Davey

moral metrics

I’m not super into celebrity gossip, and I have curtailed my algorithm to omit bullshit that only serves to distract and upset – particularly that of foreign government action that I have no control over, even that of a vote that doesn’t count – but I am not impervious to world news.

Fairly big news in my world; and likely that of the recovery world, is that of disgraced-comedian-turned-podcaster-turned-hyper-religious-zealot, Russell Brand.

If you know me personally, or follow this blog, you know it’s out of character for me to discuss celebrities at all. I bring this one up because of the commentary I’ve seen from many of my more left-leaning friends because; and this comes with some speculation, it’s apparent to me that many people are delighting in his misery because of where he’s placed himself on the political spectrum as of late, even going so far as to insinuate that their taste in entertainment is somehow superior on some moral level.

As a fan of the music of Ryan Adams, allow me to assure you that there is no moral compass built into your artistic tastes. As a matter of fact, as both a connoisseur of the arts AND as a creator of the arts, that art is inherently fucked up, and largely created by somewhat fucked up people.

Make no mistake: I’m certainly not issuing an excuse for Russell Brand, who very likely did what he’s been accused of, and likely ducked & covered himself in sanctimonious Christian practices when he saw these accusations coming for him. What I’m saying is – you don’t know until you know… then you have to decide how to feel about it.

How do I feel about it, personally? Bummed.
Sad for the victims, and bummed about the situation.
Again… he very likely did it what he’s been accused of.
And no… I don’t resonate with a lot of what he’s been into lately… but before this, a few years back when his world view was less one-sided, and more worldly, I did.

He’s a great writer, super intelligent, and not so long ago he was ideological, and thoughtful, and his greatest contribution; a book called ‘Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions’ may be one of the finest guides through the 12 steps to recovery ever committed to paper, and for that I will always be grateful. It’s unfortunate that his actions will prevent people from discovering this incredibly helpful piece of literature.

But what I know, and Russell Brand knows, is that it’s time for him to make amends. He needs to not only apologize, but atone for his deeds however the victim(s) and the powers that be see fit, and he needs to be grateful about the opportunity to do so.

My opinion bares nothing on that equation.

charming mistakes

I recently had a conversation with a friend & colleague regarding recording processes. He’s a fellow guitar player and; as odd as it feels for both of us to refer to ourselves in this way, we are composers. Rock & roll composers.

His question for me was; essentially, how good is good enough?

As in, when it comes to recording an instrument, and the ‘take’ in question is ‘flawed’ in some way – as they often are when they are performed by humans – where is the line for an acceptable take vs an unacceptable take. The easy answer is ‘well, if I did what I was trying to do, then it’s worth keeping’ and we are both inline with that. For me, the question is: Is it charming?

There are happy accidents and not-so-happy accidents in this business, but we both feel that if we get too ‘nitpicky’ with every passing note, and cut out every mistake and replace them individually, that we risk engineering the soul out of the song.

That’s a difficult decision to make in the era of quantization and auto-tune, where no mistakes are left to chance in most popular music, but it’s easy for us as artists to forget that there’s a rich heritage of raw and archaic practices. Once upon a time in 1955, when a young Elvis Presley, Bill Black, and Scotty Moore gathered around 1 single omnidirectional microphone in a room and performed their best renditions of songs, that the one that had the ‘best feel’ was what was chosen by the producer, regardless of mistakes, botched endings, and off-key flubs.

There’s a spot in The Kingsmen’s hit “Louie Louie” where the drummer apparently hit his thumb with a drumstick in the middle of the song and yells “FUCK!” loud enough to be picked up on the tape. Decades of AM and FM airplay later, it’s still there, never having been edited out.

And these recordings became iconic.

Surely, that was then, and this is now – but there’s something to be remembered there – The soul must stay intact.

In the end, it’s important that we’re proud of what we’ve made. We intentionally record on high quality instruments, into state of the art microphones, into an industry standard recording program. We hire fantastic mixing engineers, and fantastic mastering engineers. We hire great artists and have our records pressed by reputable companies. All the elements for a great recording are there, and our efforts in the studio should match those elements.

Unanimously, they do match those elements, but as I am currently partaking in yet another recording project with The Confusionaires, these thoughts and propensities come back into the foreground.

These things can be much easier to say than do.
Wish me luck.

perspective

Alan Watts, a popular American spiritualist who studied & taught eastern philosophy tells a story from time to time, as I’ve heard it repeated a time or two in the recordings of his speaking engagements, about a farmer.

A farmer’s horse got out of the stable and ran off.
His neighbors said “that’s bad.”
He answered “maybe.”
The horse returned a day later with 6 wild horses.
His neighbors said “that’s good.”
He answered “maybe.”
The farmer’s son was training one of the wild horses, and got kicked, and broke his leg.
His neighbors said “that’s bad.”
He answered “maybe.”
Later, a government man came around conscripting young men to go fight in a war, and the farmer’s son was left off the list because of his injury.
His neighbors said “that’s good.”
He answered “maybe.”

The story goes on like this, typically to illustrate the meaning of the yin & yeng, that no good can come without bad, and no object can be observed without the space around it to give it context.

This occurs to me from time to time when I’m in the thick of it, as I frequently am. When I’m busy, I want time to myself, and when I’ve got too much time to myself I start to look for things to occupy me.

The truth is, I need both. I need those crests and troughs because that’s what life is made of, and if you want to get really granular, that’s what everything is made of – our vision is refractions of light that are distinguishable because of the dark spaces between them. Sound waves are the same. Even we are an assemblance of molecules with space between them…

… but to zoom out a bit, most of us wouldn’t know what a good day was if we didn’t have a bad day to compare it to. Sunny, warm days are treasured because we know what rainy, cold days are, as we know summer from winter.

All day, every day, we are comparing what we have with what we had… you’d think gaining another perspective wouldn’t be so hard.

motivation

I’m motivated. And I’m inspired.

… but there’s something to know about inspiration and motivation, and that is that they are temporary. I am currently a little heavier than I want to be, and it’s a strange place to be because I ultimately chose it.

I don’t mean that in the sense that I ‘chose to eat a dozen cupcakes‘ but I did choose to put my endless cardio on the shelf for a bit so that I could focus on developing muscle, and the good news is that it worked. The bad news is, that when you eat more – yes, even healthy food – and lift more, muscle is not the only thing you gain… so it’s time to cut – and cut I shall.

I’ve been doing some HIIT training a couple times a week over the past couple months amid the heavy weightlifting, which has been great, but a few years ago I hit on something that I’m particularly good at (for better or worse) and that is jogging. I can run in Zone 2 (heart rate zone, that is) for swaths of time, to the point that at the end of February, I thought I’d just ‘see what I can do’ since it had been a while since I’d put in a long-ish run.
I ran 8km.
It took about an hour.
First run back after a winter of lifting weights.

I’m sure you can tell by the way I phrased that, but I’m happy with that. That’s essentially the pace I left off at when seasonal allergies took me out of the running game in the fall. I now do it 3 times a week… longer when I can, but really, between weight training 3 times per week and running 3 days per week, I’m pretty full-up.

It’s also as spiritual as it was before.
I’d almost forgotten how connected I feel to myself, and to my environment when I’m doing this – especially outside. To push myself closer to the ever-changing limit of what I am capable of is such a magical place. I’m not heading into the river valley just yet, because to fall on the ice is to endanger my artistic life, but I can’t wait.

I also have some light bike repair to complete before getting back into the mud on my mountain bike, but that’s coming soon, too.

I do everything I can to quell the winter blues, and ultimately I do a much better job of that than ever before, but that doesn’t mean that springtime isn’t massively optimistic time for me.

I’m so ready.

At this point I’m flirting with the idea of entering a race, but in the end what I really want to do is just run. Run for me. Do I need an event to stay on track? Not really. Would it be fun? Probably.

I guess I’ll have to see what my summer gig schedule looks like.

context

Even a portrait with a blank background still has a background. The background is not absent, it’s just blank, and it allows us to project our own background onto it if we wish to do so – but some won’t. Their lack of imagination or inability to align themselves with the artist’s vision may lead them to believe the artist was lazy, or that the work is unfinished.

But it’s just blank.

Sometimes I try to write like that.
Songs, not blog posts.
It doesn’t work for me, or at least I’m never happy with the end result. So I give it context. Then, in the editing phase, I remove some of that context.

I’ve been giving some thought to a series of short videos wherein I get into the subject matter of my songs, where they come from and why they were written. I’ve received encouragement into this because (a) I’ve got a lot to draw from in The Confusionaires songbook alone, let alone my own catalog from before that, and (b) people seem to be able to acknowledge that my songs are about real things, and that those things aren’t always super clear.

Every once in a while, I get asked what a song is about. It’s always flattering and slightly unnerving, because the genre that my band operates in doesn’t really have a Kerouac or Bob Dylan character. Most songs in the genre are about girls and cars, and while I don’t shy away from the usual tropes, I don’t really write about such things (to the point that my girlfriend semi-regularly gives me grief about not writing love songs).

Girls and cars might play a role in a story-song, but there is usually some larger statement at the heart of the songs I write… questions of morality, sense of purpose, nihilism, higher calling, death, internal struggle… you get the picture. But I make it catchy, and squeeze it into 2 minutes and 45 seconds at 250 bpm, and nobody really notices… until they do.

I imagine that there are people out there who have picked up on what I’m saying and not asked, and are taking me out of context. I honestly have no idea.

Beyond myself, though, I think we’ve all been taken out of context… and I would wager that we take someone ELSE out of context almost every single day, even if it’s small. Between phenomenons such as ‘vaguebooking’ and our propensity to only read the headline of an article and somehow feeling informed enough to voice an opinion on something. It’s to the point that most of the articles you see on social media now are just screenshots of stories, and I don’t think most people noticed.

It’s the reason you won’t see me jumping on bandwagons when it comes to people with controversial opinions. The way people are willing to destroy each other over differing opinions and misunderstandings is gross. I’m not talking about gender identity or nazis or any of that stuff – I mean actual differences of opinion, and actual lack of context, because I don’t believe that every right-wing voter is a nazi who hates poor people any more than I believe that all lefties are barefoot vegan hippies who use cloth diapers.

You, much like me, have things you’re conservative about and things you’re liberal about, but we’re forced to cast a couple of votes every half-decade to political parties who are constantly trying to point out our differences. Buzz-word authors and podcast hosts are trying to instill some measure of ‘holier than thou’ / ‘you’re either with us or against us’ rhetoric constantly, and if you’re not maintaining your algorithm diligently by being intentional with what you ‘like’ and what you remove from your feed, then you won’t be able to keep the wolves away.

I’m pretty accustomed to being misunderstood. My parent’s never really understood me. A lot of my friends never understood me. I’ve been misrepresented in newspapers when promoting my music. I’ve been called names I didn’t deserve. I’ve been shunned by communities and friend groups… and really none of this is special – it’s probably all happened to you before, too… yet here we are, doing the exact thing that’s brought us all so much pain over the years, only to realise that the pain from over the years has shaped who we are today…
And that’s not so hard to see…
… once we put it into context.

suffering from righteousness

I don’t get into worldly politics on here much, and I’m not going to start now for the simple fact that these are subject far too broad and far too deep to chock up to left vs right. That said, I’m sure you can gather from the hippy-dippy undertones of what I like to write about, in tandem with my arts background, penchant for animal rights, and various other indicators that my preferences lie more on the side what’s best for the group rather than what’s best for the individual.

That said, we can all be greedy. Greed may be one of the few things you can really count on in this day & age, because when someone is greedy, they are somewhat predictable.

When a war is declared over resource… oil, for example – we can anticipate that the aggressor is going to be very careful in their attack, in an effort to not destroy what they are after. Therefor, there are safe places for vulnerable people to seek refuge – near the refineries and storage facilities, in this case. Once the prize has been won, the aggressor will leave, and the affected country will rebuild. It may not seem like it, but these sorts of engagements have rules, and breaking those rules has repercussions.

A holy war, however… a war based in some perceived moral superiority, wherein the aggressor seeks to impose a genocide on an entire group of people over a difference of faith is another thing entirely. No one is safe, and no care is taken – if the goal is to wipe an entire demographic off the face of the planet, then there is no calculable loss to be concerned with. This is true terror.

There are examples of both throughout the ages, and we tend to downplay our own historical misgivings while pointing the finger at others. Nobody alive remembers the Napoleonic Wars, or the Crusades – both of which were brutal and long, and both of which have been given names that sound a lot nicer than they would have been to experience, as opposed to… say; The Holocaust.

War is an extreme case though, isn’t it?

On a more granular level we have people we know, who are not really in powerful enough positions to exact war on anyone else, but there are haters and there are abusers, and scaled down, their motivations are the same… and we see low-level efforts of both all around us.

Right now we’re witnessing our own families and friend groups engage in a form of nationalism as we shop Canadian to avoid paying unnecessary taxes to an overreaching foreign government. This isn’t a thing we should do out of spite, but a thing we should do in the spirit of support – something we should have been doing before, but now we have stronger reasons to do so. But I believe that the cause of our motivation matters. It’s important to remember that there are people on the other side of that international border who are hurting, and that although we can’t necessarily do anything to alleviate that hurt, that is who is over there.

There is no moral superiority.
We have all the same bullshit here as they do there.
And while we’re concerned with what their government is doing – a government that we can’t vote for or against, and have no say over what they do – we have our own governing bodies, and we should be concerned with what they are doing while we’re distracted by what’s going on over the fence.

That goes for an even closer-to-home look at things, as well. there are people in my own family whom I completely disagree with as far as lifestyle, initiative, what decisions they’re making. It’s easy for me to label them – and I often do – and it’s easy for me to write them off – and I often do – but hate and exploitation are pretty far off in the distance from where I am right now.

If they were to actually put forth an effort into improving their situation, I would help them.

The only thing holding me back is the notion that I cannot do it for them… and to force my ideals of what should and shouldn’t be is no better than condemning them for not doing things my way.

I guess what we’re talking about here, is grace.

fatigue

I’m not sure that the general populous of the human race in 2025 even knows how to rest. With the general onslaught of information; this blog notwithstanding, there is a constant need to decipher misinformation and half-truths that; if we’re lucky, is only peppered in between bouts of 9-5 work and/or hustle-culture gigs, child-rearing, school, hopefully an exercise regimen and ideally some food prep… and any number of other things.

Personally, and as ignorant as it may seem, I unfollowed and blocked frequent posters of American politics. As a Canadian, American politics are foreign, and thus are not something I can (a) contribute to, (b) vote in, or (c) control the outcome of in ny way. Provincial and national politics are my business, but a lot of that gets filtered out because many Canadians don’t seem to realize that there’s a difference between American and Canadian politics, or are at least impassioned about both (most with a level of futility).

I can get into that more, but I probably won’t.

Most of us think we are slaves to the algorithm in some measure or other, but just as much as ‘liking’ posts influences what you will see later, so does indicating what is not of interest by way of hitting the X in the top right corner of a facebook post, or clicking ‘not interested’ under the ‘3 dots’ in the top right corner of a Threads post.

I won’t say that this has quelled my phone addiction, but it’s certainly tamed it.

Beyond that, I wear a Garmin Forerunner that tells me how well I sleep on a scale of 1 to 100. I don’t think I’ve ever crested 83, and I’ve gone as low as 65 which will make for a fairly sub-standard effort through my day. I generally get about 7 hours per night between 10pm and 5am with a 90-minute workout.

I’m by no measure a professional when it comes to proper rest and recuperation, but I have made improvements in my life. Future goals include (a) drinking enough water, and (b) amplifying my workout regimen.

I just try to do a little better as I go.

I hope you do, too.