Music Four years ago, on the day of my 30th birthday, I woke up despondent due to foolishly misplaced desires. I couldn't bring myself to answer my phone, which was ringing with birthday wishes. Instead, I decided to drive out to the coast to be by myself. I wandered around until I discovered the Columbian Cafe in Astoria. (Appropriate that it's named after Columbus and I said I "discovered" it even though many people before me had already been there. Anyway.) I sat at the bar while the owner Uriah, a Jerry Garcia-looking man, cooked up different experiments. "Here, try this," he would say as he handed me a corn bellini or piece of roast duck bursting with flavor. I decided to order the red snapper, and when he served it to me it had slices of tomatoes on top of it. I had never really enjoyed tomatoes in my life. It's not that I hated the taste, but for some reason they always made me gag. I just couldn't eat them. I would never ask for their exclusion, but by the time I would finish a salad or something, my plate would be filled with little leftover tomato wedges. However, as Uriah handed me the plate of red snapper with tomato slices that day, I trusted that I should just eat them, despite thirty years of contrary evidence. It was his kind face and the loving way that he cooked everything, and the deep red color of the tomatoes. They were the kind of red that you only see when you cut a vein and oxygen-poor blood comes spilling out.

I ate the tomato. It wasn't "good" or "great". It redefined what I thought a tomato was. It made me mad at all the pale white tomatoes that had been dispassionately shoved into sandwiches and burritos. Those were not tomatoes. THIS was a tomato. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato describes how we never know the true essence of something, we just know the shadow that that thing casts on the wall of the cave we're all chained in. I swear to God that in Astoria on my birthday, when I bit into that tomato at the Columbian Cafe, I was biting into the PLATONIC IDEAL of a tomato, like I walked right into that cave, grabbed the tomato that was casting the shadow of tomatoes all over the world, and took a bite out of THAT.

It made me wonder what else in my life I had only had experienced inferior versions of. I wanted to find more real tomatoes.

I started this year with a vow. I decided to convince myself that this was the last year of my life. Every time I was faced with a choice, any choice, I would base my decision on the belief that I was going to die at the end of the year and this was my last chance. It was a way to trick myself into living my life instead of waiting. So I started out the year living in Brooklyn for two months. I stayed in an apartment in the Greenpoint neighborhood, which is filled with old Polish people shuffling down the street in long coats. In the grocery store everyone speaks Polish, and there are all kinds of Polish foods on the shelf, and short old Polish women politely ask you if you can grab them a bottle of pickled fish from the top shelf. From there I went to New Orleans, California, Colorado. I restored old friendships and made new ones and then alienated other friendships. More importantly, I gave up on defining my success on outside factors and made my own happiness and freedom the top priorities.

The theory of evolution gives us a good metaphor in which to look at our lives. The idea is that every species adapts to its environment in a never-ending quest to survive and reproduce. Its success is therefore not measured against other species, but just based on its own continued existence. It is unfair for us to look at our fellow creatures and say that one of them is smarter or more advanced than the other. We are judging based on our own biases. Of course monkeys and dolphins will look good because they can sometimes play along with us, and worms will look stupid. But every creature has adapted to its environment and built its strengths based on what it needs to survive. Because a worm can't beat us at chess doesn't make it dumb. Playing chess was never a part of its environment and not necessary for its survival.

We can look at musical pursuits the same way. It can be overwhelming to look at a very successful band and feel like your own musical project is a failure by comparison. If the Arcade Fire sells a thousand times more albums than you, does that make their music a thousand times better than yours? It really just means that they are a particular species that has adapted to their environment well. It's not a competition amongst all groups, even though it definitely seems like that. In reality, each project is given a certain environment and tools to survive, and it either performs well and continues living or it doesn't. There are creatures that fly planes all over the world and there are also creatures at the bottom of the ocean that live off the heat escaping from the center of the Earth. If you can survive in your environment, then you are a success.

I write these words from Krakow, Poland. I am half Polish, from my father's side. When I was a kid the first composer who ever really broke through for me was Chopin. His Prelude in E minor was a shot right to my stomach. Some music you struggle to appreciate, and some just tackles you and tramples your heart. Before I ever knew how to play an instrument I used to have dreams of being able to play the piano like Chopin. The dreams were so real, like when you can fly and it just seems natural. I would look down at my hands and would and marvel at what they could do. When I was a teenager I went to a psychic and she told me that in a past life I was a woman living in Poland in the 19th century and I took piano lessons from Chopin.

I don't really expect to die by the end of the year, but I'm grateful for the impetus that vision caused me. Without it I would have put off France, and Germany, and cliff diving, for another year. Now all I want to find is more real tomatoes. The real versions of every possible food, musical style, and type of person. You know you've found it when you realize you'd only been experiencing a cardboard cut-out until now.

Music If you haven't read the wonderful book "Just Kids" by Patti Smith, you absolutely have to. Actually, you don't have to. Only read it if you love New York, or if you love music, or if you love the 1960's, or the 1970's, or if you love "love," or if you love the world.

The book is about Patti Smith moving to New York and meeting Robert Mapelthorpe, and about them wanting to be a artists and be free. The impression it leaves on you is that the world is filled with so many beautiful details, and that the only path to getting what you want is to work really hard. But working hard can also just mean appreciating all the beautiful details of the world, trying to understand them, and create more beautiful details.

It's also a book about people being in love. When you're in love with someone, you see every detail. You love the cuff links and the ear lobes and the shoelaces and the quirky way of pronouncing r's. When no one is in love with you, you feel like a big mainsail, catching all the furious winds of the world. As though all that matters is vagaries and dumb gestures.

I spent most of this year working on a ballet. It was an opportunity to write music that was more intricate. Every time I offered a sketch of music to the choreographer he would tell me to do more: to make it crazier, bolder, stronger, more exciting. Most of the time while writing pop songs I feel encouraged to do the opposite: to make it simpler, dumber, bigger, something that can catch the attention of the guy at the bar who's watching the football game. But maybe I don't want his attention. Like a lot of artists, I've spent so much time sewing my beautiful flag, but instead of running it up a flagpole to display it gloriously, I walk with it through the mud to try to show it to everyone, and it drags on the ground, gets trampled and muddy.

When it was Patti Smith and Robert Mapelthorpe in that apartment in Brooklyn in 1969, all they had was the work. There were no venues for validation outside of producing a great body of work. Being an artist wasn't a bourgeois appellation, it was a commitment to a craft. It wasn't exclusive either. Being an artist is ultimately about finding beauty and expressing that to others to remind them why they're alive. You don't have to be a painter or a musician to be an artist. You can be an artist in how you cultivate your own personality.

But in regards to "the work": in 2011 it is possible to be having dinner with your friends, decide to form a band, record a song on GarageBand, make a Bandcamp page and have your music available to the entire world in just a few minutes. This means there is great access for all the under-appreciated bands in the world. But it leads to a pattern of forgetting. Of forgetting about the work. Of forgetting about songwriting. Of forgetting about living a life, building up a purpose, finding something to say and refining it. I don't know if I want to listen to a band who formed primarily because of a clever name, whose first order of business was to take band photos and start planning a music video. Having a band has gone from an organic collection of people who are trying to have a conversation and communicate music, to now just something you sketch on the back of a bar napkin: this will be our name, we'll coordinate our outfits thusly, my uncle knows a guy who can get our demo heard.

That's what trying to achieve success leads to, which is perfectly fine as long as we are not disingenuous about it. For myself, at a certain point this past year I started to wonder: What does my personal success do for the good of the world? It might have some tangental connection, but the actual act of me succeeding-- other than making me feel good-- what does that do to help anyone else? There is an illusion that the collection of recognition and accolades will somehow replace the shame of being a loser in high school (okay, a loser in middle school and college and all other times too.) I'm not the first person to say that the entertainment industry is populated by people narcissistically pursuing goals that obstensibly are to give something to society, but are really about healing personal wounds. Maybe this happens in all industries, but it seems magnified more in the entertainment business. Librarians seem perfectly content to help people find information and not just achieve a certain status to make the people that taunted them back in school feel bad.

A recent article in Slate by Jacob Rubin called "The Death of Titles" ruminates on the trend of movie and television show titles being very literal, such as in the case of "Horrible Bosses," "Snakes on a Plane," and "2 Broke Girls", etc. These are entertainment products that are essentially also a marketing pitch within themselves. So often if you are stuck watching one of these films or tv shows on a plane (a fate worse than having to actually deal with a bunch of snakes) you get the feeling that the product is literally being written as you watch it. Like there was no belief that there was a movie worth making until they got the pitch approved. But the pitch IS the movie, and that's all they have. You can feel the sets rolling into place right as the scene starts, actors getting their lines right before ACTION. And, as the article points out, the paradox of these literally-named products is that they are actually not even about what they say they are about. "Snakes on a Plane" is not about snakes on a plane, but about whether enough people will see "Snakes on a Plane" that it will go viral. The product itself is composed of nothing but flares drawing attention to itself, a homing beacon luring everyone in, and once we are close to it we see that it's still just a homing beacon, flashing away, with no other pertinent information.

The biggest hope that I have for artists and musicians in Portland is to dream of being more than just a meme. A meme is like a piece of cultural currency, passed from one person to another. It could be a video of a cat washing a monkey, or it could be "Just Kids." In one sense, every meme is equal. If the cat washing the monkey is seen by ten million people, then it is a success. If you spend five thousand dollars making a music video and it's only seen by a thousand people, well, how do you reconcile the truth that people want to watch random cats and monkeys much more than they want to watch your carefully constructed art? But remember that you don't have to play this game. As a musician, you are always receiving advice from people preying on your ambition, looking to sell you on a more expensive mastering job, or the music video that will break you into certain markets, or the new attitude and verbiage that will make people notice. You start to feel an anxiety that by just standing still you are moving backwards, that everyone else is racing ahead of you towards a bright digital future. Every day brings more memes, because people long to look at new things. And one of those things could be YOUR thing, if you'd put the cost of video production on your credit card, mortgage your freedom for a vague future happiness.

It's comforting when you realize that you don't HAVE to do anything. In the movie "Lean On Me," the main character Joe Clark, played by Morgan Freeman, is thrown in jail. His students rally for his release outside. At one point Joe is told, "We're in a tough spot here... The students are all getting emotional. You have to send them home." To which Joe leans back on his cot and says, "I don't have to do nothing but stay black and die."

As an artist, all you are responsible for is the work. To appropriate this phrase, you don't have to do anything but stay an artist and die. And by not doing anything, I don't mean don't do the work. Spend the 15 hours a day agonizing over the right word for the second verse. Toss and turn at night because you have a melody stuck in your head, and the covers are warm and the room is cold and your 4-track is on the other side and you want to get your idea down but you also want to just sleep. By not doing anything I mean you don't have to do anything that anyone tells you. You don't have to make songs that sound like a popular band's songs. You don't have to make an expensive music video. You don't have to record at the best place in town. You don't have to get a popular guest vocalist. You don't have to get a famous band to give you a blurb. All you have to do is stay an artist and die. That's what's really comforting.

Music I am not any superior authority on the music business, and for that matter on music leisure. I don't know a lot about music history or music literature. But, over the course of writing this column, the subject of songwriting has come up often, and so I thought it would be pertinent to offer my guide on how to write a song. I think you will find this information informational and informative whether you've never written a song (in which case-- congratulations! Send help for the rest of us!) or you've written two thousand songs and won't let anyone listen to nineteen-hundred and eighty-seven of them.

I don't offer these steps to say that I'm an expert at writing songs. Let's think of it this way. Let's say that there's an Asian grocery store downtown that sells delicious Banh Mi sandwiches for $2.25 and I've been there and you haven't, and the route there is a little complicated, so I write some directions out for you on the back of an envelope. If you don't follow these steps precisely, you will be forever lost in Chinatown. That's all. But if you think you can get there on your own, by all means...

How to Write a Song

1. Pick a key. Be considerate of your bandmates' wishes: Keyboardists like to play in C. String players like to play in G. Horn players like to play in B flat. So. Let's make it in C sharp. (It's important to stick it to people who want everything to be easy.)

2. Have some novel musical idea, please. Some basic germ of a whim. Now, there are only twelve different notes, so this can be hard. In fact, when you put it that way it seems almost impossible that we're not just writing the same song over and over again. But make sure to come up with something at least vaguely interesting. (Completion of this step puts you miles ahead of Nickelback. Gotcha, Nickelback!)

3. Now. Put your instrument down. Lay on your back and stare at the ceiling for three hours. Three and a half hours. Don't time it either. Just stare at the ceiling.

4. Buy a Greyhound ticket. Make it the longest possible journey. If you live in Florida, buy a ticket for Seattle. If you live in Texas, make it for outside of Texas. Sit on that bus. Don't bring an iPod or any music to listen to. Don't bring any books to read. Stare out the window at America. Try to sleep on the metal bar near the window that shoots out cold air. Use your coat as a pillow, even though this will make you cold. Try to not extend your body at all beyond the immediate area of your seat so as to not make any contact with the person in the seat next to you. Wherever your bus goes, make sure to get off in Knoxville, Tennessee. Walk past a laundromat that doesn't look like it's still in business, but is. Walk past a Popeye's Chicken. Go back to the Greyhound station and stare at the tile grout in the bathroom. Get back on the bus. Ride it to your final destination. Stay at a friend's apartment in that city. Be broke. Buy a can of beans, but don't buy a can opener. Try to figure out how to cook beans without opening the can. Give up. Starve.

5. Pick a subject to write about. There should be plenty of things to say by now. Filter it into one of the following subjects:

a. Falling in love.
b. Falling out of love and tearing up photographs.
c. Being in love with someone who doesn't love you and running through the rain in slow motion.
d. Being in love with someone who recently fell out of love with you, sitting in an apartment with no furniture.
e. The fact that there is rain and that you also feel pain.
f. The fact that you have a desire that is burning like a fire.
g. The fact that you want to find some kind of peace of mind.
h. Actually, none of these are good subjects. Forget about all of these.

6. Find a canal and walk along it until you reach the end.

7. Write out all the lyrics to one of your favorite songs, including all the repeats, the yeahs, the come ons. Throw this away. This is embarrassing.

8. Go for a walk.

9. Take a shower.

10. Turn off the computer. Turn off every appliance in your house. Unplug them all. Take out all the batteries from every electronic device. You want to be the only source of energy in the room.

11. Leave conversations in the middle. Walk away from dinner while you still have macaroni on your fork. Leave civics class before the end of the semester. Leave your softball team before the last game.

12. Look at a map and wonder what's going on in Ladysmith, Wisconsin. Realize that your imagination will come up with something far more fascinating than the truth. Think about truth maybe not being all that important.

13. Open to a random page of the dictionary. Szygyzy. Okay, you can't SING that but maybe you can THINK it. And keep it to yourself.

14. Fall in love. Did we not do this already? Fall in love. Make a mistake. Go down the wrong path. Sell out your friends. Embarrass yourself. Burn bridges. Turn yourself inside-out.

15. Make yourself dinner. Use a type of mushroom you've never tried. Think about the Earth, how dead bodies decompose in the ground and nurture the plants which we eat and how this makes us all necrovores. (That's a word, isn't it? Necrovores?)

16. Pretend you forgot how to tell time.

17. Write a song from the point of view of the main character in someone else's song. Write a song as Jolene. Write a song as Joe. Write a song as Jude. Write a song as Driver 8.

18. Write a song from the point of view of Santa Claus, but don't give any specific details that would identify yourself. Write a song from the point of view of Snoopy. Of Superman. Of God. Describe what you see, how you feel. Describe your relationships, how you're misunderstood.

19. Write a song from the point of view of someone in an extreme situation. In the Spanish War. In the XYZ Affair. In the Enola Gay.

20. Think about the sun, and how it burns but doesn't burn up. How it's violent and destructive, and yet the most calm and even part of our lives.

21. Make a list of miracles. That ice floats. That giraffes exist. That we are born with organs on the inside of our bodies. That hair grows out of the top of our heads and can be soft and delicate. That sound can be encoded on to vinyl and plastic. That cells have a memory. That water is a liquid. That Buddy Holly got to live at all. That grass is green and the sky is blue. That the moon is the same size as the sun.

22. Write a song not for musicians but for lovers of music. Write a song for the nineteen-year old girl sleeping in her attic room, her record collection small but lovingly assembled, brushing her hair after a shower, unable to tell when someone loves her and when someone just desires her. Write a song for people who don't care about key changes or snare sounds. Write a song for people who need a reason to climb into an icy car at seven thirty in the morning.

23. Fail at things. Fail at math and science and history. Fail at putting out the garbage, at bringing in the garbage. Fail at giving your dog its medicine. Fail at turning the headlights off. Fail at describing to people what it is you're doing with your life. Fail at asking the cafeteria worker if there are onions in the soup. Fail at removing your shoes in the Chancellor's house. Fail at calming down, keeping your hands steady, standing straight. Fail at taking care of your health. Fail at failing.

24. Take things too far. Miss the sarcasm. Shoot a dead horse. Make too many lists, with too many items to ever get through. Drown yourself in thoughts.

25. Decide that it's all wrong. Everything. Your email signature, your general wardrobe aesthetic, your favorite Woody Allen film, your openness to French symbolism, your support of socialized health care. Throw away all your possessions. Make people start to worry that you're going to commit suicide.

26. Do nothing. Lay on your bed, on top of your covers. Process everything in your mind.

27. NOW you can write a song. What key did we choose? C sharp? Write a song in that key. Or any key. The good news is that the song you write will always mean more to you than it will to anyone else. That's also the bad news. But it's also the good news. Nobody is scrutinizing it. It can be whatever you want it to be. Just don't make it boring. Or: make it boring. Make it the most boring song ever. That would be something.

28. Don't ask for feedback. Don't poll everyone. Just make a mistake. Make it wrong. You're not running for president.

This is how I know how to write a song. There is no shortcut. Yes, every time I write a song I go through every step of this process. If I could remove one of these items I would, but then it wouldn't be a song worth singing.

Music I used to think that the purpose of being mature and refined was to be critical. That the only way to properly display expertise was to shoot down something perceived as lesser. That a life spent learning a certain craft meant that I had to be the biggest snob about that craft, forever standing with my arms crossed picking apart anyone offering their version of it. My particular life pursuit—the thing I do to the exclusion of other crafts and general sanity and normalcy—is songwriting. Devoting my life to songwriting means that at least part of my brain is at all times to some degree working on a song, like some computer program running in the background that is summing an equation for the elusive Unified Field Theory. Devoting your brain to something like that, it's no way to live a decent life. It's no way to be a selfless, social human being. I teach a songwriting class summers at a rock camp for teens in Pendleton and I always find myself fighting the urge to start every class by shouting, "Get out of here! You don't want to do this! Find a rope swing! Put your hand out the window of a car on the highway and surf the wind! Just don't sacrifice your happiness by trying to write another song! We have enough songs!" But maybe I feel that urge because I'm trying to thin the herd of possible competition, throw them all off the trail while I secretly calculate how to write a perfect song. I'm sure serial killers devote a similar portion of their brainpower to figuring out the perfect way to catch their prey and dispose of the body. They are still probably better conversationalists at parties than songwriters.

The equation for songwriting, if it were an equation, not that I would ever write it as an actual equation, would look something like this:

[(p +e) * h] / y = x

Wherein p is the pain of living with your heart over-exposed, e is the embarrassment of being a grown man sleeping in your van, h is all the happiness you've put aside to play bars with blown speakers in Arizona, y is the amount of physical years you've sacrificed by malnourishing and mistreating your body, and x is, of course, a perfect song. If all of those factors could reliably produce a perfect song, then it would be worth it. But the equation is, of course, imbalanced. X is unattainable.

Being a writer has to involve breaking your own heart every day, like how Rocky would crack open an egg and eat it raw while he was training for a fight. Any time a protective covering forms around your tender areas, you have to break them open and expose yourself again. There's no other way. Otherwise you're just writing out words dispassionately as though you're taking a typing test. And, like training for a fight, writing words is literally last on my list of things I want to do at any given moment. I will whine and plead and bargain myself out of having to write down words. Just staring at a screen and trying to put inexpressible thoughts into insufficient language is too much like mud wrestling my own childhood regrets. It's trying to pinch open the spout on those single-serving cartons of milk while I dread the post-lunch social studies class where the football player is going to laugh at my collar shirt underneath my cable-knit sweater. I'd literally rather do anything. But avoiding writing makes me feel too much like a kid with a swimming pool in summer who stays inside watching tv. I should really swim in that pool. I'm lucky to even have a pool.

Andy Rooney was, believe it or not, a writer. It was sad when he died the other week and all the headlines said, essentially, "Old Curmudgeon Finally Dies." His irascibility became shtick, and you can't argue with a consensus of headlines around the country that determined that he was just a sourpuss. Would you want your life to be summed up by the opinion that you were someone who was grumpy and annoyed at everything? I wonder at what point you slip down that path and forever become a curmudgeon. As a young man he was a war correspondent who was one of the first people to visit the Nazi concentration camps after they were shut down. Maybe that's a good enough reason to become a curmudgeon.

In the beautiful and baffling film The Tree of Life, the mother at one point says, "The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by." To me, that is the only way to charge into old age: to try to open up and be more and more loving.

For example, my friend Dave is the biggest true fan of music that I know. He genuinely tries to like every piece of music that he comes across. I used to think this was foolish. How could you trust someone's opinion if they always like everything? But now I think that trying to love everything you come across is really the only worthwhile pursuit. When Dave hears a new album and initially doesn't like it, he'll try to listen it again while he's going to sleep, or out jogging, or in some other mood or under some spell. He tries to will himself into liking music. Why isn't that what I do? I always resist liking something new, like I'm trying to force myself to find men sexually attractive. Instead of being open to a new band, I need to hear twenty positive recommendations of it before I'll even listen to a song, and two seconds after the vocals come in I'll have made up my mind that I can never get into. If the voice doesn't feel like home, if it doesn't sound like a memory I love reliving, then it's not worth getting involved.

Over the last few years I've found myself only going out to shows because I want to run into a certain person I've been too preoccupied to call on the phone, or to remind a bandleader that I exist and would love to open for them on tour, or to check out a new band not as much for what they sound like, but how many people they can draw on a Wednesday night. When did these become the main reasons for going out to shows? If music were food, it would be like going to a restaurant just to talk to the waiter and see how many people are seated and see how fast the risotto comes out of the kitchen. Why don't I just sit down and feed myself? Most nights I leave a show feeling empty and unfulfilled. It's not the fault of the music. I think it's the fault of me, the listener. Lately I only feel nurtured when I go see something that is outside my main discipline, like dance or comedy or theater. When did it become so hard to stand up close to the stage, unfold my arms, give my energy to enjoying the music, looking for reasons to love instead of reasons to hate? If this is what it feels like to turn into a curmudgeon, I'd rather change the sails and take a different tack. There is, after all, still time.

Music I was in line for a comedy show last week in New York City. Standing next to me was a young woman talking on her cell phone to a friend back home. She was telling her friend about all the things she's been doing in New York lately. At one point she said, "And then we walked past those insane protesters on Wall Street and laughed at them. They're just a bunch of homeless people complaining in the park, and they smell bad. It was gross."

I had walked by the protests in Zuccotti (formerly Liberty Plaza) Park myself a few days before. Unfortunately it was the only day recently that was full of rain and wind, and the gathering had turned from a conversation in the park to a game of survival. Cardboard signs were soaked through, with slogans running. There was one that was taped to the big red sculpture in the park that caught my eye. It was in French: "Faire la revolution c'est bien; etre la revolution c'est mieux," which translates to, "To make the revolution is good; to BE the revolution is best." The rain made it unpleasant just to hang around. Wind tugged at the bottoms of tents. It reminded everyone that if you want to get somewhere with a revolution, you are going to have to go through some unpleasant shit.

It reminded me for some reason of bees. They are to us the embodiment of hard work. It's always been funny to me that we look at an insect who is trying to survive, unknowingly participating in a process that beautifully keeps flowering plants alive and therefore most of the food supply for the animals on Earth-- and we think of it as "work." It is neither work nor an accident. It's just what they do. If bees had never pollinated plants before and we went up to them as a species and asked them to do it, there would literally be nothing we could do to convince them it was worthwhile. They would say, if they could talk, "You want us to do WHAT? Why??" We always think of productive physical or mental actions as work, and maybe it's because we're so used to trading our time and spirit to accomplish someone else's goals. Which is ultimately a fine deal if you can be assured that you'll be taken care of when you need it. The protests, to me, are about the outrage over the breaking of that contract. If people complain that there isn't a coherent strategy or list of demands from the occupiers, I think that's okay. Sometimes it's enough to just say, "Stop robbing, stop lying. Just stop."

The struggle to survive becomes the essence of a person's life. I've spent so much time trying to determine at what point you can consider your life's work a success. If you're a musician, is it when you sell out a certain room? Or sell a certain amount of CDs? Or make it on national television? Even if there were proven benchmarks before, certainly the benchmarks have changed in the last twenty years now that there are exponentially more bands and a more fractured audience, and all the normal filters that used to qualify success have been discarded or made irrelevant. Like the cardboard sign says, maybe to make art is good, but to BE art is best. That doesn't necessarily mean turning yourself into a painting or a freak show, or even singing your songs as you walk down the street. It just means aligning the thing you do onstage with what you do in life. Maybe that leads you away from playing a guitar in a bar. Maybe it leads you away from music itself. The problem with revolutions is never in the dreaming stage, but in the practical stage. When you've been sitting out in the wind and rain and it's not a pleasant experience anymore, that's when you really learn why you're doing what you're doing, or if you even want to do it.

I did a tour of the west coast recently that was personally and artistically fulfilling and commercially and financially a disaster. We had trouble getting people to come out to the shows, and when they were there, we had trouble selling any cds. There is a certain desperation I'm familiar with that only comes from driving all day and getting to a venue and having them say that they didn't even know about the show and that nobody is going to come.

Part of the struggle feels institutional. There is a definite change in people's attitudes towards cds. Even just a couple years ago, you used to be able to play a great show to a receptive audience and feel confident that you would be rewarded with a bunch of cd sales. Now you play a show and someone comes up to you and says that it changed their life and you shyly point to your new cd and they look at it like it's a box of Girl Scout cookies. "Oh," they say, trying to think of some excuse. "I'd love to support you. I'm really low on cash right now…" It used to be an item that people needed to consume like it was food. They were hungry to be fed and the cd was the only way to eat. Now they can eat everywhere.

The solution, I'm told, is to diversify. I need to sell T-shirts. I need to sell artwork with download codes. I need to package different products together, give away the music, give away everything for the exposure. Those ways of making money would certainly be more appealing than some of the day jobs I've had, but something in me stubbornly resists it. There's nothing wrong with a T-shirt with a band name on it, and I've proudly worn many. But I keep thinking that I didn't start playing music to be a T-shirt vendor. When it gets to the point that spending a year of your life writing and recording an album, creating the artwork, producing the CDs—when that has almost no value to anyone, then something must change.

The music industry is, like the country itself, made up of a small number of haves and a raging sea of have-nots. There are a few musicians that make tons of money. Record sales may be down for them too, but they still sell hundreds of thousands. There are a handful of bands in the middle class, who are not household names, but can make a decent living. And there are so many bands that are at the poverty level. Basic capitalism tells us that those bands are poor because they are not good enough—that they haven't put in the work, that they don't have anything special to offer. I'm not sure I believe that anymore.

I've argued before with friends about why almost every popular band declines in quality as their career goes on. That the earlier stuff is almost certainly better than the late stuff. I think it's not so much about running out of things to say, or of songs to write, as it is about success taking away the desperate need to tear yourself apart to make yourself good. After your basic needs are taken care of and you are secure in your success, you're more concerned with protecting what you have and not making any missteps. The fire goes away. It happened to one of my favorite bands ever, REM. Even though they made albums that changed my life and protected me from darkness, they declined so much that I didn't even bother listening to what they put out in the last decade. By the time they retired a few weeks ago it felt more like hearing that a respected older relative finally succumbed to death. You were sad they were gone, you loved them when they were vibrant and alert, but knew that nothing good was coming up for them.

My reaction to personal failure has always been to contract. To pull the precious things closer, put them in a smaller tent. The American way is to change what you're doing, to try to catch on with something that works better, or you end up literally starving.

At its worst, capitalism turns us all into beggars and whores. It's not enough to do the thing we believe in, we also have to figure out how it can make money. Maybe this early on in the lifetime of our species that's the kind of structure we need. Someday maybe we won't even think of work as work. It will just be the byproduct of what we do.

I think of the REM song "The One I Love" and its brutally simple lyrics. It starts out as a simple dedication to a lover, "This one goes out to the one I love," Michael Stipe sings. "This one goes out to the one I've left behind." Then it goes off the normal course of a love song, saying that what he's singing is just, "A simple prop to occupy my time." The listener is left to think at this point that either these words devalue the expression of love or that the honesty takes the meaning away from cliche into something more sincere. To me it always felt honest. Everyone is just a body experiencing the world in their own personal way, and even the most noble of pursuits is still just something to occupy your time. Loving someone is just something you do, like pollinating flowers, like starting a revolution.

Music

People don't really want to know how music is made, just like they don't really want to know how sausage is made. They might have a brief interest in the pulled-out guts, the ground-up assholes (here I'm talking about the music business—oh, did you think I was talking about sausage still?), but when it comes down to it, we just want to believe that it's all magic; that we can turn on the faucet and out comes a song, or a sausage, or Diet Coke—and we don't have to worry about the consequences.

The belief that we can get something for nothing is the belief on which this country was built, and it will continue to be that way until we un-build the country brick by brick. After all, humans are special because we are animals that can dream while we are still awake. We can look at our situation and wonder why it has to be that way. If a coyote loses a leg in a hunter's trap he just gnaws it off and deals with the fact that he now only has three legs. He doesn't lie around wondering "WHY ME?" Somehow, as humans, we can have everything go our way and live in the most prosperous society on Earth and we hit one red light and wonder "WHAT DID I DO TO DESERVE THIS?" 

If there were a shortcut to glory, some old amulet to be found in a junk shop that granted us wishes, surely we would have found it by now. Clearly those old genie stories are just told to us so we'll go to sleep at night, so that we'll dream of Santa Claus and not wonder how one man could possibly have the resources and time to service all the well-behaved children of the world. The idea that we can not only get something for nothing but that we DESERVE it has brought us to Las Vegas and given politicians and car salesman an eternal upper hand. We all believe that one day we will eventually have more money, work less and be more famous than we are. We'll believe anyone who promises they can get us there.

I used to want to be famous. When I started playing music one of my main goals was to have more fans than friends. A lot more. I couldn't wait until the point when I would be playing a show and there would be a large amount of people who I did not personally know that clearly came out to see me. I didn't know how to get to that point, how I could get even one legitimate fan. It seemed impossible at first. I'd book a show at the old Meow Meow and put up posters and tell my friends, and on the night of the show there would be six people there: the guitarist's girlfriend, my brother's college roommate who just moved to town and didn't know anyone, my two housemates and two people my drummer worked with. And I would feel so defeated because I wanted to reach those OTHER people out there. My friends were going to come and drink and listen whether I was playing a show or throwing an engagement party, but the whole point of making music was to reach people I DIDN'T know, the other people, because those people would be unbiased, and if they liked my music that meant that they REALLY liked it.

As a performer you want people to fall in love with you, but you know how hard that is. When you fall in love with someone special, it's like you've discovered the last remaining member of a forgotten species of bird. You stumble into the clearing of a meadow and there it is, all the feathers in place in such a perfect and determined way. You love it for the struggle it had to go through just to survive as such a rare creature.

Romantically speaking, if you've had three people really see you in your life, you've done well. Once you've had that first person see you—not just look AT you, or look you up and down, or look you over, or look over you, but SEE you—it becomes a lifelong quest to find that again. You look for that in audiences, but they never see you in remotely the same way. They look at you standing on a stage under a spotlight. If the room is alive and you're playing with purpose then they look up to you with admiration. You could potentially fill every need they have, whether that's consoling them on their breakup or fixing their transmission with a tap of a wrench. If everything is breaking down onstage then they look at you with pity. That quest for affection is so close to manic-depression that you don't even realize you're there until it's too late.

These days I'd rather have friends than fans. I'd rather not just mope around the backstage area hoping that somebody still thinks of me as perfect and pure. Perfect in their head, maybe, but at the end of your life you don't get to total up all the good thoughts people had about you in their heads. All you get is the actual interactions and actual communications with actual people.

I'm starting to think that the holiness we are seeking is not to be found in fame, but rather in obscurity. Fame is like heat in that you can only keep it alive for so long; eventually the molecules will slow down and return to cold. Napoleon said "Fame is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." Obscurity is the natural state. But obscurity can be holy, too. It is the same as standing outside the party lights, adjusting your eyes to the darkness so you can see more stars.

Think of how much more thrilling it would be to pursue obscurity instead of fame: You would no longer have to worry about losing an audience. You would only ask yourself what drives you and what you want to communicate. You wouldn't care about what the safe way out would be. I tend to shy away from situations involving large businesses trying to make money off of my desires. Nobody's trying to make money off of people diving into obscurity, but a whole industry exists to take money from people looking for fame.

To be obscure is more like being that last remaining member of a forgotten species of bird. You survived the encroachment of civilization and the tyranny of homogeny. You didn't change your feathers to blend in, even though it made you more vulnerable.

So many of us are striving to be well-known. We've built up a community where we start to get recognized around town if we play a few good shows and believe that in some way we are famous. It's a nice dream, but it's still a young person's indulgence. The famous are carved into coins or nailed onto street signs. The famous are like reverse-zombies: instead of running away from them, we are drawn to them, hoping they will infect us with their bite and turn us into one of them. If only it could happen that way.

I didn't start playing music so that I could crank out sausage, so that I could be the background music in a bar. I started writing songs so that somebody could lay on their bed and touch the arm of their sweetheart and say with their eyes, "This song is how I feel about you." Having that impact on someone somewhere is a gift. Wanting that to happen a thousand times over is greed. It's wanting something for nothing.

It's important to remember why we came to this party and that we can leave at any time, walk outside, rub our eyes and see the stars in the sky again.

Music Whenever I encounter someone I don't like, I try to relax and think about a long time from now, after our sun has died out and all the stars in the sky have collapsed and all the matter in the universe reverses course and hurtles toward one infinitesimally small point in a Reverse Big Bang. Every particle that has ever existed—you, Oprah, every person that you've ever loved and hated, city buses, hair spray, your lost mix-tapes, the early notes for the lyrics to the Eagles' "Takin' It Easy"—all of that will coalesce into one little point MUCH smaller than the elevator in an old building, and we will all have to learn how to get along and find something to talk about. For at least one billionth of a second, that is. Until the universe Big Bangs again.

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Music You go to a party in Los Angeles, up in the Hollywood Hills. It's the house of a television actor. The house is bigger than any house you can ever imagine owning, even if everything in your life were to go really well. Right when you arrive you are shuffled into a little room where a dozen people are watching a man perform magic tricks. He's really good. He makes the cards disappear and reappear at will. He pulls a card out of his pants. Several people say, "Oh shit!" almost a little too loudly, like the magician just brought back their dead grandmother. Later on in the night, the television actor—a big barrel-chested guy who could physically and financially not give a shit about anything and no one would be able to call him on it—gives you a long explanation of where the term "dead ringer" came from and then asks you sincerely if it would freak you out more if you found out the universe were finite or if you found out it were infinite. This is Los Angeles. This is the second largest city in the United States. I've spent three months of this calendar year in New York City, and so I am getting used to the problems and luxuries that arise when millions of people are in the same space. You get spoiled, because any important cultural event that is appearing anywhere will be appearing in your city. Your intellectual curiosity is rewarded when, for instance, you suddenly get obsessed with a strain of architectural poetry or something and you find out that this art form was invented down the street from where you're staying and there is a performance of it tonight at the cafe in your building.

But Los Angeles has a certain different twist on this big city cultural abundance, and it involves the two factors that you instantly think about when you think about L.A.: cars and weather. The relentlessly sunny weather makes people tame and docile in a way that most people define as happiness, but which twisted artist-types like myself define as complacency and, you know, "selling out". Also, the dependence on cars to get you anywhere makes your life constantly defined by where your car is parked and how feasible is it to get to where you're going. And of course there is the constant debate amongst well-meaning friends about the best route to take to get to your destination. It's conducted with the same gravity as a discussion of the merits of home-schooling vs. private schools, but people rarely acknowledge the possibility that maybe it's not that there is a right and a wrong way to get somewhere, but rather there might just be a wrong way and another wrong way. The world doesn't exist as a duality just because we want it to. Maybe two roads diverge in a wood and neither one makes much of a difference. Or, they're both awesome. Let's keep our heads in the game.

This is not to imply that I don't like Los Angeles. When I was in Los Angeles last week, everyone I contacted said something like, "But I thought you hated Los Angeles?" And then when I met with them, they all said the same thing: "What are you doing HERE?!" I hope I am at least setting some sort of record for hearing that phrase this year. (I am also, I hope, setting the record for times in a year that I drive a car that I am not familiar with into a gas station and pull up to the fuel pump and get out, only to realize that I presumed the tank was on the wrong side of the car, meaning that I have to drive around to the other side, which would be very comical if you sped it all up like on Benny Hill. In this case, of course, there IS a duality, there IS a right and wrong side of the car and I always, invariably—kind of miraculously—choose the wrong side. Every time.)

Los Angeles was for some reason helpful in making me remember that the art we make is not about the particulars of what the painting looks like or where the snare comes in on the bridge or what actors we get for our film. The art we make is us. That doesn't mean that we have to be full of bizarre tics and affectations, just that we cultivate our personality to be as much us as we can. The best people are the ones that are a unique iteration of themselves, the only one of them that you can find in the world, that when you're describing them to someone else, the other person would never say, "Oh one of THOSE kinds of people."

One of the hardest things to accept as an aspiring artist is the success of your friends. When you're working on achieving success in your field and you hear that someone you know has rocketed ahead and received some amazing opportunity, it's hard not to feel a little sting of, "Why wasn't that me?" Which is both completely normal and understandable, and also entirely selfish and rude. If you look beneath the jealousy you'll find some pretty ugly assumptions, first of all that success is a zero sum game. There are some ways that you could say there are only certain slots available in the pantheon of success, finite commodities like spots at a festival, or appearances on Conan. But any time you're upset at someone else's success you're being lazy. You're assuming that the bare minimum will get by and that someone else breaking through means you don't get that opportunity. But I always think of it like this: Think of a undeniably great band like Radiohead. Their success isn't just because they got on a lucky bill one night at an Oxford club. Their success is very much driven by their talent and hard work. If you think their success takes away the possibility of success for someone else, think about how the world would react if there happened to be another band as brilliant as Radiohead, yet completely original and unique. People wouldn't groan and think, "Oh God, I don't have room for ANOTHER amazing band that will change my life and provide a touching soundtrack to the best moments of my day." Instead, you expand your world and embrace this other band. If you work hard enough to make your art compelling, there will be room for it, and the success of other artists won't take away that opportunity.

Besides, to put it in a more selfish way, the success of your peers expands the possibilities of success for everyone. Just in the relatively small town of Portland, the breakthrough of bands as different and diverse as Menomena and Blind Pilot has made it more possible for others to find some traction. Now it becomes a mark of pride that you can write an email and say that you're from Portland, Oregon, and that designation actually means something to people in other cities. That comes from the great successes that other bands have had.

And yet, still, I know I personally feel that sting when I feel like someone has gotten some great opportunity and I wonder why it wasn't me. It feels like such a childish emotion, like you're sitting on the floor in kindergarten wondering why you're stuck with the Stegosaurus instead of the T-Rex. If you're going to pretend to be a dinosaur, it's no fun to be a plant-eater.

When you're a kid it's hard to figure out at what point exactly you'll become a grown-up. That's probably why some cultures have those celebrations that mark the entrance into adulthood, whether it's a bar mitzvah or quinceanera. If you grow up without that, you have to pick some arbitrary moment. (When I got married, I thought to myself, "Okay, now I'm an adult." And then when I got divorced I thought, "Okay, NOW I'm an adult." For some people it's when they first rent a car.)

But after a while, you suddenly look around and notice that you and your friends ARE the grown-ups. You're the ones in charge of the world. That's a scary moment, because you realize that there's no one above you who's going to make sure everything is okay. You suddenly have the responsibility yourself to be in charge of that. But after a while you can relax and remember that the people you thought were the adults were just as scared of being adults as you are now. And they somehow made everything okay, so somehow everything will continue to be okay. But thank God I escaped Los Angeles for now.

You can stream or buy Nick Jaina's new duets record, The Beanstalks That Have Brought Us Here Are Gone, right here.

Music It took me a long time to realize that no matter what we do or how old we get, we'll never stop telling the story of our lives. And it's not just because the story keeps changing, although that's part of it. But there will always be someone that hasn't heard your story, even if you just finished telling your story perfectly five minutes ago and you're on your death bed and you don't feel like telling it again.

The danger of having stories to tell is that you'll grow weary of repeating them. If you're a performing songwriter and you want your songs to have meaning, and you want to perform those songs for people and let them in on the meaning, just remember that you can never stop telling those stories.

In my somewhat financially-dictated quest to explore whether I can put on a compelling solo show, I've been looking to stand-up comedy for inspiration. Not that I'm trying to be funny or come up with jokes, but I'm fascinated with how a great stand-up comedian can command a room with nothing but his or her mind. Often they're not even great performers in the theatrical sense, they just have a relentless desire to strip away their defenses and leave themselves honest and open.

Performing comedy can be a lot like performing music, except that musicians can always take extended guitar solos instead of talking about their genitals. Comedians are essentially FORCED to talk about their genitals. They are up there alone for up to an hour and need some way of making themselves vulnerable. Discussion of the genitals is always one route to vulnerability. Musicians can talk between songs in a similar way to stand-up comedy and they may even be charming and funny, but if they start bombing with that they always have the safety net of saying, "Well enough talking, let's play a song… Two, THREE, FOUR!!" And then the audience forgives them for saying something inane a second ago. But comedians have to push through that awkwardness. If they start telling their jokes and nobody laughs they have to keep going. They have to dig in and see if they can get people to come over to their side. It's kind of fascinating in a way that makes me feel a little sorry them. Plus, they are only able to succeed on one level. A musician measures his success at a show by many factors: whether the audience applauded or danced or held their lovers' hands or a dozen other heartening occurrences. Comedians are only successful if they get laughs. I'm not the first person to make the observation that music and comedy are very similar. They are both dependent on rhythm and timing, dynamics, intimacy and terror, among other things. But musicians can always hide behind something, and comedians have nowhere to hide.

I went to the UCB Theater in Los Angeles the other night to see the Comedy Bang Bang showcase. It cost five dollars to sit in a hundred-seat theater with the promise of seeing a handful of unspecified comedians. The first was Jen Kirkman, who was rehearsing a set she was going to be doing later that week on Conan. After she finished, the audience had a ripple of surprise when the host said, "And now here's Patton Oswalt!"

Patton told the audience that he was preparing to record a new comedy album in Seattle that weekend and was fine-tuning some new material. He read subjects from his notebook and did little bits on Disneyland, malls and handwriting. He's a very good comedian, and it was fascinating to get to see him work on material that he wasn't completely sure of. At one point he said that he hopes the FBI never bugs his car because what he does to entertain himself while he's driving alone is similar to what you'd expect from an unstable and dangerous individual. He then did a minute of examples of this: stupid made-up songs, silly noises, weird gibberish, the same sort of crazy things we all do to entertain ourselves. The bit got a few laughs and he started to move on to something else and then said, "Man, if I'm going to do that bit, I just have to go for it. I've got to stand in front of that theater and just keep doing those sounds for an uncomfortably long period of time." Which is essentially what any comedian or musician needs to do: Sell it. Believe in your material so much that people start to question your sanity before they question your commitment.

There is something else that comedians do well by necessity that musicians could learn something from, and that is connecting to the audience. It's easy for a musician to hide behind his instrument and blow through his setlist without considering where he is or who he's performing for. It's harder to allow the audience inside his walls. Great comedians acknowledge the space that they're in, how big it is, the constraints and limitations of it. They gauge the mood of the audience and how responsive it is. They have to do this to survive. Musicians can easily bypass that whole consideration, but I think they do it to the detriment of their art. That doesn't mean that a musician has to stop in the middle of tuning his guitar to say to someone in the audience, "Where are you from, sir? Cleveland?!" But every audience member, whether they acknowledge it or not, comes to a performance for a personal connection. They want to know that the performer KNOWS he's in Portland or wherever, that there is something different and unique about this show than all the others, even if all the songs are the same. Some wink, or nod that we are all here now, that this is a moment that is occurring and the only moment of our lives. It's surprising how often musicians fail to do that. It's hard to remember that it is currently now, RIGHT NOW, and that we can always share that knowledge of the moment with the people around us. I forget to do it all the time.

I saw the great comedian Louis C.K. in New York a few months ago. He has dedicated himself to working up a new hour of material every year and never revisiting old stuff, which is a rigorous work ethic for a comedian to have. It would be like a band coming up with a new hour of music every year and never playing old songs. I wanted to see if Louis C.K. did anything performance-wise that was different from just a normal guy on a stage. Indeed, he has no particular theatricality to him, no special body awareness or physical humor. He IS just a guy on a stage talking about what's in his head. What makes him special is of course that his thoughts are brilliant and funny, and that he allows himself to talk about potentially embarrassing subjects without flinching. After seeing him I decided I wanted to try stand-up comedy just once, not because I thought I would be successful at it, but rather because I thought I'd bomb and learn a lot from bombing. I wanted to go to an open mic and just try for three to five minutes. I still haven't done it. I think it comes down to being afraid to be that vulnerable on stage. I'd like to get to the point where I'm not even slightly afraid of being myself in front of people, where I don't care whether people might be turned off be what I might say, where I'm trying to please anyone. Someday maybe I'll have the confidence to do that. Just once.

Music Recording an album is a specific form of insanity. This is clear to anyone. What is curious is that so many people are interested in willfully hurtling themselves towards catching an ever-shrinking horizon such as this. I can isolate three main reasons why anyone would want to record an album:

1) "Let's see if we can do it! Recording an album! Like the Beatles! That would be awesome!"

2) "We're going to make it big as a band! Like the Beatles! We gotta record an album!"

3) "There are some things I have to get off my chest. Like John Lennon did with the Beatles. I need to record an album."

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