when the music’s (not) over
originally published elsewhere august 2022, shortly before the infinite singularity reboot, lightly edited for context and clarity.
a few months ago i was musing about music, and i since tentatively concluded: i hate music. i’ve spent tens of thousands of hours playing, and listening to, music, so it’s not as though i reached that conclusion out of ignorance. music is not fun for me. It does not make me happy. it has often felt like an insect bite that itches and itches that you can’t stop scratching, and the more you scratch it, the more it itches, and the more other insects bite you in the same place…
i have recorded hundreds of songs over the past 20 years. i have been in numerous bands, mostly unsuccessfully; people who play music for fun don’t typically enjoy working with people who treat music like an itch they must scratch. when my first album, ruins, came out in 2002, the zine lords of metal published not one, but two reviews of the album and how awful it was (here’s the short one; here’s an extended, gratuitous take-down). i was told by many since, not just the dear friends at that zine that i’ve never taken the time to thank, that i should just give it up.
a strong person would dust themselves off and walk away—it was, after all, only a few thousand hours’ work and a couple years of unremitting aspiration. but i am not a strong person; i am a withdrawn, insecure, neurotic person with a large and fragile ego. so, i set out to prove that i could do better, and made silence in 2004, a follow-up album that was much more expensive, took a lot more work, and by the time i was done with it i was too burned out to promote it.
undeterred, i started work on a third album, but somewhere in between i passed the age-21 mark and discovered the numbing joys of substance abuse. stumbling into my studio one night after going out partying back in 2005, i destroyed most of my equipment and the few tracks i’d recorded for the follow-up. demolishing my life savings and life’s work in one fell swoop gave me an idea: if people like to party, and i like to party, then maybe i should play the blues about partying…while also partying.
after saving up for over a year, i bought an acoustic guitar and a new digital audio workstation and started writing some new songs about partying for when i was partying at places where other people were partying. this was the most commercially successful decision i ever made in my entire music career, yielding an acoustic album in 2009 called moderation (currently out of circulation, though here’s a reprise of the title track) and, between album sales and paid gigs, eventually paying for the destroyed recording studio many times over. i also played in a band called according 2 legend that built up a following in the dallas/fort worth scene and co-operated a live underground music venue called the annex in fort worth, texas.
lo and behold, making substance abuse the cornerstone of one’s image is not sustainable. the venue got burglarized at the end of 2009 and we recovered some of the gear but never fully recovered our dignity; i alienated multiple friends in the aftermath over money issues (the issue being that i made money but never had money because all the things i had to manage and maintain in order to make money were so expensive). i also made some good friends and had some good times, but all things…
eventually I got a bit cliched-rocker-biopic carried away and woke up face-down in the gravel parking lot of the venue on the morning of april 22, 2012; being broke, without insurance, and afraid of what “they” might say, I avoided medical intervention and chalked it up to chronic exhaustion, substance abuse, and/or a nervous breakdown. i sought intervention, effectively stopped using “party” as a verb after that, and didn’t drink a drop of alcohol for close to two years. i have not maintained anything resembling perfect purity, but have been able to avoid the kind of abuses that led me to come face-to-face with a gravel parking lot.
the venue closed and the band packed it up in 2013; an intelligent person might have given up after this. i am not sure if i lack fundamental intelligence of this sort; or if i am so intelligent that I can talk myself into, or out of, just about anything. either way, this is freeing because then nothing i do has to make sense, so i continued making music despite all this. i started busking, playing acoustic shows in coffeehouses, bars, restaurants, along storefronts, at farmer’s markets, and even on the side of the road for spare change. in many ways this was more artistically rewarding, if also less financially so. i have found there is an inverse relationship between how much money i make and how much i enjoy what i’m doing…not just in terms of music. perhaps this is just a fact of life: we don’t get paid to do things that are fun.
despite losing that flawless marketing campaign after nearly killing myself with it, i was more artistically productive after the party was over: there is an acoustic vault and neoclassical vault on youtube that attest to this. maybe people liked these acoustic and neoclassical songs; probably people listened to them because they were free and they were short. a second solo acoustic album with heavy harmonica-folk overtones, perspective, followed in 2015 (also out of circulation, though here’s a really old video of an alternate version of the title track). i gave it away in cd form for free before moving out of texas to kansas for work-related reasons, but by 2015 this was probably the equivalent of sending someone a fax. like the mosquitos that swarm in to take another bite after you start scratching, all that had simply made the itch bigger and stronger and more impossible to ignore.
after moving to kansas, where my career was more demanding than ever, i decided that recording twelve instrumental eps was a good use of my time. i had been working on some of the songs since the 1990s, but didn’t really have any real commercial direction with recording those songs. after releasing some rough mixes on youtube, i finally got around to distributing them, digital/streaming-only, in 2023, in two parts: keys i-vi: the lost kansas instrumentals 2015-2016 and keys vii-xii: the lost kansas instrumentals 2017-2018 (listen here).
i also cut a third acoustic album, candidate, in 2017, mostly acoustic arrangements of a bunch of songs i had played back in the according 2 legend days (again, also out of circulation, but here’s a remix of one of the songs). this third acoustic release was partly out of necessity: i was a broke nontraditional student whose summer class got cancelled, so i got busking gigs to make ends meet in lawrence (a college town where the university of kansas is located). those were, to date, the last live gigs i’ve played. i still get an occasional compliment on this album—mostly because my dog chewie (r.i.p.) graces the cover, and he is really cute.
during my final year in kansas, 2018-2019, i started to lose hope of progressing in my field despite running myself ragged in the attempt. being ever the ever sensible dude you’ve been reading about so far, i decided that recording a third infinite singularity album, monsters, was the best use of my very limited resources. as with the other two Infinite Singularity releases, i threw everything i could spare at it, without regard to myself, and it utterly crashed and burned once it was done.
ruins flopped because enough people actually thought it was bad (though it sold better than any other album except moderation, and now collectors are hawking it for 30 bucks online, so…). silence was a lot of time and money and noise but no sustained release campaign beyond “here, my dudes, listen to this thing I did” and a few scattered promo spots—it got some buzz in the south american metal scene (though I’m hard-pressed to find the specific zines and reviews now) and also yielded “a forgotten name” which I’ve played thousands of times since then and which is the closest to the “one hit” part of “one hit wonder” I ever got. monsters never even went to pressing; the master just sat in the purgatory of my car cd player (yes, my car has a cd player) for two years before the rough mixes made it onto youtube. it all paid off quite well in the end—because i finally got a job after all (the 100th job i applied for that year), and because, three years later, monsters was mastered, pressed, and officially released september 2, 2022.
i recorded some live acoustic tracks on a playlist called quarantini in 2020 during the COVID lockdowns (here’s the title track—the first country song i’ve ever written). This included acoustic arrangements of some songs from monsters and briefly revisited to the whole “woo i’m drinking and stuff sucks” vibe from moderation. until the reissue of monsters, it was the most listened-to music i ever posted on youtube. later, there were a few remixed and updated versions of older songs as i threatened to make another album—which i finally did, hemiboreal, which will be released summer 2024.
after 20 years, i have a reasonably stable career i enjoy and a happy family; i like where i live (not least because it’s a shed in the woods of northern minnesota), and life is good. but instead of enjoying the second half of my life and in relative stability and peace, i have decided that what ineed to do more than anything else in the world, right now, is play more music. and not just any music: revitalize infinite singularity. Because people have long loved to pay good money to see a middle-aged man flop around with an electric guitar, and because the project was always so well-received by fans and critics alike, i might just have to record live versions of some old infinite singularity songs. Because i live in the woods, and i want my work to reflect all the aforementioned artistic success, i will record them from a shed in the woods.
because only suckers (like me) use actual instruments to make music anymore, I will limit myself to live vocals, guitar, and keys when performing, using technology to manufacture everything else i need—drums, bass, additional keyboards, and perhaps even a highly appreciative but respectful audience. i don’t want to seem like I’m not keeping up with the times. If this goes well, i might keep going. if it goes badly, based on the pattern of behaviors i’ve exhibited in the past, i certainly will keep going. update: this turned out to be a partially empty threat, though the series live from a shed in the woods did air on youtube shorts.
the truth is that along the way, reflecting on the past and building toward the future, I came to realize that I don’t hate music at all; i love music, and i can’t seem to stop making it or listening to it, nor do i want to. going through this process of self-reflection and stepping up once more to really finish some of what i started (getting that third album published and working on a fourth) made me remember why i got into music in the first place. the acoustic stuff is easier all around—easier to write, easier to perform, and easier to get people to listen to—but i don’t do what i do because it’s easy. being middle-aged doesn’t have to mean “settling down,” and having a good job that keeps me busy doesn’t mean i can’t find the time to scratch the musical itch from time to time. the great thing about having a job i enjoy that comes with a steady paycheck is that i am free to make the music i want to make, to experiment, be weird, and not worry about it. the great thing about being middle-aged and having accumulated some wisdom from all those years of being young and stupid is that i don’t have to relearn those lessons again, and just maybe others can learn from my mistakes without having to repeat them.
here's the cover from the new infinite singularity album monsters, which is available now on all streaming platforms and will again be available as physical copy (cd) this september.
