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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Last Saturday I dropped a friend off at the Oakland airport. Oakland is the home of Harold Camping, the guy who came up with the great idea of freaking out trusting children everywhere by telling them that the Rapture was coming on May 21st. That day turned out to be such a pleasant day, and when I was pulling out of the airport I saw one of those billboards promoting Judgment Day, and noticed the little gold starburst on the side where the ad people would normally place copy like, "Contains Real Fruit!" except in this case it of course said, "The Bible Guarantees It!" Okay, maybe there wasn't an exclamation point after the phrase, but that was the only bit of restraint the billboard-makers showed.

With much less didacticism than that, Willamette Week music editor Casey Jarman sent out a mass email to his writers last week, telling them certain words that he didn't want to see anybody use again in their writing. Understandably, for a Portland-based paper, one of those words was "hipster".

Before I stop using that word entirely, let me just use it several dozen times in this column. Let's first accept that hipsterism is a movement of adults trying to reclaim aspects of their childhood that they are sentimental about, but which they had to abandon at a critical point in their life in order to fit in socially. That can include significant possessions that belonged to your parents or older siblings which you accepted as cool or at least normal, and which changing trends at some point told you were actually lame and unacceptable. So: your father's mustache, your own puffy orange vest, the Dukes of Hazard lunchbox, your older brother's mesh hat all become critical paraphernalia that the hipster as an adult can choose to reclaim and intentionally populate his aesthetic with items that he used to take a bunch of shit for. When you're a pre-teen and you're first inundated with middle-school judgment (a scarier Day of Judgment than the Rapture could ever be), you have no real choice but to abandon the artifacts that were so important to you, but which now make you feel like a stupid kid. Once you're fully grown and in a comfortable city of like-minded people, it's easier to re-embrace these things. You can put on the truckers hat and carry around the lunch box and effectively say "Fuck you" to the imposing groups of kids at school who coerced you to dress like them.

This is an important distinction, I believe, only in that I think hipsterism is mostly misunderstood by outside people. It's generally seen just as a sarcastic appropriation of things that are not cool, as if hipsters are arbitrarily selecting cultural artifacts that they can find cheaply at thrift stores and imbue them with a new kind of hip-ness. This assigns an unrealistic motive to a group of people that would never try for something so ambitious. We should recognize the hipster movement as a bunch of emotionally-damaged and socially-deficient people who are reclaiming their childhood as the last time they felt confident in choosing their own aesthetic, before it was physically or socially beaten out of them. Places like Portland and Brooklyn are centers for people to gather and feel acceptance in these decisions. When the show Portlandia famously pegged the city of Portland as a place where young people go to retire, it was funny, but struck me as a bit backwards. It's a city where young people can go to never really grow up. Retirement is different from adolescence in that with retirement you've accomplished some capital through a life of work and have earned your permanent vacation until death. Adolescence is the period where you don't have real responsibilities and are not challenged with all the complexities of the real world, and therefore develop an unrealistic vision of how life works.

I played a show in Seattle last fall and shared a drink afterwards with a young couple. They used to live in Portland and had recently moved to Seattle. They both worked in the social services industry, and their primary complaint about Portland was its lack of diversity. Laugh if you will about the wisdom of traveling further north from Portland to look for more diversity, but at the very least Seattle is a bigger town than Portland, and has more real city amenities, including more minorities, if not per capita than at least in total. (I'm attempting no research here. It's beside the point anyway.) I've lived in Portland for ten years, and it always bothered me when visitors would complain about the lack of diversity. For a while it seemed to me to just be plain wrong, as I lived in a part of Northeast Portland that had roughly the same amount of black people as lived in the neighborhood of New Orleans that I lived in just before. But spending time in other neighborhoods I realized that it is true that Portland has a definite lack of diversity. While you can acknowledge that there are certain pockets of the city that have minorities, living as a white progressive twenty to thirty-something-year old in Portland and playing music means that you encounter white progressive twenty-to-thirty-something-year-olds almost exclusively. At first I thought that complaining about this was just an aesthetic issue: that, in being progressive, you realized the need for diversity, and desired more of that just to ease your mind. Like in the way that you want to plant different flowers in your garden so that they're not all just tulips. Sure tulips are beautiful, but you want to see different flowers sometimes. As a strictly aesthetic argument, it seemed to fall short. When I met this couple in Seattle, I asked them to explain what exactly it was about Portland's lack of diversity that was such a problem to them.

They said that the problem with always being around people who look and act and believe just like you is that you can easily get lulled into the false belief that race isn't a problem anymore. You start to think that all the struggles you hear about in the world are just minor skirmishes, that living in a predominately white city means that you don't have to worry about that stuff anymore. Like we've evolved past race. But if you life in a city like Detroit or New Orleans, it is very apparent every single day that race is an important factor in every aspect of life, and while we might have come a long way with it, there are so many institutionalized and personalized forms of racism still in place. This couple argued that in places like Portland this discussion is not even happening. There is just no talk about it because there is no agitation to spark it. Unfortunately, such conversations usually are only brought up when something horrible happens, when someone is unjustly treated in a grotesque and public way that brings the conversation to everyone's mind. At those points, the whole city is at least aware that there is a problem. When that doesn't happen, it just doesn't get talked about.

The discussion of race in contrast to the hipster community has a purpose. I count myself among the many people who have come to Portland because of childhood awkwardness and social unacceptance. If I haven't chosen to wear truckers hats and grow a mustache, it's not because I'm any better or wiser. I would be a hipster if I changed the part of my hair and wore the kind of jacket I wore when I was twelve. But the uniform is not what defines a hipster. As with any often derisively-used term, people are not eager to jump up and claim that they belong to the group. The way you can look at fog and see it as just over there, but never right here in your hand, hipsters always seem to be the group of people at the next table, not the ones you are talking to. This definition speaks more to fear and the constant human condition of always thinking that the problem is out there, when all the real problems start within. If you are damaged inside and insecure, everything feels like an attack. I came to Portland too because I felt awkward and not accepted in most places. It's a very comforting city if you are of a certain demeanor.

Spending a few months in New York City this year, I realized the value of diversity. Walking in Brooklyn from Greenpoint to Clinton Hill, you cross through a part of town that is heavily populated by Hasidic Jews. As you're walking, you see the men dressed up in the heavy coats and imposing hats. Their heads are shaved and they have curls of hair falling down their faces. The little boys even have shaved heads, and the little girls wear dresses that go down to their ankles. You can't help but think as you walk past them, "What's it like to live like that? Does it make them happy? Do the kids wish they could live a different way? Does their sense of community mean more than communities I've been a part of?" And just that spark of questioning is the first real benefit of diversity, the realization that just because you're intelligent and enlightened doesn't mean that you've determined the best and only real way to live in the world. There are different people out there, all walking to different clocks striking the hour with different tones.

The power of a police beating or hate crime to start these conversations is many times greater than the ability of a small music column read by a few dozen people. But a conversation has to start somewhere, and sometimes it starts small.

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.

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.

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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These are all perfectly good reasons to want to record an album, but you also might want to consider the fact that the whole process is ultimately a descent into

M

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(Notice how my use of line breaks emphasizes my point.)

Recording music is not what healthy people do with their time. It's what insecure, unhealthy-- I'm speaking mostly from my own experience here, and from things I've read in MOJO—unhinged and narcissistic people do to cling to some sense of permanence in an ever-changing world. It is like trying to write a sonnet in the snow and have it not only stay forever, but continue to be meaningful throughout history. ("Sonnet In The Snow" is a good name for an album. Wait. No! Stop thinking of album titles.)

Let's remember that recorded music has only existed for less than a hundred years. Just think for a moment what this world would be like if recorded music had never been invented (and when I say 'for a moment' I mean 'for the rest of this essay'). How would a lack of recordings change our perception of music and how we relate to it if it meant that there were no iPods, cd players, home entertainment systems—if it were just not possible to capture music on magnetic tape or in ones and zeros? If music could only ever be transmitted by vibrating air molecules traveling directly from instrument to ear, and if those molecules couldn't be tricked by a computer and a woofer and a tweeter into simulating the sound of a band playing in a little box… what would THAT be like?

First of all, if you wanted to hear music whenever you desired you'd have to become a musician or become really good friends with one or become rich enough that you could pay musicians to be near you at all times. You'd have to have a piano in your house and order the latest sheet music when a new song came out. This would make being a musician less special and more utilitarian. Knowing how to play an instrument would be like knowing how to stuff a turkey or wash your clothes: just another household skill. Secondly, the value of seeing a live band would increase greatly, because not only would there be no comparison between the live and studio products, but in fact the music you saw at a show would be the only form of music that you could consume. Live music would be called simply "music." Recorded music would be called "that thing that crazy people won't shut up about; let's up their dosage."

Musicians would be paid more, because any restaurant or bar owner who wanted to liven up the atmosphere of his establishment with music would be forced to get an actual guy or girl with a guitar and pay them to sit on a chair to strum the latest Lady Gaga song. There wouldn't be any other way that people could hear a Lady Gaga song unless they went and got the Lady Gaga sheet music themselves and went home and played it on their piano. (This convoluted scenario has forced me to use "Lady Gaga" and "sheet music" in the same sentence.)

To take this to its horrifying extreme, in a world without recorded music we would likely lose out on Lady Gagas in general. The image and personality of musicians would be secondary to the music they made. While we feel like we might have a sense of the character of someone ancient like Beethoven, it's easy to forget that a) we're just picturing Gary Oldman when we picture Beethoven and b) no one alive today has ever heard Beethoven play an instrument. (Maybe we've never heard Lady Gaga play an instrument either. Bad example.)

A record is called a "record" because it is supposed to be a document of a performance. It captures a moment or series of moments when certain musicians played music. In one sense, it's kind of weird to expect any record to be applicable to everyone at any time, as if you could record a phone conversation you had with your friend and always listen to that instead of needing to talk to your friend again. As people have gotten better at recording, they've gotten better at simulating spontaneity. They've gotten better at perpetrating the illusion that when you press play you are hearing a band perform a song just for you.

There is a theory (that I just made up) that all the technological progress we are making ultimately just replaces abilities that we already have but are afraid to tap into. Smart phones, for example, help us find places, connect to people, use a slingshot to fling birds at monkeys… all things we used to be able to do just fine before. When we're left on our own to figure out how to locate destinations and intuit what someone is thinking, we are able to. When we have a phone in our hand, we just look at that. Technology is gradually externalizing our own latent abilities. At some point that technology might become so advanced that it will go back into our bodies and we'll have it internalized again. And then we'll be able to search all the information in the world from our own brains, which we used to be able to do without technological assistance, back when all the information in the world was only as far as we could physically see. Soon we'll have so many insights into musicians, documents of every aspect of their performances and personal whims that it will be like they belong to us. Technology is turning us all into rich people, with music at our demand at every moment, like we've got Scott Joplin sitting in a closet waiting to play for us whenever we want. Whether we become complacent and entitled with those privileges is still up to us.

A gypsy read my palm today in Sag Harbor, New York (where you can neither get a Screen Actors Guild card nor can you eat a tasty Indian spinach dish—in case you were wondering.). She was reading my fate line when she said, "Your purpose is your home." Then she looked up into my eyes and said, as if she just realized it herself, "You're always going home."

Which, I guess, is a nice way of saying that I'm homeless.

When I say "gypsy" I mean my friend Xan, who is a high school teacher in Bushwick. She and I went to the Hamptons for the day to meet her poet friend Pam. Over lunch we talked about writing and I mentioned that I was working on a ballet. Pam looked at me and asked, "So you're a dancer?" and I looked down at my frail and imperfect body and thought to myself, "Uh…" and then said, "Uh… No, I'm composing the music." Which led to a discussion of writing. She told us how she had several friends who had worked hard their whole lives and had finally gotten a publishing deal or a grant to write. And once they finally had nothing but wide open unfettered days in which to write, they could produce nothing. When they had been working a day job and they spent all their time wishing for a free moment, they could produce poems in bales and bales. But as soon as they had nothing to do but write, they froze up. The freedom and lack of structure were just debilitating.

A year ago I was trying to write a novel and I asked my friend David, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, for his advice. "Writing, when you're doing it well," he said, "is not much unlike reading. Everything you're going to put on that page is already done somewhere in your mind."

I like the idea that writing and reading are the same process. It takes the ego out of it, that horrible responsibility of being a god creating new worlds.

David continued, "Telling a story is way too complicated to do with your conscious mind. It would be like trying to think about circulating and breathing and metabolizing and excreting. Impossible. The key is to get out of your own way and let it happen, and that takes practice. You once told me that good songwriting is all a matter of confidence. You can do it not when you've mastered the guitar, or when you know every possible chord there is, but simply when you've done it enough to allow yourself to be good."

I guess I said that once, though I was probably just joking. But I like the comparison to bodily functions, because whenever someone asks me for advice about songwriting it feels like trying to tell someone how to urinate. I mean, you know the basic pose, but how do you actually, you know, get the urine to start flowing?

Or it's like when I had food poisoning a few months ago. I ate a bad burger in Seattle and spent the next twelve hours thinking that I should probably throw up, but it had been about five years since I had thrown up and I wasn't sure I could do it anymore. Even if I'm leaning over, ready to throw up, how does my body know how to actually do it?

Paul Simon talked recently in The Atlantic magazine (about songwriting, not throwing up): "I haven’t spoken to any of the other guys of my generation about how they do it. I’ve known Bob Dylan for a long time and I’ve known Paul McCartney for a long time, but we’ve never talked about songwriting."

They've never talked about it?!? It has literally never come up?? What is it, like talking about having a crush on your sister? What exactly is the problem? Why would three of the greatest songwriters of the last fifty years, who are actually friends, never talk about the craft of songwriting with each other? Are they afraid that they'd jinx each other? Is every songwriter just living in mortal terror that the last song he wrote will be the last song he will ever write?

I've never thought of songs as something that comes from inside of a person. When someone says that maybe they've written all the songs they can, or they've run out of ideas, I think they're just looking at it the wrong way. Maybe instead of songs being a product that is generated by our heart or our brain, they are like a rare natural resource that is out there in the ground and which we have to mine. And the people who are good at songwriting are more like masters at the craft of mining: digging down deep, risking getting buried in the rubble. Sometimes one of them gets stuck down there and we have to drill down to get him out, and when he comes up he kisses his wife and says that of course he'll go down there again even though he almost died, because that's his job.

Maybe songs aren't as personal as we think they are. They are just out in the world somewhere and someone has to go out and get them.

In a 2002 interview in GQ, Tom Waits said, "If a song really wants to be written down, it'll stick in my head. If it wasn't interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else's song."

Every politician can agree that oil is a finite resource. At some point we won't be able to pump it out of the ground. Could songs also be a resource that we'll run out of one day? Is there a point when we'll reach the peak of our supplies after which we'll have an ever-dwindling number of songs left? It is amazing how many songs have already been wrung out of the twelve notes of the Western scale. Surely there will be a point where there aren't any more combinations of melodies, rhythms, and harmonies that we can combine to form a new song? Even though they flow freely now, spilling out of our car radios as we meander down the highways, there could be a day in the future, maybe in our grandchildren's lifetime (when everything is going to suck anyway) when we'll start to go whole days without songs. Then weeks and months will pass, and someone in Iceland will report a new song finding. But it will be a false alarm, and we'll realize that it's just a rewriting of a long-ago song by Pink. And people will wonder why they didn't save songs when they could have. They'll say, "Why didn't our grandparents realize that all these songs were going to run out eventually? Why didn't they try to ration them? They just let them gush out of their instruments until they were all gone. Now we just have the random slow drip of the faucet. God dammit, why did Pink have to use up that melody?"

Think about that, songwriters, next time you are faced with a blank page. Instead of thinking of your process as wringing the last drops of creativity out of the sponge of your brain, think of yourself as plucking songs out of the air in an era when they are still bountiful. Think of it as Manifest Destiny. The resources are here for you to use and abuse as much as you want. Because really the well of songs will never run out. The tide of human existence and the little struggles and miracles that occur all the time serve as though a million new dinosaurs were dying every day and their bones were petrifying and turning into oil for us to tap over and over again.

Links:

Nick Jaina dot com (where you can see a preview of Nick's balet!)

Tom Waits in GQ

Paul Simon in The Atlantic

Instead our conversation on the ride down revolved around the potential federal government shutdown that day, of which NPR had its typical slate of respectful, informative stories followed by (I swear to God) announcements for a Cuisanart swap. I asked my drifter friends if a government shutdown would mean I wouldn't have to send in my check to the IRS on April 15th and they informed me that the Federal Reserve is a private bank separate from the government and a big scam really and that there was no way I was getting out of paying my taxes. (God damn intellectual drifters.)

I indeed took them to their destinations without incident and with my money clip still in my pocket. I spent that weekend in San Francisco touring art museums with my friend Craig. I saw a scale model of a cathedral built out of bullets and gun casings by Al Farrow, with an actual spine running the length of the interior. I saw an anarchist action figure meticulously produced and packaged by Packard Jennings, which he placed in a Wal-Mart with a camera to capture all the shocked reactions of potential customers. I saw carved wooden war clubs by Michael Arcega in the style of Maori warlords who would put a symbol of their enemy at the top of their club to remind themselves who they were fighting against; on these modern clubs were representations of oil refineries. And yet, the image that I remember clearest and am still trying to understand is a photograph from the 1920's hanging in Craig's kitchen of bicyclists in the Tour de France, one with his arm around his friend, another helping that same friend light a cigarette. They were smoking while competing in the toughest physical challenge on Earth. And they didn't look like they were ruthlessly competing against each other. They looked like they were friends.

I've spent the last four years pursuing a dream of aggressively touring this entire enormous country with my band. I haven't had help with the booking, yet it's been important for me to set up shows that look like real shows, hoping that at one point they would be real shows and I would be on a real tour. My tour last fall was in many ways our best yet. I spent the whole summer working on it, making sure that we were at the right venue on the right night of the week with the right bands. It can be dispiriting to drive all day to a show and realize that you're playing the same night as the circus or the rodeo. It's amazing how many times the circus is in town. I chose the size of band that I thought best represented my music: drums, upright bass, electric guitar and trumpet. I even hired someone to help tour manage and sell merchandise. I tried to think of everything, to run down every loose train before it plunged into the ravine. We had places to stay almost every night of the tour, only getting one hotel room in the entire six weeks.

The shows were all very good. The crowds were generally captivated. I played at a prison and met Poppa Neutrino. In many ways it was all a success. But I got to San Francisco, the last show of the tour, knowing that I was going to lose a lot of money on the tour. How much exactly is hard to say, because as band leader I'm already basically subsidizing everything with my own bank account. But I lost a significant amount of money, and when you factor in the money that I still would have to pay to the IRS months later whether or not the government shut down, it was a pretty spectacular financial loss. Not to mention that when we loaded out of that last show and got in our van, we realized that my laptop, passport and iPod had been stolen.

The ride back to Portland the next day felt like a repeated kick in the stomach. I kept thinking how I couldn't afford to live where I had been living, didn't have a job, didn't have a girlfriend (note the priorities). The music that I made seemed to have some value, but that value was out of proportion with the ambition of what I was doing with it. I spent the rest of the winter laying in my room feeling defeated.

One day in December my ex-wife called and said I should come over and see her house and her dog Lennon. He used to be our dog for several years, and since she had more of a day job he was my dog, and I estimate I took him on over two thousand walks in that time. When I got to the house to see him this time he was so senile that he barely recognized me. As we took him out for a walk she informed me that she was going to put him down the next day and that would be it for old Lennon the Dog.

I cried all the next day. I hadn't even seen Lenny in three years. I knew he had lived a great life. He had been all over the continent, not that dogs care about traveling. He had carried great big logs in his mouth on the ocean. He had vainly tried to chase down deer in the valleys of California. He galloped the endless plains of Saskatchewan. And now it was over. I'm not usually so sentimental about animals. When I tried to isolate what made me so sad, I thought of all the times I stopped Lennon from eating something he shouldn't, or tried to teach him to do something. At the end of his life all I wished was that I had given him more treats, that I had given him (literally, I guess) a longer leash. Or another scratch on the belly. I thought about how hard people can be on each other until we realize that we're not here forever, and then we feel sorry about everything bad we did. We know from the start that we're not around here forever, but we still do it.

My wardrobe over the winter changed to black. Every time I chose a shirt or shoes or it was always the black one I wanted. I was in mourning, not just for the dog, but for the life I had thought would make me happy which I now realized wasn't going to happen the way I hoped it would. Some sort of indie-rock dream of headlining theaters and having thousands of people embrace your every word. I realized that the pursuit of that dream was giving me manic moments of excitement, wonderful moments that have changed my life, but those moments are not the same as happiness. Happiness is a sustained feeling where you are in control of who you are, and you're not raking everyone over the coals for your own deficiencies, or expecting the world to sort out your insecurities.

That form of theater-headlining success doesn't come true for very many. But you see examples of it that look attainable and you wonder why you can't have the same success. The Decemberists are probably the best Portland example, as they play theaters around the country, and recently their new album debuted at number one on the Billboard charts. Despite knowing that these things come about because of hard work and talent, musicians are always looking at each other and thinking, "I could do THAT." Audiences, however, don't care if you could also do that, because the band they like is already doing that. Your personal ambitions are not what feeds people, it's the art that you produce. And you have little control over which parts of it are effective and who receives them and in what ways. The entire music business is built around the illusion that you can dictate what people will listen to and when, but that's a lie. I wasn't even around for whatever marketing campaign preceded Joni Mitchell's Blue, yet that album has affected my life far more than anything that came out in the last year supported by marketing dollars. Confusing an advertisement for art is the biggest challenge we have as audience members today. It gets incredibly confusing when music is a commercial for itself, repeatedly asking you to listen to it even when you've bought it and are listening to it.

Sometimes it makes sense to have an external event that you can grieve about when you were really looking for a way to grieve about something internally. Not to turn the death of a dog into something about me, but that's generally how stories are created. The random events all mean something different to different people. Most people would find the crux of the story in the cathedral made out of bullets or the war clubs with oil refineries on the handles. You have to find your narrative arcs where you can and not question it. So Lennon the Dog died and it was the end of the life I wanted to live.

But it's not a sad story, because I've been happier these past few months than I've ever been. The failures made me actually more committed to music than ever, just with a desire to lower the overhead and change my approach to it. I keep thinking about that Tour de France poster. Sports used to be about a way to enjoy yourself and connect to others, and it has turned into a venue to become obsessive about dominating everyone. Winning the race at the expense of your identity is probably not worth it. Maybe the race isn't so much about a competition or the absolute limits of human endurance as it is about a ride through the countryside, enjoying being alive.

Last fall I went to see a lecture by the artist Ryan Pierce at Portland State University. He paints landscapes depicting a post-industrial society after some unnamed breakdown or catastrophe. The paintings are not grotesque or disturbing. They're serene. They are usually just quiet depictions of some obsolete technology which nature has overrun. In his lecture he said something that was initially disturbing and then quite comforting:

"Your priority in life shouldn't be to work hard and save money, because at some point all money will lose its value."

Which is a pretty shocking concept to hear someone express. It goes against everything you were ever taught by your parents and your teachers. What he is saying is that if you use your time to learn skills and build up your character you are better preparing yourself for the future than if you just acquire material assets. Money only has value because certain men in a room say that it has value. There's nothing inherently valuable about the pieces of paper with green ink that we carry around with us, or even the numbers in our online bank account. Someday someone could inform you that everything you have is worth half of what it was yesterday, which is not such a far-off idea since that exact thing has already happened in places such as Brazil, Venezuela, and Russia, and it happened in certain ways in this country just recently. One day your house was worth $400,000 and the next it was worth $200,000, and yet it was still a house and it still had a roof and it still kept you safe and warm.

In other words, put your focus on assets that have a value that can never be taken away. If you learn how to chop down a tree, or skin an animal, or build a house, there's not anything any person in power can do to take that skill away from you. He can't walk up to you one day and say, "Actually, sorry, you DON'T know how to chop down a tree."

Or you could write a song. Whether that has value is still hard to determine, but at least it's not decided by fluctuating markets or a group of men in a room somewhere, though we are certainly led to believe that music is subject to such forces.

Canadian singer Veda Hille has a song called "A Peculiar Value." She wrote it when she was about to sign a record deal in New York City and there was a clause in the contract that said her talents were specific and non-transferable because her music had a "peculiar value."

The song goes like this:

"It's a fight to be good, a good fighter
you asked for ecstatic, you got it
you gotta admit, a peculiar value
so peculiar it's practically invisible
invaluable"

Some people think of playing music and touring as a vacation.  I'm not going to tell you that it's harder than an office job or a construction job, but it does have a certain way of tearing you down. All the while there is a struggle to determine if what you spend all your time on and that is so valuable to you has any value at all to anyone else. The lines from that song express that helpless feeling a performer gets when they wonder at their worth, not just in monetary terms, but in other more lasting ways. The value is something, but it's also at times completely invisible.

If you're a writer of music, then music lives mostly in your head. It means so much to the creator of it. You pour every emotion into it, spend all your free time practicing and preparing and then you play for an indifferent crowd in Columbus and you walk off the stage and go to pee in one of those metal urinal troughs that makes you feel like some animal. And some dude comes in and says, "Hey man, sounded good." And you say, "Thank you," as you zip up your pants and think, "Is that what I'm doing this for? So that it sounds good? I'm trying to affect people's lives here, not just produce sound waves that are acceptable."

I decided to become a musician for life the day I discovered an abalone cross in a well at the San Juan Bautista Mission in California. It was 1995 and I was taking an archaeology class in my freshman (and as it turned out, only) year of college. I went to college not knowing what I wanted to do with my life and as soon as I got there I realized that I wanted to write songs and that I was in the wrong place for that. I used to go up to visit my friend in San Francisco on the weekends, and as I walked up the hill to her apartment in the lower Haight, there was a church behind her building and all you could see was this glowing white cross above. I was thinking about whether to leave college and move to San Francisco as I dug in that shallow well at the Old Mission. This was the first ever archaeological dig at this site, and no one had yet found any artifacts. I struck my pick into the soft dirt and this white abalone cross jumped out. I picked it up and held it in my hand. I was alone there in the well. I could have put it in my pocket and walked away, but of course I didn't. I climbed out of the well and showed it to the teacher and everyone celebrated and the Padre shook my hand. And then I walked across the street to a pay phone and called my friend to tell her I was going to drop out of school and move to San Francisco.

That led to open mic nights at a coffee shop on Haight and Ashbury, and later an inexorable slide through Greyhound buses to New York City, the streets of New Orleans and folk festivals in Texas, ultimately leading to me living in Portland and sticking around long enough to meet wonderful musicians and be a part of a community.

But a large part of the existence of being a musician is looking ahead. It's a business where you always have to know what you're going to be doing three months from now. And there is always that hypnotic prospect of your fame growing exponentially and your situation quickly improving. There is always some reason for hope, like the new song you just wrote, the new album that could take off if it gets the right push or the next tour that will be better than the last one. When you're young it's okay to live in the future and ignore that you're overdrawing your bank account and not brushing your teeth enough. But at a certain point you need to look at the present realities of your life and figure out if they are serving you.

Dorothy walked down a sparkling yellow brick road, and everyone she met kept telling her that all her problems would be fixed once she got to the end. And then she met people along the way and she told them if they joined her they would all get their problems taken care of if they just kept going down that road. So many musicians are on that road, thinking that once they get around the bend everything will be better. At a certain point you have to just step off the road, assume that no magical creature is going to appear and fix all your problems, and decide whether your present situation is good enough or not.

But let me tell you, that is one crowded road. Everyone is on it. It's not easy to see how exactly you exit it and keep your dignity and creativity with you. But you have to get off that road now because you can't start acquiring things that have real value unless you at least realize that it's quite likely that you have been misled about what is out there waiting for you.

But that's the point of subtext. You can get away with saying obscene things, because you can always deny what isn't explicitly said. "Nah man, it's just a joke. Don't take it so seriously."

Once you start identifying the subtext you can't stop, like that kid in The Sixth Sense who couldn't help but see dead people. So I recommend you not play the game at all, as it is a game that you can never stop playing, and it will only make you more cynical about the world. At best I would say that, like Candyland, try to limit yourself to maybe once a day at most. It's a bit like becoming really good at grammar, and getting a smug sense of satisfaction when someone says "begging the question," and you tell them that really that term doesn't mean what they think it means, and they say of course it means what they think it means because that's how everyone uses it and you know what I'm talking about so why do you have to halt the conversation and make me feel inferior? And you scurry away with your superior knowledge and feel more alone than ever.

This is what you get for trying to cultivate yourself: more loneliness. Your desire to better yourself was in the first place probably a reaction to loneliness. A desire to connect with people made you want to become an expert in a field, and that expertise now means that you can't enjoy that field anymore. Everywhere you look you see only the deficiencies in what you've worked so hard to understand. Which makes you lonely again. Congratulations.

And so I went to see a Pink Floyd tribute band in Folsom, California with my parents. Johnny Cash once performed in Folsom Prison and sang about how he shot a man in Reno "just to watch him die," which was totally not true. Johnny Cash never killed a man. As a songwriter, he tried to imagine what would be the worst reason to kill someone, and he determined that it would probably be cruelest just to see what someone looked like while they died. (An intellectual approach to songwriting, though no one would ever describe Johnny Cash as an intellectual songwriter, but of course show business is a big lie anyway, and of course you know that.)

I have no shame in telling you that I love the music of Pink Floyd. I think it is some of the most compositionally ambitious, melodic, evocative music in pop history. You think of the Beatles as ambitious, which they were, but their ambition was almost always channeled into a three-minute pop song. Pink Floyd had multi-part suites, twelve minute songs, or thirty minute explorations that never got boring. (And I don't even use drugs.) Through no effort I can sing nearly every note of every David Gilmour guitar solo, not because I sat and memorized them, but because they are like little songs on their own. I'm not sure what I was hoping for from a tribute show other than just being reminded of music I love but don't ever listen to. I told myself I wasn't looking for art, but maybe part of me was hoping that there could be something artful in the whole endeavor. This band, the Pink Floyd Experience, went about 85% of the way towards recreating the music, which is kind of pointless with such an indulgent and over-the-top band like Pink Floyd. I was mostly just disenchanted as an expert, as it were, in the music of this particular band. If you're going to leave out the cowbell in "Pigs" it's going to be achingly obvious to nerds like me.

I don't think it's unfair to say that my parents were never big fans of music, and perhaps the influence of me and my brother on them over the years has sparked some interest. Somehow my parents got into Pink Floyd even though we've never really connected on much other music in my adult life. My mom says that I was in the car with her once in high school when "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" came on the stereo and I explained to her how the song was about their former band leader Syd Barrett who literally went crazy, and who showed up one day during the recording of that particular song, thinking he was still in the band when he clearly was out of his mind. The story behind the song opened up the music for my mom and she got into the rest of Pink Floyd catalog, at least the hits.

One thing I can say about the Pink Floyd Experience is that they didn't just indulge in the hits. The whole first set was the non-crowd-pleasing album Animals, and the second set opened with the lifeless and cliche-ridden late-period Learning to Fly. By the time they broke into "Another Brick in the Wall" at the end and the lead singer was shouting at everyone to "Let them hear you in Libya! Let them hear you in Egypt!" I was ready to go.

I tried to talk to my dad on the drive home about my mild disappointment in the show, but he thinks that if I don't like something I'm just being negative. We had a conversation that was mostly about me trying to get my point across while he corrected my driving.

"Look," I said, "Think of it in terms of food. McDonald's is probably the most popular restaurant in the world. But you wouldn't say that the food is good, right? It's more that the restaurant has been successful in business terms, that they've figured out how to make a cheap and efficient burger that pleases most people, and they've been able to keep that burger consistent whether it's made in Indiana or China."

"Turn right at the next light," my dad said.

"So if, for example, someone was telling you about a restaurant you'd never heard of and they were explaining that it's the most popular in the world, you probably wouldn't expect much from it right? Popularity has more to do with accessibility, with appealing to the largest amount of people in the least offensive way you can. I think it's the same with music—"

"RIGHT, not left!"

"There's just such a large divide economically among musicians. There really isn't much of a middle class to speak of if you're a musician. It used to be in the '70s that you could play five nights a week with your band and get paid reasonably well without ever needing to become famous or have a hit song. I think that's what most musicians want, is to just make enough money to live well and maybe buy a house. In Portland, a town with thousands of musicians, I doubt there are even a dozen bands that are in that class, where they can buy a house with what they've earned from their music."

"Okay, next turn is up here. It's across from the Walgreens."

"Most musicians I know are in what you would call the lower class. They make poverty wages from what they do. I hardly know any bands that could sell out an 800 seat theater and Pink Floyd is so big that their low-grade tribute bands can sell it out. That's a remarkable level of fame, but it goes to just the tiniest percentage of bands."

"I guess there isn't a Walgreens here. Turn right anyway."

"But what I'm asking is, why is it like that?"

"The speed limit here is 50."

"There was a study Malcolm Gladwell mentioned in The Tipping Point—"

"I'm reading that book."

"Oh good. There was a study in that book—"

"Speed limit is still 50."

"There was a study in that book, I don't remember it exactly, but someone set up a music downloading site and picked like ten different songs. They asked a group of people to visit the site and download whatever they liked, and the site had a chart that showed which songs were most popular. After a while, one song would get more popular than the others and it would quickly shoot up to be exponentially popular. Once a song caught on, it just got crazy popular. But the interesting thing was, they repeated the study multiple times with the same songs and a different set of listeners, and a different song became wildly popular each time. I found that comforting."

"You can go 50, you know."

"It made me think that this is all kind of random, and I just wish that people would investigate things on their own, and search things out instead of just accepting what other people tell them is good. It's what leads to this great divide in the haves and have nots."

"You know how to get home the back way?"

"You're not interested in this conversation at all, are you?"

"I agree with everything you're saying. I'm just trying to get us home."

And that's what's lonely about becoming an expert. No one wants to talk about the details. People just want to enjoy themselves. I understand. I wish I could be that way. But once you start seeing the subtext, it's all you see, and all you'll ever see.

Elizabeth Taylor died this week at the age of 79. The New York Times published her obituary, which was written by a man named Mel Gussow. ---At the bottom of the article was the surprising footnote that Mr. Gussow himself died in 2005. We should all be proud of Ms. Taylor for outliving her obituarist by six years. Naturally, it makes sense for a major newspaper to prepare an obituary for a famous person who is likely to die soon. It makes you wonder though, how much of your own obituary could already be written right now, while you're still alive. Have you already done everything you'll be known for? My friend Nathan has always wanted to die by being shot out of a cannon, naked, holding fireworks, so that at least there would be some event that would necessitate a new paragraph in his obituary.

It's comforting to think about all the people anticipating the period at the end of the sentence, and how they are often the ones who reach their own end first. Most of the people throughout history who have predicted the end of the world have died long before such an event ever happened. Why does everyone want the world to end? Just because something looks like the end of the world doesn't mean that it is. In 1350, about half the population of Europe was killed off by the Black Plague, a disease which formed boils on the groin and armpits of its victims, who would vomit blood in a horrible fever and die within a few days. If half your friends were dying this way, you'd be excused for thinking that it was the end of the world. But it wasn't. Not even remotely. Think of all the great stuff that has happened since 1350. Pretty much EVERYTHING good. Like cars, ice cubes, Disneyland, typewriters, flip flops, Kurt Vonnegut… It's been a non-stop orgy of innovation and fun since that dark time where it seemed like the world might end. And not to rub it in the faces of 1350's Europe, but man that was SO not the end of the world. This won't be either.

I saw a billboard on I-10 East in Louisiana that said in big letters, "May 21st, 2011 is JUDGMENT DAY!" and it was referring to The Judgment Day, the judging-of-all-nations-before-God Judgment Day, not some movie or something. Which is kind of a funny event to advertise on a billboard, because Judgment Day comes after the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which is probably a more important date to mention on a big highway billboard. Would that mean He'd be coming on May 20th? Or just earlier on the day of the 21st? It would be like a high school kid advertising to all his friends, "My parents come back into town on May 21st!" leaving everyone to assume when the big kegger would be. That is to say, I wouldn't want to schedule anything important for the 20th and have it interrupted by the end of the world.

Now that I've talked about early obituaries, Black Death, the End of the World, and Judgment Day, let me talk about South By Southwest, the yearly music festival in Austin, Texas. Whatever you might have heard, it is NOT the end of the world. Sure, it looks like a post-apocalyptic hellscape, a sort of Escape From New York-type world where all the bands on Earth gather into one metropolis and construct some sort of rudimentary society whose hierarchy is decided by the tonnage of your bass amp, and everyone passes around plastic discs that nobody will ever listen to. But it's NOT the end of the world. I mean, come on, when the end actually happens it's going to be pretty tame. Epic parties never end in explosions. They end sometime around dawn, with a straggling couple making out on the couch, carpet stained, everything just dwindling out.

I'm not a journalist, so I won't try to review SXSW in the objective way, telling you which amazing band or taco I saw or ate, or how that band or taco changed my life, until the next band or taco changed my life AGAIN, and how great it was to hear those silky lines that lead guitarist played or eat those spicy grilled vegetables that cart cooked up. I can't go into such detail. Any time I buy a notebook to write ideas down I forget to bring it with me. I walk through most of the world in a half-dream state, in the midst of a conversation with myself.

I really enjoyed SXSW more than I thought possible, and tried not to project my own insecurities, but I still sensed a feeling of overkill and defensiveness in the knowledge that everyone had gathered not for the spreading of art in some pure hippie way, but to either make it big or see a band before they got too big. If you're a band amidst thousands of other bands, it feels a little weird. If you were a dentist and went to a dental convention, or if you were a salesman and went to a sales convention, you wouldn't be threatened by how many other people were engaged in the same discipline as you. Everybody needs a dentist. Not everybody needs an indie rock band, and you could say that the more indie rock bands you hear, the less special each one becomes.

That's not to say the whole festival is a waste of time. It is just a strange place, a place where you literally cannot go anywhere in the city limits the entire weekend and NOT hear music. This might not sound like a bad existence if when you think of music you think of Brahms concertos or Argentenian tangos. But if you're overhearing music at SXSW it's because it's really loud, and that means that it's white rock music.

The only vibe about the whole festival that tends to get tiring is the idea of entitlement, that it is written somewhere that by assembling four of your friends and buying guitars and playing power chords while looking at the floor you are entitled to some sort of superstardom and wealth. It is understandable why people get this idea, because so many crummy bands have been given ridiculous amounts of money to revive the tired corpse of rebellion that used to signify rock music, but it is still a bit of a bummer. I would hope at some point people would not take the superficial aspects of rock music as the point of the music itself. At one time, turning your amp up and distorting it and playing simple chords and screaming about something was really threatening to the power structure. Unfortunately, that was back in 1977. Just because loud guitars once signified rebellion doesn't mean that they always will. You have to find ways to subvert people's expectations and do something dangerous that puts them on edge. Those ways might ultimately not involve loudness or guitars or distortion or black jeans or skinny dishevelment. Or it might satisfy all those criteria, but it doesn't necessarily do so.

I caught a ride back from Austin to New Orleans (during which I saw the Judgement Day billboard.) My friend Meghann (one of the most intelligent people I know, who would hate to be defined solely as someone doing this) was watching an episode of American Idol. I had seen an episode on a plane a few years ago (see how I distance myself from the program by declaring that I couldn't help but watch it) and the one aspect that I enjoyed was the judge Simon, who would listen to the first two judges give emotional, supportive praise, and look at them with a smirk that seemed to say, "Do I have to be the one to say this again?" and proceed to piss off the audience and the contestant by suggesting that maybe the performance we just heard wasn't the most beautiful and perfect thing to ever occur.

But now the show has three judges that are all on the same page. With no dissenting voice, the whole show runs like a tuned machine, in search of fresh idol blood, like the meat-eating outer space plant from "Little Shop of Horrors." And all Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler can do is smile and make it look the most fun thing in the world. "Yes, yes, just stand in front of that enormous plant there while we take your picture. Step back a little… a little more… Oh God, what are we DOING?!"

The idea that there is such a need for "idols" that we must regularly comb every inch of the country for them is really fascinating. The competitors are all certainly talented, but they are so obsessed with a type of music success that is so foreign to me-- and, I imagine, most of the musicians who would attend SXSW-- that it is almost necessary to look at it as a different discipline all together from what I do. The judges too are all knowledgeable and accomplished, but every critique they give is just as concerned with marketability as it is with heart. If these kids that they're judging aren't able to put on a two-hour arena concert, they'll just have to be excused from the competition. And yet, most of the critiques that the judges give the contestants on American Idol are suggestions that I wish most indie rock bands would consider: open your eyes, connect to the song, have fun with it.

If SXSW looks like the apocalypse, then American Idol looks like Judgement Day. As a singer, I worry about standing in front of Randy Jackson at the End of Days and having him assess my entire career in terms of marketability and pitch. "Yo Dawg, you started out shaky at sixteen, then you kinda got into it in the middle of your career, I didn't really know the songs you were singing, but that's cool, it's kind of a Paul Simon thing you got going on. But you just didn't show us something that we could connect to. And the whole thing was kind of pitchy." And that would be it. More humiliating than whatever God could possibly throw at me.

In this world, small magical moments would be insignificant compared to the greater goal of selling records and being a star. On that scale, most of us are failures. If there is to be entitlement, musicians should be entitled to not stardom, but rather the power to define who you are and what you are trying to achieve, because it's not remotely the same for everybody.

SXSW and American Idol offer two unique approaches to the current state of confusion in music. People who go to SXSW are sick of the packaging and commodification of music. They want realness and danger, but to get that product to the audience, the bands have to tear down so much of the spontaneity that made them special in the first place, the same way that a tomato loses its purpose as a delicate delicious food after being picked before its ripeness, driven on a truck for thousands of miles and painted red. And American Idol, in its search for a perfect product, doesn't even want that spontaneity to be involved at all. But you can at least respect the work that goes into it, and hard work should never be synonymous with selling out or losing your edge, though you could never convince most people of that.

At one point in the middle of SXSW, on an outside stage, where the wind was blowing mic stands around, a simple indie folk band played a set to tepid applause. After they finished, the sound man blasted Michael Jackson's "Rock With You" and everyone got up off the ground and started dancing with the joyous look of wonder and amazement that I imagine would only be recognizable to the liberating Allied forces who rolled into the German concentration camps and saw people who had previously lost all hope in humanity. I stood up too and danced, and I really liked the indie folk band, but there's a difference between working to like something and having the music just overtake you. All anybody wanted was to dance to the greatest dance music ever, something with soul, something that didn't take itself too seriously. All anybody wanted was a little Michael. We just needed to wait until he died before we could enjoy it again. Maybe when we're all gone, and the ego and creepiness of ambition is removed from the music we're making now, the next wave of people can decide what was actually good, what really feeds them.

The most helpful advice I've heard about show business and the people in power of that business is this: "No one is ever going to give you anything until you make money for them." Which is not only true, but sort of trumps any other complaint, argument, or grievance you might want to make about how you're currently being treated in the music business. Music venues, promoters, bookers and managers are not working pro bono. They are running businesses that need to make money in order to stay around, which doesn't make them evil or selfish people, it just makes them members of a capitalist society. Whether or not capitalism itself is a propagator of suffering and a beast that no one should ever blindly entrust with the humane treatment of its people is a debate for some other space. If you are a musician and you wonder why you don't get things that other musicians get, it's because you're not making someone money, or not making them enough money. The extent to which you're willing to alter the art that you're creating to change this situation is an issue which you can constantly debate in your head at every moment of your career, even in the supposedly primal moments when the mic is in your hand, the spotlight is twinkling, the audience is holding their breath and you think, "Should I do that thing that people like? Or should I do the thing I want to do right now?"

I first saw Menomena at MusicFest NW in Portland in 2003 when they played at the Fez Ballroom. I went to the show with my brother Matt and my friend Paul. The three of us were in a band called Binary Dolls, which started as a project that would allow me and my brother to work together and implement things like playing radios through the pickups of electric guitars, but still have real songs about Civil War submarines and the Siege of Leningrad. Seeing Menomena that night perform their magical act shifted everything in my musical life. Those shifts always come when watching someone joyously break rules you thought were unbreakable. "You can DO that? I didn't know that was possible!" Like being in prison for 10 years and watching an inmate suddenly just walk right through the doors. It greatly influenced the music we did with Binary Dolls, maybe too much.

I have seen Menomena maybe 10 times since then, and each experience has been more and more frustrating. Even as they've recorded brilliant albums, the fractured nature of the relationships in the band created a situation where three brilliant songwriters and performers were unwilling to play together cohesively, as a band should ideally do. More and more they looked like three solo performers that just happened to be performing at the same time on the same stage. The body language communicated a lack of trust and acceptance of each other. Watching them was like watching your parents argue. You loved them and wanted them to get along, because things would be so great if they did, but you were always wincing and squinting to picture the perfect family you so wanted.

Their songs have always been a strange balancing act of how much you can take away before the structure completely falls apart, a musical version of Jenga where blocks are removed and the tension is raised because of the gaps left behind and the awareness by the observer that everything could fall apart at any moment. On Menomena's albums this formula, to me, has worked almost always, because they can keep polishing every moment in the studio until it reaches that mixture of danger and stability that makes music exciting. At the live shows, I felt too often that one of the members was pulling a Jenga brick haphazardly and perhaps passive-aggressively from the bottom, leaving the whole structure swaying precariously.  (I just googled "Menomena" and "Jenga" and found a record review from the blog cokemachineglow.com in 2008 that said: "But the chance Menomena takes can be found in the Jenga-like way the band pulls notes and instruments out of the mix, and then piles new ones on." You can't find a original metaphor anymore.)

The last time I saw Menomena was in Denver last October, and I didn't actually get to see them play. I was starting a tour and they were ending one, and I rushed over to say hi before I had to play a set on the other side of town, and then met up with them afterwards at a bar. It was obvious that it was a band under a lot of strain. I think of them as being several rungs up the music business ladder from me (or rather they're actually on the ladder and I'm standing on the ground) so I was amazed that they were having the same troubles as me: attendance not going up from the previous tour like they had hoped, expectations being thwarted, expenses some times exceeding income. Danny mentioned playing a show in New York City one night to about a thousand people, and then playing in Rhode Island the very next night to about 20. It was comforting in a way to hear that a band that I think of as the height of artistic expression still had those bummer shows where the audience was literally 98 percent smaller than the night before.

Shortly after that tour, keyboardist Brent Knopf left the band. For most bands, you could lose a member and easily replace him or her with someone else who is just as competent at playing the parts. Menomena was different. They were a trio, they all had a strong songwriting voice, and the parts they added to each others songs where integral. You couldn't play a Danny song without including the part that Brent added to it. It wasn't the same as another band where you could just give someone the chord changes and have them sing harmonies. I assumed that losing Brent meant that the band was essentially over. It just wasn't acceptable with this band to alter the lineup.

But it's not reasonable to walk away from music you've spent a decade making, and so Menomena are of course carrying on. They've recruited my brother Matt and my friend Paul to play in the touring band, which if you knew Binary Dolls, you'd know is like the Beatles losing George Harrison and recruiting a couple members of Rain so they could still tour. And I mean that in a really great way. (Journalistic integrity requires full disclosure, so I have to say that of course Matt came from the same womb that I did, albeit three years earlier, and we grew up playing with Star Wars figures and Big Wheels like brothers do. This is supposed to make me unable to be objective about anything that he does.)

I'd been in New Orleans for a few weeks for several good reasons, one of which was to position myself to be able to see my old bandmates play with my favorite band. New Orleans is a fascinating study of the double-edged sword of tourism. Towns that rely on tourism allow visitors to dictate what is special about that town and demand, through their tourism and tour books, that the special thing never evolve or change in any way. (My friend Meghann is a bartender on Frenchman Street and she has an anecdote of a young college girl asking at the bar during Mardi Gras, "So, this is Frenchman Street? So, I'm just supposed to walk up and down?" As though tourism was something that you HAD to do, like a chore.) Bands dance along that same line, of trying to codify the specialness in them to make it repeatable, while trying to keep growing and evolving and staying alive. When you break through with something new and spontaneous that people respond to it's compelling to freeze that thing and not change it, for fear that the audience will move away and find something else. The difference between bands and towns, obviously, is that a band has to get into a van and drive to the tourists, while a town just stays there and lets the tourists come to it.

I went to the venue in New Orleans early, just after Menomena had finished soundcheck. They were all eating food that was catered by the venue. This was a big shock to me, leader of a band that runs around the country with a hobo mentality. I've played hundreds of shows in all types of places, and if a venue ever cared about feeding me it was no doubt by mistake, or because I happened to be playing with a band that was much bigger who was nice enough to let me gnaw on some chicken bones. Not only did this venue—which doesn't have a restaurant and so had to order the food themselves—not only provide this food, but they offered what is called a "buy-out" which is basically them giving each band member $15 with which to feed themselves, should the array of catered Italian options not suffice. Plus, the band's tour manager gives out an additional per diem of $15, so that everyone has their nutritional needs fully taken care of. (If this sounds like I went to a wedding and only noticed how nice the linens were, I apologize, but again I've been living a hobo existence. On a related note, are you going to eat the rest of that or just throw it away?)

I asked Paul what he thought of the life of a touring musician and he said that all in all it was "pretty easy." Menomena travels with a tour manager who is also the soundman and the driver, so he takes care of booking hotels, finding directions, deciding what time to leave a city, and any little problems that come up during the day, of which there are countless. If I had one of these people on any of my tours I would still have a stomach lining.

When Menomena took the stage I drank a High Life and watched from the wings, about two feet from Danny's sweaty back as his six-foot-eight wingspan cracked down on the snare drum. Now there were four people in this band instead of three. I'm not going to imply at all that Brent was the problem because that would be unfair, but certainly the change in lineup has allowed everyone to play for fun instead of out of spite. Justin looks back at Matt to count off the start of "Late Great Libido." Paul draws out the end of "Five Little Rooms" by trilling on the high piano keys while Danny stands up and crashes the cymbals. I never saw moments like this from this band before, and to me they are vital to making a band feel human, to know that those are people up there enjoying what they're doing. I wish that feeling could've happened with the original lineup, but short of that this was the next best thing. It made me happy for the current iteration of the band and fearful for the future. Everything seemed balanced again, a properly and soberly played Jenga match, but what would happen when the band wrote new songs? Could a band so defined by three distinctive songwriting voices exist with just two? Being happy for the present and afraid of the future is about the closest thing to comfort that we can get in a world where the earth waves can take away your city, so I'm okay with the compromise.

Again, like seeing your parents not get along, the previous version of the band was so full of tension that I found it hard to fully enjoy it. I wanted to hang on to the past, but now that it's done and the divorce has gone through, life seems better for everyone, even if it'll never be quite the same as before. Brent has his own wonderful band Ramona Falls, just like how Dad moved to Florida and is dating a really nice real estate broker, while Mom stays home and raises the kids while seeing Steve, who treats her well and is pretty cool and has a motorcycle. Things are different now. We can't go back.

Just like the first time I saw Menomena in 2003, the show made me inspired to work harder at all the things I do, to pay less attention to the rules, to not ask permission. I think that the thing that I most want from art is to remind me what I love about the world. I like what Michael Mannheimer wrote about the band in his Willamette Week cover story from last fall: "[Menomena are] the closest thing Portland has to Radiohead—a group that pushes the boundaries of both its sound and its sanity on every record." Apparently that sanity got pushed too far. There's only so long that you can live like that before it becomes untenable.

It made me think of a David Foster Wallace essay I had just read about a professional tennis player named Michael Joyce, who was at the time about the 85th best in the world, which meant that he had to play qualifying tournaments just to reach the real tournament. Wallace highlighted the disparity between the perks the top pros receive at the big tournaments, and the lack of any support for the next tier of players, who have to fly themselves to the matches, pay for their own hotels, and have no guaranteed money waiting for them. Wallace then reflects on the fact that he himself was a tennis player as a youth, playing and sometimes winning regional tournaments, and for a minute thought that he would maybe be able to ask Joyce to hit some balls together. Until he saw how fast and precisely Joyce played and got sad at the realization that he wasn't remotely in the same league of players who were not even the absolute best in the world:

"The craven game I spent so much of my youth perfecting would not work against these guys…I could not meaningfully exist on the same court with these obscure, hungry players. Nor could you. And it's not just a matter of talent or practice. There's something else."

What that something else is is hard to determine. I think it comes down to work. If you do the work, if you care enough about something to think about it all the time, to dream about it, to constantly try to get better at it, maybe you can make the big leagues. After New Orleans, I jumped in the van with the band and rode with them to Austin. On the drive to Houston I fell asleep and woke up at one point to see Paul—who is primarily a drummer and has had to drastically improve his piano skills to fill the role in this band—with a Midi keyboard and headphones, practicing scales, his hands moving synchronously up and down the keyboard. The hard work is never done.

As I write this, I'm at my friends' house in North Austin, watching their cat play with a lizard on the kitchen floor. The cat twists around like it's a game, batting at the creature, sometimes rolling over and crushing it until the lizard loses its wherewithal and the cat loses interest. I'm not saying this has anything to do with Menomena, it just interrupted my writing: the cat playing, not knowing its own strength, the lizard dying. Just a short, forgettable moment to the cat, but the end of life for the lizard. If the cat kept a diary, it probably wouldn't even make it into today's entry that he killed something. It wasn't an angry thing. You wouldn't say that the cat killed the lizard because he hated it. He was just playing around. Maybe it wasn't love either. Maybe just indifference.

This email made me feel like I was some special assassin-- the best in the business!-- who had turned his back on it all after getting blamed for a botched job that wasn't his fault. And now Casey was trying to drag me back in for one more assignment. One more job to make things right. "I said I'd never do this again."

Of course, I have no such special skills, but the assassin game being what it is these days… Well, someone has to do the killing around here. So here we are, a weekly column about music.

The assassins in those movies always have some caveats before they accept the job, so here are mine: I'm not a journalist, and I've tripped myself up before in thinking that I have to do some basic journalism to write a column like this. The reason this whole column stopped a year ago after such a meager output was that I constantly talked myself out of ideas. I thought that I was either too unqualified to talk about the subject or that the conflict of interest of being a musician was too great to write them. This, in my head, limited the range of subjects I could write about to one, and when I wrote a column about the use of the word "Hey" in pop music, I was finished. So let's try calling these not articles but "essays." Everyone knows that the only qualification someone needs in order to write an essay is the feeling that they already know everything and don't have to do any actual research to come up with an answer.

So. I will now be writing one of these every week for the rest of the year, not because I have to, but because I want to (I keep telling myself). The perspective will not just be an inside look at the Portland music scene, mostly because I haven't been in Portland for the last few months and I haven't been participating in or even listening to any Portland music or really much pop music at all. I've been working on a ballet and choral music project in New York City, which has led me to do some research (see? I can do research.) by going to operas and ballets, where the performance starts on time and you start applauding before the show even starts. When I told my mother about this over the phone, her simple response was, "Oh, opera… hoity-toit." Yes, mom, hoity-toit.

Some of the only pop music I've listened to so far this year was Radiohead's new album, of which I only listened to about the first six songs before falling asleep and deciding that it's best that I never listen to it again, not because it's bad or anything, it's just that at a certain point you want to preserve your memories of a band at the time when it really meant something to you and not grasp for more little scraps of good memories, the very real fear being that you'll drop the other memories you're holding and end up breaking them all. (Also, has anyone noticed that Thom Yorke has done a reverse Michael Stipe and gotten more mumble-y over the years? It's shocking to go back to OK Computer and hear him clearly saying words that actually mean something.) But what kind of review would that be? To say that I couldn't stand listening to the whole thing because of some juvenile urge to preserve the purity of something? That would not make for good journalism. So I will stick to essays.

All of this is to say (and sorry if it seems like I'm trying to run out the clock on my first column without actually saying anything) that my interest in writing music and writing about music comes from the same place: an aesthetic appreciation of what I see and hear and feel, Casey asked me to review a song from the new Decemberists album, and after listening to it I felt an overwhelming obligation to comment on the critical angles already out there about this release, mostly that the album was a return to the band's roots and some sort of homage to both country music and early R.E.M. records, if that's possible. My greater desire was to write about the actual music on the album, and how it made me feel and how it fits into the story of the band and the scene as I've experienced it. But then I'm walking a fine line of talking about people who I've met and had dinner with and think are wonderful people and not wanting to say anything remotely critical. But where is the journalism in that? I suppose I don't even believe in objective journalism at all. How can anybody ever truly remove their own biases and talk about a story objectively? It's almost better if you just state your biases outright, in which case probably Fox News (am I really coming to this conclusion?) is the most honest journalism out there.

As far as diving into the discussion offered up by the publicity push, i.e. whether the album sounded like a "return to their roots" or out-did early R.E.M. at their own game, my only response would be, "Uh… what?" Ultimately the Decemberists album didn't sound to me like country music or early R.E.M., even though it had Peter Buck and Gillian Welch guesting on it, which were probably meant as red herrings anyway. It's so hard to come across music these days that doesn't already have a conventional wisdom thickly wedded to it, which you have to fight through like thick underbrush.

This kind of writing is fine (and I'm not advocating for anyone to change what they're doing, I'm just trying to find a way that I can write about music) but after a while it's important to remember that you're just commenting on comments, much like the bizarre threads at the bottom of an internet article that start with someone proclaiming "First" and often don't get more substantial from there. I'd rather hear about someone's personal reaction to the work, which is what I always longed for in college English classes and what serious English majors probably hated about me and what made me drop out of college after one semester.

But alas, assassins don't need higher learning. Killing is in their blood. I said I'd never do this again, but okay.

Bring on the first assignment.