The Historical View from Coronado Island.
Or, “Cruise Ship Music and its Retrospective Recuperation.”
Feeling not great about calling this that, but feeling good about moving forward regardless. I know there is something baked into that memory and so I will poke at it for you and we shall see what unfolds and then I can change the title. Speaking of recursion, maybe I already did. Speaking of memory, we started that day in summer of 2006 at the San Diego Zoo. I called my father and put on an aggrieved voice when he asked how I was. “This place is a zoo,” I said. “Where are you?” he asked. “The zoo.” It went well for us and now I do this every time I go to a zoo, which happens a fair amount but the point here is not our little routine; the point is that I could hear in my father’s laughter so much relief. “He is making a joke,” he might have been thinking. “Thank god.”
I had not really been making jokes for some time at around that time of life. That summer I was busy figuring out how to justify withdrawing from Princeton and spinning, spinning, spinning about the crisis of music. Its pursuit, I was convinced, was making me sick. Have A Normal Life on one side and Keep At This on the other and I was straddling them, kind of, but really my mind was mostly made up. And withering. We talk about mental health now, right? So when I say I was deeply depressed it is ok? For me that depression, fanged and vicious, was also good at making reasoned arguments based in pseudopsychology and a kind of ardor about connecting some personal historical dots. I/It had made a very compelling case for fleeing the vocation on many occasions, and tonight the cruise ship feeling went at the zoo banter feeling and completely eviscerated it, its happymaking power subdued/suspended. Because—get this—there was a songwriter playing on this cruise ship on this extraordinarily beautiful night and I thought “oh my god this is my fate” instead of thinking “wow, that would be so fun,” which is what I now think, spoiler alert.
Flash fifteen years forward to The Big Tractörhead Show yesterday afternoon and all I want to do is play on cruise ships, at cideries, microbreweries, and public libraries. I am dreaming about just playing the keyboard, when it comes back from Chicago where it is being facelifted, and singing, and having so many songs that I can play three sets, engaged throughout or safely ignored or any other way that someone might think about what music means in a room or on watercraft or as fuel for darkening those summer days. On the latter, though: I will try to honor the joy of playing, communicate that over anything else, the celebration of being in this skin and making things with and through and by virtue of it. So I can be a link in a chain, the one we use to pull each other forward, to remind ourselves that we chose this kind of life because, and I am going to quote Sting here, who said this on an awards show that I happened to be watching, “music is its own reward.”
It is easy for Sting to say and I suppose, teaching job landed for the moment, and house purchased and kitchen about to be renovated, it is easy for me to say, too. But this is about saying it when it is difficult to say, and reporting back that somehow, on balance, that is what I told myself and that telling was marginally louder than the other ravenous tellings bent on sinking the enterprise. So if it is helpful to know that, I am saying it.
I wish you redemption of your most difficult days and generous listeners when you tell the tale. And that you tell the tale. I am easy to find.