My life as a musician has been....
One surprise after another and completely unexpected.
I still don't really consider myself a 'musician'. I think of myself as a songwriter/producer/arranger first and a musician second.
My chops are 'aural'. I 'play' guitar and keys well, but I've met so many people that are brilliant on their respective instruments that I feel like an imposter referring to myself as a 'musician'. I was always a fan first. I was the person everyone called when they wanted to hear a 'new' record. The coolest thing is I've actually met most of the artists that I listened to before I ever wrote a song. It's been a trip. As a teen I loved Ride and getting to see them play in their hometown of Oxford years after the fact was mindblowing. I couldn't believe I had been invited to play the same festival.
I'm most interested in the spaces between the notes and the lyrics that fill them. Using the dynamics of the song to tell the story. Like scenes from a movie, where all the songs on the album give you the whole picture. To me that makes the most sense, as my background was mainly in film and theater. While all my favorite musicians were spending countless hours learning their instruments - I was memorizing dialogue and writing plays. I never picked up a guitar til I was already in my twenties. And that was only because I had to learn how to 'fake it' for a play. After that, music took over for me and I became more interested in writing and recording than I was in acting a role in someone else's universe. I like creating my own world. It's more fulfilling and I don't have to spend my time running around trying to be included in someone else's production. Maybe I'm just a control freak? But I love being able to just pick up my guitar and create whenever I want without having to wait around for a play, or a production or what have you.
Tell us the story of your being shot.
Ahh, the gunshot story. I keep trying to move away from that. To not be defined by it. Half of my friends insist I keep telling it and the other half are like 'aren't you sick of it?'. In truth, I am. It was a major life-changing, life defining moment. But it's in the past. I'm not that person anymore. Yet without it, I wouldn't be who or where I am today. And of course I titled the new record 'Exit Wounds' so it's always in my psyche. I mean, how wouldn't it be. There's a bullet lodged in my neck. I swear sometimes it causes a lot of pain and on other days, I forget it's there.
But it definitely made me take stock of my life at the time. I was an arrogant prick who only cared about being a movie star and getting laid.
It's humbling to be shot from across the street, to never see the gun, never see who shot you. I didn't walk down that street again for ten years. And I still look up at the windows of buildings when I go down an empty street, wondering if there's someone waiting in the shadows to have another go. It's that sense of impending doom, that stays with you. And the feeling that each moment could be your last. Blah, blah, blah.
In the emergency room at the hospital they told me I was really lucky. That the bullet had stopped centimeters from my jugular. I said if I was 'really' lucky, it would have missed or hit me in the fleshy part of my shoulder. It's all perspective. I guess mine's skewed.
When I look at my life so far I...
I still see failure. I try not to. A friend of mine once said "look at everything you've done. Where you've come from, what you've been through, the people you've met and the lives you've affected. If you died tomorrow, your life would be considered a success."
But to me it's not enough. I'm still not where I want to be. I still haven't absorbed everything that I want to absorb. There's so much out there and we owe it to ourselves to find all of it, take in as much as we can and become better for it. So that's what I'm trying to do. Create, learn, love, f@#$, give and share. Maybe not in that order. Survive.... intact. I don't know if that's possible.
I do know that one of my favorite things in life so far was rescuing these two feral cats that I now live with. One of them was already two years old when I trapped him and he had never been touched by human hands. It took three and half years before he trusted me enough to let me pet him. Now he can't get enough. It taught me a lot about patience and trust; two things I'd been lacking.
Music is...
Taken for granted. I miss Tuesdays. It was always my favorite day of the week, because that's when the new releases came out. I would spend hours every Tuesday combing through the new releases at the record store. Once I made a purchase I would run home and put the CD on and listen to it while I read all the liner notes and lyrics. Sometimes I'd invite a few friends over and we'd have a listening party. Many of these records became the basis of my own songwriting. I learned from listening. My teachers were Disintegration, the Bends, Gentlemen, Third/Sister Lovers, Fruit Tree, Bad Vibes, Everything I Longed For, Cardinal, Peggy Suicide, Good Morning Spider, Dear 23, Moon Pix, Laughing Stock, Ejector Seat Reservation, Spirit of Eden, A Series of Sneaks and countless others. It's not the same anymore.
(Illustration by Michael Arthur)