pains to preserve the original rawness and weirdness of the compositions and sound when recording ruins revisited: 20 years later.

max weber was a german social scientist and theorist (among my personal heroes) who died shortly after the end of world war I. he wrote about religion and culture and work and lots of other stuff. he pointed out that the german word beruf made a transition over the centuries in the wake of the protestant reformation—today, it means “vocation” or “job.” with the lutherans it meant “calling” as in divine calling. people, weber argued, used to see what they did for a living very differently, not as “just a job” but as something that god had called them to do. imagine going to an interview at a company in the year 2022 and telling them you want to work there because god called you to sell widgets or sort through spreadsheets or some other glorified-computer-programmer-telephone-operator tasks that postindustrial employees do these days. even if the interviewers are deeply religious this would probably strike them as weird.

very few professionals still talk about what they do as a “calling”—priests and clergy, monks and nuns, sure. doctors? sometimes. teachers? maybe. i doubt the guy cleaning the fountain drink machine at the gas station sees that as his divine purpose in life—and there’s nothing wrong with that. maybe a “calling” doesn’t make much practical sense in the twenty-first century because most of us are going to do more than one thing in our lives anyway. maybe the whole idea seems self-important, pigheaded, hokey, obsolete. and if I really thought I was special you’d think i was going to say i was “called” to be a musician. i love composing, and feel compelled to do it, but am not fulfilling some cosmic purpose with a guitar or a piano (eye roll). also, to reiterate, i was writing the album ruins in the rather immediate aftermath of leaving my catholic upbringing, and…well…

when I began having questions and doubts about religion and the worldview in which i was raised, i did what a lot of people do: found ways to learn about those questions and doubts. for me it was books. i read the bible when i was a kid (which, frankly, contributed to my questions and doubts) but followed it with the qur’an, the tao te ching, the upanishads, books on wicca, neo-paganism, the occult, greek philosophy, adam smith, karl marx, existentialism, and so on…i was still expected to attend mass every sunday, but by the time i was in my teens i liked to excuse myself from mass and go and sit in this well-tended little garden behind the church where i would listen to Mass on the speaker alone and surrounded by living, green things.

going back to weber, he called himself “religiously unmusical”—a polite way of saying “secularist” or even “atheistic” in a time when expressing such thoughts was even less tolerated than they are now. i am religiously unaffiliated but that doesn’t mean i’m religiously unmusical. in fact, on the day i began writing calling, i had what i could only describe as a mystical experience, an experience of momentary cosmic oneness. i had this experience in a park, and have had other experiences since, all of which happened when i was outside in a “natural” setting. i have spent a good chunk of the years since studying philosophy of religion, metaphysics, epistemology, and later sociology of religion, religious studies, theology, environmental studies, and more to try to make sense of these experiences.

something i learned early on was that such experiences simply cannot “be made sense of” in some academic sense. language as a tool is designed for separating this from that, subject from predicate, and can therefore never articulate what an experience of oneness is like. being unable to describe a thing, does not mean the thing does not exist (sorry not sorry, logical positivists), but it’s certainly worth exploring plausible alternative explanations in such cases. i do not have a diagnosed psychosis, nor do i have temporal lobe epilepsy, for example (both offered up as plausible scientific explanations for mystical experiences). though i might be self-deluded, would be weird to call it “wishful thinking” because at that time in my life i didn’t believe in a personal god or an afterlife (and still do not).

then there’s “consciousness expanding,” conjuring up stereotypes of people hallucinating their way to enlightenment. neither on that day, nor at any point during the writing or recording of the album ruins, was I under the influence of drugs or alcohol. i was in my late teens when Ruins came out so I couldn’t legally drink (though I had smoked cigarettes, and experimented with alcohol and weed in my youth). at the time i had become rather “against drugs” back then for at least two reasons. first, the “consciousness expanding” i witnessed in my younger years typically amounted to aimless, reckless, embarrassing, or even criminal behavior. it wasn’t clear what personal growth resulted, beyond maybe bonding over a shared experience of vulnerability (which a person obviously doesn’t need drugs to have). second, watching avant-garde artists do drugs and get rich off their art led many young people in the nineties to naively mistake correlation for causation: these people are brilliant and creative and successful, and they do drugs. therefore, if we do drugs like they do, we’ll become brilliant and creative and successful, too. in my experience, drugs don’t make you creative or enlightened, and they definitely don’t make you smarter. i remember kurt cobain’s suicide and well-documented struggles with heroin. i remember watching one of my musical heroes, layne staley of alice in chains, die a slow and miserable death from his drug dependency. this should have been enough to counteract those reckless illusions (as i noted elsewhere, it wasn’t, in the end, and i almost killed myself traveling this road later on).

ok, so maybe i got a bit distracted there, but i would rather be verbose than misunderstood. saying one is called to help others or make the world a better place is, at least, a nice sentiment. saying one is called to be an artist or some other self-focused interest borders on arrogant and pretentious. don’t get me wrong: it’s ok to be proud of who you are and what you do (as if you need my permission or anyone else’s) but there’s just so much self-serving garbage out there that passes for “spiritual.” there are moments in the song calling that brush against that kind of “spiritual exceptionalism,” the kind of elitism that the metaphysically initiated “us” feel relative to the uninitiated “them,” like the climactic final chorus:

the calling is a wary farewell

to the path of the fearful naïve

watching intently, standing apart

summoned to infinity

them is my least favorite four-letter word. i am unique, but i am not special, just like every other human being muddling through. but I wanted (and still want) to be more than i am, and i don’t want to delude myself with fear, naivety, or herd mentality (including “us-and-them-isms” which so often enfranchise authoritarianism) along the way. our minds are functionally limitless—isn’t that incredible? why waste that? i have worked to understand the connection, and divide, between the human and natural worlds, and my place in it. but that’s an identity that came from experience and effort, not some spooky action at a distance. the calling became an impulse to understand whether any such thing as a calling existed at all, and i developed as a person along the way through choices i made (and the cultural and structural constraints i faced), not fate or destiny. i could have ignored that mystical experience or decided to do something else with my life. i could have listened to the folks who said i didn’t have a future as an artist. maybe that’s why i still like playing the song; no matter how much i play it, it never fully captures that moment that inspired it.

i remember meeting the woman i would one day marry at a club on my 18th birthday (yes, really). the next time i saw her, i was playing riffs from calling in the garage of a friend who ended up being a far more successful musician than I’ve ever been. and rightly so—he’s a really talented guy, and he’s still around but we haven’t talked in years. anyway, thinking back, perhaps what i really wanted to express in this song was a sort of moment when everything becomes different. there aren’t going to be that many of them in a lifetime, but there will be a few. when they happen it’s often not clear what’s going on right away, and sometimes they pass without realizing until later (even much later) the significance of that moment. and maybe, with a clear head, and a chance to slow down a bit, it’s possible to make the most out of those few such moments we are graced with over the rest of the handful of decades we get to be a part of all this.

Sources:

Garcia-Santibanez, Rocio and Harini Sarva. 2015. “Isolated Hyperreligiosity in a Patient with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy.” Case Reports in Neurological Medicine, Aug. 13, 235856, doi: 10.1155/2015/235856

Rowe, William L. and William J. Wainwright, eds. 1998. “Mysticism and Religious Experience.” In Philosophy of Religion: A Reader. Third Edition.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Weber, Max. Politics as a Vocation.

Weber, Max. Science as a Vocation.

image taken during 2002 ruins photo shoot—was i ever really that young?