in memoriam

Yesterday I checked the mailbox. There was a note from a dad who wanted me to sign a card for his two-year-old son, because the dad wanted the son to know about the people who had been an inspiration or influence in his life.

He wrote that an older album of mine called Saturn Returns had meant a lot to him. That album was recorded in Seattle, where I lived for years and got my musical feet wet in a pool of musicians much more talented than me.

I met one of those musicians through an ad I’d placed in the local music magazine. I needed a bass player for what would be my debut full-length album and the first call I got was from some guy who called himself Joe Bass.

Joe Bass?

He said he sometimes went by the name Joe Skyward. Since I was new in town, I had no idea that among the bands he’d played with were the Posies and Sky Cries Mary, and he was considered one of the best players anywhere.

He came to our dingy rehearsal space in a building we shared with a thousand other Seattle bands. He had bleach-blonde spiked hair and full-sleeve tattoos, needled into him long before it was hip for guys with beards to do those kind of things. The word “RENT” was tattooed on the fingers of one hand and either “FOOD” or “BEER” on the other. I don’t remember which now.

But I will never forget the moment he hit his first note in that rehearsal space. I felt like somebody punched me in the stomach.

We recorded many songs, including that album Saturn Returns and played many shows together over the next decade.

The only way I can describe him is as one of the (if not the) purest, truest, and best human beings I’ve ever known.

I was back in Seattle a few days ago to see Springsteen in concert. He’s why I do what I do and gave me a hand to hold as I started stumbling toward a dream. The almost four-hour show galvanized the kind of man I want to be, strengthened my faith in humanity and resolved my hope to put something beautiful in the world. I felt the circle come around several times as he played, this awareness that I was here in the town where I discovered twenty years ago that I could use my words and music to affect change in people. And myself.

The next morning we drove by the studio where we recorded ‘Saturn Returns.’ It’s an empty storefront now, buried in a city I couldn’t even recognize in the massive stakes of steel and concrete recently driven into its heart.

I thought of Joe Bass and wondered how he’s doing.

And the next day a massive light in this sometimes too-dark room went out.

The world was a better place because of you, Joe.

Rest in peace.

the other four-letter word

No one likes to talk about it.

But it makes all the difference.

When you’re building a business, you don’t want to talk about it.

When you’re searching for your significant other, you don’t want to talk about it.

When you’re chasing a dream, you don’t want to talk about it.

Why?

You want to believe you have control, that what you hope to achieve will be a direct result of your hard work.

Nobody talks about the other four-letter word, because this particular word doesn’t feed the narrative of the system, or further the agenda that demands six-figure college tuitions or five-figure coaching programs or four-figure weekend seminars.

And if I suggest that the success of anything, and I mean ANYthing, involving external stimuli or circumstance is also dependent on this other four-letter word, and not just your own actions, not only will you agree, you may be discouraged.

Don’t be.

Be encouraged. And unrealistically optimistic. And joyful.

Do beautiful things and let them go.

Because if you do beautiful things and let them go, your world will be wide open and free and wild and untamed.

And nothing like you dreamed. Bigger than that.

Better than that.

And the other four-letter word won’t matter.

What’s the other four-letter word?

I just realized that I don’t need to say it.

It already doesn’t matter.

Just do something beautiful.

where you sit

I’m already in the airport. It’s 6 something in the morning. Day started at about 3:45am.

So when I react quietly to something and hear my voice explode across the chasm of my (and everyone else’s) sludge of consciousness, I jump in my seat.

And look up.

I remember when I was kid I went on a tour of New England, where we visited historic landmarks in the bigger cities like Philadelphia and Boston. Many details are escaping me at this gray hour of the morning, including the name of the building, but there was a room where the Whigs and Tories in colonial times would argue and hammer out laws, and there was one guy who always sat in the same spot, with his head down.

Everyone thought he was asleep.

But he was listening.

The ceiling of the building was domed, so even when the opposition was whispering on the other side of the room, this guy could hear everything they were saying. He had found the one small sliver of space where the sound reflected off the dome and down onto him, and was able to decipher and exploit their strategies and arguments. He became a great orator and leader for his party and eventually a founding father of our nation. I wish I could tell you his name, but like I said, the coffee has not yet taken hold.

Anyway, the domed room I’m sitting in now is full of noise too, with people talking ignorantly loud on cell phones, which ring unsilenced so everyone here knows how important they are. This is the same kind of noise we face these days in getting our message heard, the same cacophony we as artists and business owners and human beings try to shout above as we compete with social media metrics and the open playing field of the internet.

Maybe it’s not about shouting above anything.

Because above it all, I can whisper from this seat and hear my voice reverberate across the room.

Maybe it’s about where you sit.

the old barn

I met her tonight, many years ago. I’d just walked off the stage at the Central Tavern in Seattle’s Pioneer Square and was standing at the bar when someone tapped my shoulder from behind and said So I heard you were on The Love Boat, huh?

I turned around and it was instinctual, immediate, undeniable.

She was the one.

A few years later I was at a payphone in the rain outside the same bar, checking my answering machine to see if she’d left a message.

She hadn’t.

The dance had begun in the space between, in an old barn we built of timing and growing up, where the slow waltz of music seeping through the roof would sometimes almost bring us together. And always, just as our fingers began to grace the fabric of each other’s coats, the soft lilting melody would stop.

She’s married these days, almost two decades later, with a kid and what sounds like a lukewarm marriage. I hear from her now and then, usually on some anniversary we would have celebrated if we’d burned that old barn down and built a new one.

An anniversary like tonight.