you cannot eat a poem.
What moves you to write? To sing?
To — as Salinger put it in Franny and Zooey — “do anything at all beautiful on a stage, anything nameless and joy-making”?
What was it that caused you to break your dad’s heart, despite his good advice to stick to the known corridors, to make of your muse a hobby and put your mind to the gainly grind? You cannot eat a poem after all.
Ignore me at your peril, he said.
Or else what, you said.
What were you thinking?
Perhaps you are young and beautiful and determined to make a name for yourself. You’ve taken stock of the available options, all the ways forward and up, and you’ve decided the pretty path, in its current commercial incarnation, is the one best suited to your gifts of proportion. For you, darling one, this fraught vocation is perhaps a means to something else, something really quite sensible — public adulation, box seats, lauded company, sidelong glances from attractive strangers at the Whole Foods.
In that case I wish you a long list of number ones and open invitations to all tomorrow’s parties.
But there are some whom the calling, once heard, cannot be forgotten, success or no.
I’m talking to you who make because you must.
You know who you are. You who wake up in the middle of the night to an uninvited melody ringing in the dark. You who lay still and listen and wait for more. Sometimes it comes and sometimes it doesn’t.
Some of you are what the world calls professional. You’re on TV. You made the top ten. You’ve been tapped, trophied, sat in first class on a flight you didn’t pay for. Very good.
But whatever your recognition, if you’re still reading this it probably means you’re one of us: the perpetually dissatisfied, the day dreamers, the time tinkerers, those audacious idiots who seek solace in the next sentence, or song; who, morning after morning, come to sit at the side of the bog and stare into the mist, hoping to see something no one else does.
You might have a Grammy in your closet and a boat at your dock, or you might work two jobs and sneak a smoke on the back porch, pulsing the cherry while you think of a metaphor for self-destruction.
I don’t know how many of you are out there. But if I think about it for a second — what I’m talking about isn’t a thing you are or aren’t. It’s more like an invitation that’s answered, or not.
It’s like a guitar on a stand in the common room of your house. You walk past the guitar without seeing it. Or you see it and think “that’s a nice guitar” and you forget one second later, reaching as you do into the cupboard for a yogurt-coated snack. Or, there is a third option, which is that you stop. And you sit down and you twist the pegs until the strings come ‘round. And you play.
Maybe you play a song someone else wrote or maybe you play your own. That isn’t the fundamental distinction. The distinction is between you who play and you who do not.
I mean play in the widest possible sense.
Making music is playing. Writing is playing. Acting is playing. Maybe writing down a dream. I don’t know. I don’t make the rules, you do.
And it is the central supposition of this writer, this page, this podcast, that everyone wants to play.
I want you to play.
I’m sitting in the dark in my half-finished studio while my wife and child sleep. I’m trying to put a few words to this feeling I have. Call it a benevolent desire.
That person I described above, who lives in his head and rises each day with an arguably insane hope of making something beautiful and true, is me. I’ve had a few wins among my losses, enough to keep the lights on and the motivation going, and what I’ve noticed after all these years of trying, is that the moments of validation, renumeration — while absolutely necessary — were almost completely forgotten a second after they happened.
Because for me the thing has always been the making, the trying to make.
My tries have taken me all of the world, provided me a kaleidoscope of memories which I will look forward to sharing with my kids and grandkids. So many! The night I spent in jail in London before being deported, the hitch-hiking four days down the Al-Can Highway, riding across the tundra under a canopy of Northern Lights. The several remarkably civilized conversations I’ve exchanged with police officers while sitting handcuffed in the back of their cars. Wonderful times, all. And none would have happened had I not been hellbent on finding meaning in my life through music and words, a song and a story at a time.
I work daily on my own creative projects. I would be lying if I said I knew exactly why. In a way it’s fun. In another way it’s extremely not fun. But whatever it is, it’s not a mild curiosity that moves me. It’s life and death. That may sound weird to you but if you are someone for whom a creative pursuit are not just a worthy outlet, but a soul-preserving necessity, then you understand.
It is very hard to do the work, to stay doing it. If you are presently engaged in your own personal struggle with art, you have my absolute adoration. I am inspired by you, as I am by the guests with whom I am privileged to talk week after week on the Morse Code Podcast. The pod is my very selfish and necessary effort to make contact with souls in a similar predicament. People who live to burn.
Talking with someone else who has forsaken similar comforts in the name of some unseeable ideal, is, well it’s quite helpful in the motivation department. Each time I wrap a conversation with one of the guests on my show I feel like someone just took me off the battery charger. I am full of hope, and determination.
If you can relate to what I’m saying, if you have some itch to write or sing or act or play, this podcast is for you. You are the audience. I think these conversations will have the same impact on you as they do me. If you can’t relate to what I’m saying, it means I need to work on my message. Thank you for your patience.
Photo at top is from the filming of the music video for my new song “Meet Me at the End of the World.” The video was directed by MCP alum Mila Viliplana and stars fellow alum Mason Mecartea and Emma Naumovska and features a Vietnam era period piece with a Singin in the Rain style dance sequence. We’ll be releasing more behind the scenes footage in the coming weeks as we start to rollout the single, but the point is, we are sneak screening it Saturday February 15 at my full band show at the Five Spot in East Nashville. I am really excited to share this new music with you, as well as these inspiring friends of mine — Abby Jane will perform, Carl Anderson, plus MCP alum Ryan Rado will be doing some live immersive painting. I throw great parties. Don’t miss this night! Grab your tickets here.
“It was a pleasure to burn.”