One Year Later...
A lot can happen in a year. As I write this I’m flying to Florida, to Gainesville specifically. It’s a city that I know pretty well, it’s a lot like Lawrence but in Florida. Most college towns are like this, Boulder is like Lawrence but with mountains, Ann Arbor is like Lawrence but really fucking cold, that sort of thing. I’ve had good shows in Gainesville, it helps to be friends with Hot Water Music but this time we’re heading down to play FEST. There are a lot of punk rock festivals but this one is the punkest in my opinion, at least the punkest that would have us as a headliner. I don’t really love playing festivals but I like this one. In a weird way it makes me feel a similar happiness that I used to get at Winfield, a bluegrass festival outside of Wichita that had a very different sound but a very similar vibe. Everyone knows they aren’t the mainstream and they revel in it. Nobody is posing for magazine cover shoots in the communal backstage area like some of the “cooler” festivals we’ve played. I don’t even think there is a backstage area at FEST. I guess I’ll find out.
This feel like an appropriate place to end this tour. For the last year and a half we’ve been playing our second and most popular record every single show. It’s been great, we’ve gone all over the world, seemed to make our fans happy and we made some money. Not a bad way to celebrate but it’s time to stop. We are tired and need a break not only from touring but from playing these songs in particular. I don’t think any of us ever want to get to the point where we feel resentful that we “have” to play these songs as opposed to “get” to play them. Luckily we haven’t crossed that particular threshold yet but it’s good that we are stoping when we are.
After this weekend the band will be on a break and I’ll be officially into solo record mode full time since “The Salton Sea” comes out on the fourteenth. It dawned on me just today that it’s been a year since I started this project. It was on the second leg of the STWHA tour that decided to start every day with a writing exercise. On October 1st, 2024 I got up before the bus was awake and wrote a thousand words. No real agenda, just an “Artist’s Way” sort of thing. That book calls it the “morning pages” where you write three pages of whatever you want, but I was typing so I did it by word count. In the morning, before the bus is awake is my favorite part of the day on tour. Its the only time that space is truly quiet and the only part of the day where I can be alone with my thoughts. As glamorous as you might think tour is, it’s still communal living. I have ten roommates in a what is essentially an above ground submarine. It can get claustrophobic sometimes. But, in the morning, especially before dawn its quiet and I decided to take that time for myself and write.
After a few days of this practice I realized that I was writing a lot about my experience getting sober. The dark days, rock bottom, the trips to the hospital, recovery meetings and ultimately going on tour again without the aide of alcohol. I started to wonder if I was needing to write these things down because I might forget the stories? I might want to forget them one day, it’s not exactly a happy set of memories. So, I kept typing, a thousand words a day, seven days a week for a calendar month. At the end I found myself with thirty thousand words and not sure what to do with them. For the month of November I spent any free time I had trying to turn those essays into songs.
The process was not dissimilar to how I write custom songs for people though it was the first time that I ever attempted this technique for myself. I’ll take a questionnaire that anyone who commissions a song will fill out, or in this case an essay that I had written and scan it for phrases. With love songs it’s usually something like the nicknames two people have for each other, or a phrase like “I love you three thousand” from Endgame. With this project it tended to be more location specific. The Salton Sea itself is a metaphor for how I thought of my life back during the dark days. That all my best days were behind me and I was a shadow of my former self. Union Transfer is a club in Philadelphia where I had a sort of internal breakdown. The hospital in Kansas City where I went for detox, the secret society meetings I attended, even New Orleans are all places I found myself writing about. I would take a phrase that I had written during a stream of conciseness exercise and build a set of lyrics around that. “We drank like Barrymores” came to me as I walked around Spokane, Washington for some reason. As far as I know the Barrymore family doesn’t have any association with Spokane so IDK where that little burst of inspiration came from. But, it was something I wrote down without thinking so it became the opening line of that song.
Songwriting, at least for me, is as much editing as it is inspiration. I think about that when people congratulate me on writing a book. I don’t think you know how long it takes to make a record, it was honestly pretty comparable. It takes laboring over the same small piece of a song over and over again until it’s perfect in your mind. It all takes time and the tricky part is making the time to do it. They say the best way to become a writer is to start writing, so that’s what I did. Stories into songs.
Thing is, I wasn’t totally sure I would still be able to do it. I’m certainly not the first person to think that it was the booze that made me creative. Come to find out, I was actually creative in spite of it. Having had that crutch kicked out from under me I find myself much more motivated to work and much less concerned about fucking something up. Comedians talk about how bombing onstage is part of the process and so is writing shitty songs (or shitty essays). You might have to write a hundred stinkers to get one good one, that’s just the way at works. Now that the fog has lifted I have the drive to keep writing. Songs and essays and a screenplay and a children’s book and a cookbook and a novel and on and on and on. Who knows if I’ll ever finish all those things but I’m excited to try.
So, looking back it feels good to pause and think about the process. A year ago I just started writing every day and that turned into something so much more than just some words on a screen. It’s something that I hope to do forever and I can’t recommend it enough.