A Musician’s Thoughts on Surrender

These days, it would almost always be that sharing your art was a form of self-flagellation. I talk emphatically about creating for the sake of creating, but I’m human, and it was always right there in front of my face — a kind of truth. The calculated success of art didn’t used to be so accessible and immediate. Now I had special apps to track my streams and followers and engagements, apps that updated in real-time so I could watch as a song I published started its slow crawl to whatever abstract milestone was mentionable enough for a post on social media. The whole affair was underwhelming at best, painful and defeating at worst. When considering the smallness of it stacked against news of plane crashes and executive orders that felt strangely and irritatingly personal, it was killing. And I was meant to keep contributing to this machine? To find myself some stable ground where I could emerge from another boring release day unscathed? Hopeful even. Prepared for whatever would be asked of me when, inevitably, the world rose up and said, “enough.” One resounding moment amidst the chaos signaling the start of something new or the end of it all.

When I thought about it — putting my music out — it really didn’t seem that consequential. Couldn’t I just put it out and allow for it to mean nothing or everything? When I got right down to it, it felt quite immature to make such intense “I” statements about something I couldn’t really control. Things like: “I’m never going to make it.” “I’m just one more singer in a long line of many.” “I don’t know why I think I’m so special.” Of course, I knew the importance of creating to create, rather than creating for praise. But it was hard to stay latched onto the original intent when the song in question wasn’t picked up by a curated Spotify playlist in a matter of hours after its release. To many an artist, that placement made a world of difference, even as we released a collective sigh about the powerlessness of the artist’s relationship with streaming giants that were eager to raise prices incrementally with no meaningful impact on the artist’s salary.

Without that initial pickup, I all but threw my song a funeral. I went into overdrive doing chaos management, like a publicist trying to control the narrative for some A-lister hell-bent on spinning out. I would check and re-check my social media, making sure the lack of traction wasn’t the doing of some 10,000-year flood, whereas the systems were overwhelmed with notifications, the song making a miraculous splash and clogging all roads leading to me. I was in the dark waiting to be saved. And then, when I really thought about that — about my salvation being inexplicably tied to whether or not my work was being heard — I felt alienated by the absurdity. How funny to welcome the dark if it was a side effect of being so loved, so celebrated things had to be recalibrated to handle the magnitude of attention I was getting, but to fear it if it meant nobody was hearing me at all. To then run to Instagram to see it really was true: I had one notification. One. Notification. The song was dead on arrival. At which point I’d devolve into hours of mindless scrolling, eventually finding myself on somebody’s page — anybody’s page slightly more popular than mine — wondering whether they had great marketing, or the algorithm favored their aesthetic, or they were, simply put, chosen.

“Golden Rule” single cover shot by Hollon Beasley at Skyline Lanes in Clarksville, TN.

My newest song is called “Golden Rule,” and it is, at its very core, a song about presence. I wrote about times of inadvertent pause, when I found myself in a strip mall parking lot, watching the sunset, the clouds, which meant rain all day, now adding texture and substance to the sky, so the sun wasn’t just setting in a diaphanous blue, but backlighting a stage of hills and mountains and tributaries. It was a song about great American traditions and community, about singing “Sweet Caroline” at the ballgame and learning to populate our lives with the same intentions we used to decorate our homes. William Morris said, “If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” And I lived in service of this truth.

But then, I shared something of myself with the world, and even though I found nothing useful or beautiful in notifications or stats or streams — or jumping to conclusions, for that matter — I still let them lord over me like I was Elton John’s tiny dancer watching headlights approaching on the highway. It all felt so bleak. Doomed, even. I believed in rest, in the reset that happened when you took time away and allowed for space to bring you the next great idea that might turn you into a giant among men. It was only too bad I had to be pushed to rest, frustrated to a point of Shakespearian downfall, whereupon I left my phone in some undisclosed location and forced myself to be present with all that was in the material world.

And so, when I decided the release wasn’t going my way, I poured myself a glass of wine, and I brought it out to my front stoop where I sat, hot from a bath, trying to cool down, and watched as my neighbor’s motion detecting garage light flickered on. In time, a small gray cat named Fitz trotted up, dragging his face along my jeans and pushing himself into me with so much force, I thought it ridiculous I was mourning a song that had barely been out for twenty-four hours. We created this reality with its likes and filters and award shows, and now we had to find a way to live in it. Sometimes these moments of surrender, while more reactive than intentional, were the only ways we could fight back. And perhaps, that was the great why of it all. We create because we have to, and we disseminate our work because we have to, and we learn to find purpose and merit in it because we have to. There was no other way.

Later, as I sat at my computer and typed in the same password I’d had since I got my very first laptop, a pink MacBook in 2009, I thought of the girl who authored the password, so feverish and ready to be the exact age I am now. Through the ages, we shared this one innocuous keyword and a devout wish for things to be different, which is to say, there was a certain level of denial there. I was always her and she would always become me, and there was something pacifying in that. In timing and predeterminism. Possibly, it was all greater than I would ever be, and trying to exercise some level of control was futile. I refilled my glass, and I considered this essay, and I recalled a moment when my friend and I sat around a bonfire two nights prior. She talked about the January wind, how she opened all the doors of her new home — a home she’d prayed for — so it could rush in. “Now, this is living,” she said, finding ostensible meaning in an otherwise throwaway transaction with the world; a tiny rebellion in its own right.

This is all to say, it is never that easy to surrender to what is. I’ve tried, and I only find that I disappoint myself in that way too. Perhaps, the great mystery is letting life be disappointing when it’s disappointing and letting it be exciting when it’s exciting. In either state, there is flow and stillness, especially when you consider the fact that none of it means anything about the bigger picture, which is, of course, your Life. Who you are. The messages you carry and propagate with what you create. It’s by no means new, but I’ve found that artists need to be reminded of this time and again. That art isn’t dead on arrival. Art is, by its own right, alive, and giving into the doom of scarcity rather than reveling in the sweetness of maintaining a certain belief that art can change the world simply by creating and publishing what we create is one of the ways we contribute to the collective’s despair.

But it doesn’t hurt to laugh at yourself. This is a tough business, and, by nature, we’re dramatic, artistic, and defeatist. As I sulked around my bedroom the night of the release, ready to prematurely mourn “Golden Rule,” my partner said, “Give it a chance.” It still had plenty of time to do something great — forever, if you really think about it.

There’s this feeling that only the new can make a splash, so we drive up our output to stay relevant. But what if we fought back merely by reminding ourselves that old art is constantly being discovered, and that all good things do, in fact, take time? As I sat there in the throes of my newest tragedy, my partner laughed at me, and in time I laughed too. I guess it is kind of funny when I remember there was a time before cavemen discovered fire, when the dark was just an established and abided part of life.