Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #031

Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #031 – “Should I Come Out Of Retirement?”

Hey now!  I know it seems like I’ve retired from writing here lately because submissions are pretty much at an all-time low as of late, but I’m talkin’ artistically.

Some of you out there know my musical history, and I’d assume the majority of you don’t.  What most of you wouldn’t know, given the fact that you likely only knew I wrote about music primarily instead of making any myself, is that I walked away from it all about seven years ago.  None of it was really all that willingly mind you…it was more of a circumstantial thing.  When we packed up the studio to move across Canada back in 2016, I consequently moved away from the one guy I’d spent my time making music with for the two decades prior, in our humble band known as Balls Deep In Your Stepmom that we formed back when I was about twenty years old.  The formative years, or so I’m told.  Anyhow.  We knew it was clearly going to be more of a challenge with such a massive physical distance between him and I, Vancouver to Ottawa, but towards the start it at least seemed theoretically possible that we could still make music together.  It was the process that needed to change and we needed to adapt to it, and we did for a while.  I think it’s fair to say that, while we were never what I’d consider to be a ‘good’ band – we managed to make some of the worst music we’d ever made in our history as a result of not being in the same room to call out what sounded like crap in real-time…and somewhere in there, like a lot of what we created, was a handful of significant breakthroughs and genuinely great tunes as well.  The last album from Balls Deep In Your Stepmom, aptly titled Packing It In – The Final Recordings, was made by sending files back and forth across the internet, and along with two records filled with B-Sides & an EP, was the last of four recordings we put together in 2019.  Before that, our last official album traces back to 2013, long before the move and longer before the eventual dissolution of our friendship became fully permanent.  Now…that seems like a lot of time off, and that’s because it is – but if you were to look at our production level between say, 2006-2013, you’d be blown away by how much we accomplished.  It never went much further than the two of us or our circle of friends, but we never had the goal of getting on the radio or playing shows…nothing like that.  I used to tease all the musicians that came my way for interviews when SBS Live This Week was first getting underway, because they’d usually play a song or two for the show, and I’d laugh at’em all, because they had to REMEMBER all those details to recreate it live again and again.  Me?  I made music to forget.  We’d play something once, record it, and we’d never revisit it again.  Couldn’t have played an old song from out catalog if our lives depended on it.  For years and years, we’d get in these self-made studios and spend entire days and even weeks at times recording everything we could think of.  As soon as the lights were turned off, and the recordings were finished, we would quickly go about the process of forgetting everything we just did.  Rinse and repeat, several times.  At the start it was like anything else that you dabble in…we practically started the band as a dare to ourselves just to see if we could actually even do it, but it was only ever a hobby at most.  As we eventually started to get fairly decent at what we brought to our band, the standards would slightly rise along with our evolution, and more disagreements were had as time marched on.  We’d labor & debate the lineup of songs & the flow of a record, fight and argue for our favorites to be on it or the shit tracks to die on the cutting room floor…we…cared more about that band than we’d ever really let on I reckon.

Making the last album was excruciating in a variety of ways.  I mean, if the one that came before it was released in 2013, and I didn’t move until 2016, and Packing It In – The Final Recordings didn’t get released until 2019…well…as you can see, the math wasn’t mathing.  It was like pulling teeth to get it finished, and threatened to break apart the band throughout the years that it took to make, many times over.  I was just the singer at that point…so…correct me if I’m wrong but, a singer needs a song to sing on, right?  I’d wait and wait and wait for him to make something new musically, which was fucking tough to say the least.  I’d get the typical excuses and litany of bullshit he was so proficient at spewing out, but it took forever to get anything I could work with.  Now…I know what you’re thinking – don’t be so lazy, right?  Surely, if I used to be half of the music in the band when it all started, and I was the only one that had prior experience in any other bands before (My first one, called Oblivion Street back in the high school days), then obviously I could just make my own songs, right?  You ARE right, and YES, that’s exactly what I did.  I went on to release my first official solo album done entirely DIY (for better AND worse I’d say!) in that time – The Cellophane Heart’s The Dark Becomes The Light.  I was getting deep into the second record when my Mac computer blew up and I lost everything that we’d recorded at the studio throughout the first three years of SBS, which was just as much of a tragedy for what I’d lost as it was for the several archives and recordings we had of everything that came through the studio in those first three years.  I also recorded a metric TON of music under the name Aixelsyd as well…and the only place you can hear any of that is in the intros of SBS Live This Week.  I would practice songwriting by singing to other people’s instrumental music.  From professional mainstream releases to underground stuff, if there were no vocals on it already, I’d put some in there somewhere.  I mean, when you’ve got no band of your own, right?  I’ve had a lot of fun doing this, singing my way from year to year, and I’ll always have amazing memories of every band and project I’ve been in, as well as all the time we’d spend in the studio simply playing and singing along to all the music that we loved listening to as well.  I miss it.

The truth is that I was missing it even as I was doing it though.  In those last six years of waiting for any music to come my way to continue the journey of Balls Deep In Your Stepmom, it seemed like it was impossible to wrangle my cohort into doing anything.  As far as I was told, he was way too busy getting balls deep in actual stepmoms, not just fictional ones…and the lifestyle was catching up to him.  Then the endless stream of lies and bullshit started, ad nauseam.  My original partner in music just wasn’t the same anymore, especially with the distance between us in where we lived geographically now.  The drugs became a massive factor as they took over his whole damn life for a couple years, and while we still hadn’t officially broken up, gone was the moderation in that department, and it basically wrecked his ear for sound entirely.  A guy that was once extremely gifted in that area, became essentially useless.  I’m not saying that out of spite, I’m saying it with complete objectivity.  When I finally did start getting instrumentals from him, they were largely sub-par and highly uninspired.  We had eleven tracks on our last album – but we probably had forty or fifty instrumental tracks to work with that were basically impossible to use, or just didn’t have the spark they used to have.  Hence those B-Side albums…a lot of the garbage ended up there, with titles that referenced that.  Even the last album we put out has artwork that is just a long log of puke from my dog in a Ziploc bag, because that was the best physical representation of how I felt about the music we were making by that point.  Fucking metaphorical.  I’d send over the songs with my vocals added to them for him to mix, and they’d come back ten times worse because he had lost his way personally & his skillset professionally at the same time.  So I’d be listening to these mixes of my voice that weren’t even in the same spot as when I was singing them originally, and/or using effects that made them over-processed, or just weaker in general than what I’d sent to begin with.  Sometimes the music just ended up sounding awful in the final mixes, and it seemed like I was the only one that would be honest about that.  And I got super tired of that.  As exciting as it was to get a few cuts that actually worked well enough – the songs that ended up on Packing It In – The Final Recordings – it felt like there was still something there to be proud of, but it was so far and few between by then that it truly became sad.

So we shut the thing down, or, more accurately it basically imploded.  Heck, we didn’t even agree on the finalized lineup of songs that formed the last four records in 2019, because we had totally stopped communicating in any kind of functional way by that time.  He’d been caught in so many different obvious and stupid lies by that point that he pretty much avoided me, and with me being so frustrated by his lack of attention to the friendship, the band & the songs, I pretty much avoided him too.  After months of that behavior, and no further movement on the material, it was pretty easy to just go with what we had left.  I listened, and shuddered at most of it…everything seemed so half-baked and thrown together in the production, but what was salvageable still had the essence of the band in there somewhere.  I sorted through it all, dumped it online, and that was where the last chapter of Balls Deep In Your Stepmom came to a close.  Twenty years we were in that band for.  Off and on…but mostly on…and then just like that, poof, gone.

I got so pissed off about it that, rather than rotate my way through Balls Deep In Your Stepmom songs, Aixelsyd and The Cellophane Heart as the intros for SBS Live This Week, I stopped playing anything from BDIYSM for the next several years, until this month when I finally started adding them in again.  I decided that I’m not surrendering my agency here…those songs are every bit as much of a part of me as anything I’ve ever done, and while I might never want to sit in the same room with the guy that helped me make them ever again in this lifetime, I’ll be damned if that dictates whether or not I listen to music I brought into this world, you feel me?  It IS weird to listen to them now after all this time, so don’t get me wrong, they’re a little tainted by the stain of a fallen friendship, but man, we had something so totally different than anything else out there.  None of it made sense, and having that as a creative outlet was such a wonderful thing.  I never needed it to be heard, I never needed it to be acknowledged…any of that stuff would have been nice and welcomed of course, but all I really needed was to DO IT.  When we shut down the band, which wasn’t even in itself a discussion so much as an implied result of other discussions, I not only stopped making music with Balls Deep In Your Stepmom, I stopped making music, period, end of sentence.  One of the things I used to love doing most was anonymously singing on people’s projects from all over the world…creating songs, spoken word pieces, or helping them with their songwriting.  I left all that behind too, and other than packing up the instruments and electronics and pedals and microphones from the studio and such, I haven’t touched anything to do with making music since back in 2019.  It’s like an entire chapter of my life that got ripped out of my book…and I just kind of let that happen.  I let it slip away.  I had this thing that I genuinely loved to do, even if I was the only one doing it, and I simply stopped doing that thing altogether.  And you know what?  The world has been a lot more of a darker place for me as a result.  It can be hard to justify any kind of hobby when you’re busy trying to leave your mark on the world, and without that kind of accountability partner situation that you get in a band, and the sting of BDIYSM’s breakup still too fresh, I stopped making music.  As days passed, at first it was a matter of thinking I’d come back to it when I was ready.  Then as more days passed it became kind of symbolic, like I was making myself my own martyr and refusing to make music because of how wronged I felt I had been.  Then came the excuses like moving and life and work…dog cancer…I mean…anything that counted as a potential excuse was certainly used as one.  Then you get to the fear stage, where you think you’ve lost all the skill and talent you had, or start to conclude that you might never have had either of those things to begin with…and so that holds you back too.  Imposter syndrome.  There’s a level even beyond this that’s scarier than that though, and what makes it scary is that it can often be the solution for so many other problems, so you’d never see it coming…but what’s scarier, is acceptance.  I started to believe that I wasn’t going to make any real art of substance ever again.  This sinking feeling helped me craft some pretty damn killer sentences over the years, because I absolutely thought, or perhaps I had convinced myself, that writing was going to be my only contribution to art from there on in.  And if that was indeed the case, I should be happy with that – it IS enough in so many ways…all except financially & emotionally I figure.  You know what I’m talking about though…I thought that I was done making music forever, and that I’d probably lost the spark, the passion, the desire & the skill I’d need to have if I’d ever do it again.

I was accepting this as truth, and simultaneously, it was also confirming the way others saw me as well.  I’ve fundamentally been relegated to the status of being ‘a person that has indeed, made some music,’ in the eyes of my family, which has a long history of professional music careers in it.  I think to some extent, it bothered them at times that I’d refer to myself as a musician, even though I’d personally recorded about twice the songs that any of them had and spent twenty freakin’ years in a band.  The goalposts were continually moved for me as I grew up.  At first, I was raised on the idea that a musician was anyone that could play an instrument.  Once I could do that, then a musician had to be in a band.  Once I was in one of those, a musician had to have songs recorded, albums and whatnot.  So I did that too…and then being a musician became defined by playing your songs live, which is the one threshold I never successfully crossed.  Remember the whole writing songs to forget thing I mentioned earlier?  A philosophy like that doesn’t lend itself well to playing live shows.  Anyhow.  The real point is that no matter how much I tried or how close I got to the mark, the further it felt like I got pushed away in response.  It happens in all industries and jobs of all kinds…you put your life into it, you study it, you become the thing you wanted to be, and the last thing you’d ever want to see is some ragtag douchebag come along and claim to be on the same level without having put in any kind of a similar effort.  Maybe that’s fair.  Maybe I still believe being a musician is what I was originally taught – that anyone can be one.  That if you can hold something in your hand and give it a rhythm, anything can become an instrument in the hands of a musician.  That you’re not supposed to worry about quality or any of the technical details…that music is a primal part of who we are…and that you should be encouraged to express yourself out loud for the world to hear it.  Real-life, practical hands on experience counts for so much…like, c’mon…I was in a band for longer than any of your teenagers have been alive for.  That’s just objective math y’all, think about it.  I was also in that band for just a few years less than half my life.  Music itself, has been a part of my existence for as long as I can remember.  Yet when people would inevitably ask me, often right in front of my musical family, if ‘I played too’ or had any musical talent at all, my answer eventually became ‘no.’  Which is a lie of course, but I can remember the look on one family member’s face the first time I said it, which was a huge smile that beamed with a malicious type of victory, as if to say, ‘correct, you’re not.’  Those who can’t do, teach, as they say…and they also say that every music critic on earth is merely a wannabe that never did anything substantial of their own.  To be fair to me, my family has probably heard about two of the six-hundred-plus songs I’ve recorded and read about one of my articles…so truthfully, I don’t know if they ever knew that I might have had at least a little talent in their arena.  It was more of a matter of not wanting me in it…like a line drawn in the sand that separates the punks from the professionals…you know who you are on each side of the line, and more importantly, you knew you weren’t the people on the other side.  Distinction.  Distinguished distinctions.  I’ve never believed that everyone has to take the same route to success.  I’ve never believed that just because someone didn’t study something the same way you did means that they might not still have something valid to say or express.  I’ve always believed that family and friends should support each other, yet for the majority of my existence, it’s come with a feeling of competition.  Not the good kind either, where you encourage each other to be at their best.  No…for me, it was always the opposite kind, where you’re playing an endless game of trying to establish some weird dominance, or at least avoid feeling like you’re being dominated.

In any event…this all came to a head as I drifted away from doing one of the few things on Earth I felt good at, and one of the few things on Earth that I not only always seemed to enjoy, but always wanted to do.  I really started to accept this narrative that I wasn’t ever, or at least had no longer been, a musician…and I slipped that shadow right on over myself to head right back into the dark I came from.  I mean, I have to acknowledge that no one really came to my defence on this issue, except for maybe my wife on a few occasions, where she’d tell a stranger we met in the crowd that I did in fact used to play this or that in those random conversations we have at shows.  And it’s sweet.  I love that lady.  She never listened to my music either, but as I’ve come to learn throughout the years of loving her, music simply doesn’t connect with her in the same way that it does for me.  So yeah…maybe she’s not listening to what I create, but she’s not listening to the Beatles either, you get what I’m saying?  Anyhow this isn’t about that…this is about the bullshit narrative I created & then allowed myself to believe about myself.

I like to think that I’ve always known I was wrong.  Deep down, music is either something that’s in you or it’s not…I’m sure any artist in their field would tell you the same with respect to what they do.  I wake up and I think about music.  Music is probably the last thing I think about before I go to bed.  And you know what I do in the middle?  I work with music, listen to music, and talk music with anyone & everyone that I can.  I’ve got all this amazing equipment in boxes…I’ve got a voice I’m proud of as a singer…I’ve got boatloads of instrumentals I could sing to, and/or the right instruments to make my own.  I shouldn’t be allowing myself to accept fiction as fact when it comes to who I am – music is a part of what I do, but I am indeed still a musician all the same.  I’m a jack of all trades…I wouldn’t same I’m amazing at anything I’ve chosen to play, but I can hold my own on any instrument whether it’s the first time I’ve held it or the fiftieth.  What really matters is that we all have a right and responsibility to create, if only for ourselves.

About a month ago, I received an email from an artist that I’ve been listening to for more than a decade.  Like I’m talking FRESHLY listening to…like yes, I’ve had this music for more than ten years, but I probably still put it on YESTERDAY…that kind of listening, you feel me?  I had purchased one of their old records from Bandcamp on one of their ‘Bandcamp Fridays,’ and so he emailed me to say thanks, and that he felt like this could very well be a sign.  He hasn’t made music for a while now too from the sounds of things…and he was wondering if I might be interested in working together with him on something new.

Maybe it wasn’t just a sign for him – maybe it was a sign for us both, I figured.

And so, like a punk that has a dreadful fear of success…I hid from responding until I basically couldn’t take it anymore.  No joke…I let that thing sit in my inbox and must have stared at it in disbelief and horror every day for a month or more.  To think that an artist with the kind of talent this dude has, and a sound I have loved for years, would consider working with me on any level in the realm of music making, is terrifying…but equally exciting.  I’ve said no to many amazing talents throughout the years that have asked if I would do something over this past seven years since officially walking away from Balls Deep In Your Stepmom…but this time something feels different.  Maybe that’s a different headspace for me, maybe it’s the right opportunity, maybe it’s both at the right time – I don’t know…but I feel like I have to say yes to this.  Who knows what will ever come out of it…maybe something does, maybe nothing does – maybe that doesn’t matter whatsoever, and it’s always more about the journey than the destination.  I’m in what would be the worst space to record I’ve been in for years, so I have no doubt that’ll make things additionally challenging and stressful…I’ve gotta track down all my instruments and microphones.  I’ve gotta remember how to do all the things I used to do, but most importantly, I really have to remember that I AM a musician…I’m an artist…and that I’ve got this.  It has been way too long since my last creative adventure…so no matter what does or doesn’t come out of this, I’m ready to say yes again.

Should I come out of my artistic retirement at long last?  Fuck it…I never should have felt retired at all.

It’s time for me to send out an important email I think.  Let’s find out just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Until next time my friends – be excellent to each other.

Your ally in all-things-music,

– Jer @ SBS