The Conscious Pilgrim

father to the thought

There’s an old saying; maybe it’s a proverb, “The wish is father to the thought” that crosses my mind sometimes. Particularly around this time of year when people talk about ‘Christmas wishes’ and ‘New Years Resolutions’ – neither of which mean much to me, personally. I’ve written a few times over the years about how September is the beginning of the year for me (and I think most people) but for anyone new to this corner of the internet, I’ll sum it up by saying “I’m a big fan of making changes when they need to be made… rather than waiting for some special day on the calendar” though I’ll concede that some dates are special.

I’ve spent a good portion of my life wishing things were better while doing precisely nothing about it and wondering why things weren’t getting better despite my lack of effort. Then at 37 years old I started putting one foot in front of the other, resulting in losing 166 lbs, starting this blog, and taking my art seriously, and just generally doing a good job – even when doing things I hated. These things all resulted in a better and more fruitful life – but they also resulted in an adjustment of my sights, which made for more wishing… which made for more thoughtful execution.

So, I still wish for things. I just have better follow-through now.

I’ve developed a plan for things that I’m reluctant to talk about at this time, but I’ve taken on a long-term goal-oriented project that I’m creating the time for in my life. I’ll admit that it’s an artistic goal, and that I’ve been laying the groundwork for it for some time now, by way of proliferating artworks and other songs “ahead of a schedule.” When I say “ahead of schedule” I mean that there’s a certain timeline-oriented expectation for creative works with my rock & roll band, and due to our own efficient execution of things, we’re in a position where we can take on this ‘side quest‘ (for lack of a better term).

It’s something we’ve been talking about as a band for some time, and we’re putting it into motion now. It’s exciting, but it probably won’t see the light of day for a couple years.

But… it started with a wish.
And it developed into a pie-in-the-sky dream that we’re determined to see come to fruition.

I genuinely hope you still have wishes, and that you can muster up the gumption to make them happen. Following your dreams, no matter how big or small they might be, is a full-time commitment and a ton of work – and for most of us, it tends to have to happen in the off-hours when you’re burnt out from working too much, when you haven’t slept well, and you’re poorly nourished. it’s a true exercise in fortitude but nobody is going to do it for you.

It’s hard, and anyone who tells you it’s not hard is trying to sell you something.

So, I hope you don’t wait for it to happen – coax it out and help it along, and it will repay you with the energy you need to keep going.

… the season

I’m sure I’m not the only one who finds this particular time of year exhausting. I’ve finished all my performance engagements for 2024 and I’ve got a month to sort out the festivities… but if we’re really looking at the calendar, I’ve got 2 weeks, and I’ve already attended a Christmas party a week ago now.

It flies by. We all know it flies by.

So as we make plans to gather with the people we haven’t seen in a while, and in the spirit of cold weather and too much food, and the social contract of ‘tradition’ under which we operate, we include people we don’t really want to spend time with. We spend as little time thinking about the people we’ve blocked and unfriended – both in real life and on the internet – no matter how ‘grinchy’ it makes us, as a mechanism of defence for our own mental health and well-being.

As I ponder the notion of defending our mental health and well-being through the holidays, I can’t help but think that the whole notion of this tradition is a bit of a detriment to most of us. The functions we host and/or attend can be quite magical in the moment, but we all know that as the hour draws ever nearer, the stress compounds and magnifies.

The house is never clean enough or decorated perfectly enough.
The timing of the food being ready all at the same time is paramount.
“Did you iron your shirt?”
“Is that what you’re wearing?”
“I hope so-&-so doesn’t start talking about x, y, and/or z”

I’m flashing back to my youth, praying to whoever was listening to send SOMEONE from our guest list to the house early – or even just on-time – so I could stop dusting the window sills or whatever seemingly senseless task I was assigned that ONLY gets done during the day on Christmas Eve.

The way most of these stresses are handled is by throwing whatever food regimen you follow out the window and washing down the associated guilt and stress with booze. We pour that shit in our coffee first thing in the morning… and we pour that shit in our egg nog with breakfast… until we somehow reach what we’ve deemed a socially acceptable time of day to stop hiding our coping mechanisms… and as much as Christmas is 1 single, solitary day, we actually lose our fucking MINDS from December 20th until January 1st, and most of us go broke doing it.

Being that I’m vegan and don’t drink at all anymore… I don’t have a pool in which to drown my sorrows, so I try to just not have any sorrows in the first place.

If you need to get off this train before it drives off the side of the mountain, consider this your permission. If you’re looking for a sign, I assure you it’s a stop sign.

The holidays weren’t meant to be this self destructive or poisonous. This is the season of giving, after all.

Personally – my family and I have been dialing back holiday commitments for years. My daughter has 2 extended families, my girlfriend has family, then there’s my family… so it’s a lot, especially for my daughter. We actually managed to get my entire family to meet for lunch at Boston Pizza a couple days before Christmas and call it good with just that! However last year, a family member decided that someone (other than their self) should host a proper meal. The only people that showed up was me, my girlfriend, and my daughter. Not even the person who decided this should happen showed up.

We’re back to keeping it simple this year.
Maybe more simple than ever.

I strongly encourage you to do what you can do… but if you need to draw the line, then draw it.

Happy Holidays.

when it’s no longer yours

There’s a strange thing that happens when you create something, and I don’t know that people really talk about it very openly. Maybe they don’t talk about it at all, but there are so many examples I can point to, and many of them can be triggering for creative people. I hope my perspective; however, is not triggering.

When you make something – anything – there’s a certain point at which it stops being yours, and starts being part of the fabric. Which fabric depends on what you’ve created, I suppose. I’m fortunate to have been part of many creations in my life, and over time I’ve learned that although I’ve been integral in the process, these things no longer belong to me.

The biggest and most obvious thing I’ve had a hand in creating is my daughter. She remains my daughter, and I suppose that will never not be the case, but as far as being part of the creation process of another human being goes – she is very much her own person, and is learning to self-govern by the example of the people around her; because, yes, it takes a village.

In a similar yet different way, I create music with my close friends. I write songs. I take a blank page, fill it full of words that rhyme, ideally with some poignant message about love or life, and I set it to music… and at some point after smoothing out the rough edges at loud volumes in a rehearsal space, it becomes what it’s going to be. Eventually it’ll be performed live, and/or in-studio and recorded, and released.

I may have some rights to it as has been carved out by intellectual property lawyers over the past hundred years or so, but if the magic and the timing line up, the song will take on a life of its own. In a perfect world (in which we do not currently live), someone with a higher profile than me will hear it and want to record it and release a version of it, and it will go on to reach more and more people. It will have taken on ‘a life of its own‘ the same way my daughter has a life of her own, and I the time will come when I have no real governance over what it becomes.

At what point does this happen? Probably when the record comes out, (though some pro-lifer may examine the parallels I’ve made so far and argue that it’s when pen meets paper… please understand that this is not a conversation I intend to have). After all, a painting is not a work of art until it’s finished.

And… making an album available for consumption is called “releasing.”

Regardless, my daughter will always be ‘my daughter’, and my songs will always be ‘by me’ if only as a point of reference: Davey’s daughter. Confusionaires’ songs.

The tendency with these artistic works, to further the parallels, is to be precious about it. To protect and conserve this music so nobody steals it and copies it before you get notoriety for it… and but this is where the parallels stop.

It’s important to let go of these things, and let them become what they are to be. Most of them will go nowhere, and become nothing – possibly ever, possibly just for a long time – while some of them might get picked up by the wind and travel the world. To put a finer point on it, if Bruno Mars heard one of my songs and loved it, and wanted to make a hip, modern r&b version of it, I’d be elated and honoured. However, I’d have to get comfortable with the fact that the majority of the world would know it as a Bruno Mars song because his version of it would easily travel further than mine.

A solid example of this if Johnny Cash’s version of Hurt, which was originally written and recorded by Trent Reznor under his project name ‘Nine Inch Nails.’ Though NIN has a far reaching fan base, that song has become a Johnny Cash song to more people than it is a NIN song.

Trent Reznor also knows that he can write more songs.
I can write more songs, too. And I will.

So to be precious about a string of words and notes that were arguably dropped on me and picked up by my antena from some unseen energy that has deemed me a good conduit for these messages seems selfish to me… especially since if I were to not write the words down, and not conjure up the melody and structure, that the song would keep floating, and be picked up by someone else.

new failures

In my artistic life – a life that I wish wasn’t so separate from my daily life – I’m in a pretty crazy world.

By a very real and tangible metric, I’ve successfully put out roughly a dozen albums. Each one has successfully surpassed reach and influence of the previous. I’ve had music on indie charts. I’ve made music videos. My current band has successfully sold out copies of first vinyl release. I’ve successfully toured internationally as a performing and recording artist. I’ve sold out shows in this country and in Mexico. And I’ve successfully learned new lessons from each experience.

By another very real and tangible metric, I’ve never sold enough albums or had enough steams to make myself eligible for a Juno or a Grammy… meaning that every album I’ve released has sold poorly, failing to meet the criteria for those awards. I’ve never had a hit song. The album we sold out of had very low production numbers, so was a low target. Technically, our international touring adventure earlier this year lost money.

Every musical success I’ve had could be called a failure in the same breath.

There’s an interesting phenomenon that happens with hit songs. If you have a song perform well – say, #15 on a billboard chart, and the next one does even better – let’s say #12 on the billboard chart, things are; by definition, going very well for you. However, if you have a song go to #1, and the next song doesn’t crack the top 10, you get labelled as a has-been pretty quickly.

In a similar way, a restaurant owner I’ve known once said that he wouldn’t want to be the #1 restaurant in town (according to a local publication) because getting bumped from the top spot – which WILL happen – makes for declining value. He was content with consistently being (and his restaurant was) #2 or #3 for years.

Local musicians often suffer from what’s been referred to as hometown prophet syndrome. This is a situation where you have a difficult time drawing a crowd to a performance in your home town because the perception is that people can see you anytime, so what you’re doing isn’t special. But, to perform a few towns over can be a guaranteed barn-burner of a show, mainly due to the fact that a great performer can show up and blow minds and get a reaction like “where did these guys even come from?” which is a stark contrast to the hometown music scene who’s been watching that performer get on stage and just suck, while gradually grinding it out and honing their craft to near perfection without anyone really taking notice.

My band an I are embarking on a new recording adventure. We’re going back to the drawing board with a few things, and revising our approach to recording while working up a new batch of songs for what will no doubt be an album that we will release. In that way, it will be a success. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again.

How that album will perform, we sincerely hope, will be better than any of our previous efforts. The challenge will be to go back through every misstep we’ve taken and improve upon every bad idea we’ve ever followed through on, and amplify the good ideas we’ve barely scratched the surface of.

Addressing the shortcomings of the past is hard, but it’s how growth is achieved and it’s as painful as it is necessary.

I can’t wait to learn how to improve this.

After 30 years, I am still improving.

attentive

In my artistic life – not that I segregate my life, but certain things require a singular focus and art is one of those things – my band and I are embarking on another recording project.

To date, we’ve released 3 full length albums and essentially 3 EPs, and I’ve essentially lost count of the ‘sessions’ we’ve done because (a) there’s been a lot of them, and (b) my memory is not great most of the time and these things tend to run together, especially when it’s been the same 3 guys, and pretty much historically has happened in the same studio. We’ve also done a bonkers amount of rehearsal recordings.

Sometime next year, we’ll take our artistry and duplicate it a whole bunch of times and turn it into a product to be bought & sold. It’ll become a commodity that people can have an opinion on, and they’ll determine if it holds up to our other albums, and at some point someone will say they liked our “old stuff” better, which will add a linear element to all of this, thereby making us feel old or something.

But for now, we make art. We set up microphones and baffles and headphone mixes and we flush out chord progressions and ramblings and churn them into songs. There will be pounding drums and loud guitar amplifiers and we’ll allow our imaginations to take us into strange places. We’ll weave together poetry and bent strings and interesting rhythms and low frequencies and our dreams will stretch our further than our shadows.

Working a job in between recording sessions is brutal, but we’ll do it because it’s the part of the process we can’t do without just yet. The transition from the top of our creative mindframe to the of an exhausted and underslept worker and back again is so painfully humbling, yet necessary.

Months later, a critic will refer to our efforts as “fairly country” or “chaotic” and if we’re lucky, both of those terms in the same sentence – but that’s in the future, and we don’t live in the future, we live in the now, and now is the time for art. Now is the time when we redefine and reframe the way we’re perceived by the world, designing a work that will give us another shot at notoriety. We fully believe it will propel us further, but how much further is not yet determined.

I have to focus on the art right now, though imagining a future in which this artist work already exists is such a beautiful distraction.
Now is the time for focus.
Now is the time to be attentive.
Now is the time for art – while completely disregarding the future possibilities.

We can’t create art for the future, this is a snapshot of the present.

The future will take care of itself.

The future happens anyway.

life with fear

In light of recent election results, I figured it’s time to talk about fear. I’ve spent a good portion of my life afraid of a lot of things. It’s through conversations with other people that I’ve come to this realization, and I’ve come to the realization that I was actually raised this way.

I’d wager a guess that a lot of us were.

I don’t blame my parents for this. They did their level best. We’re all doing our level best… but that doesn’t change the fact that I was raised in this environment. We were a low-income christian family who; on more than one occasion, were cut off at the knees by the church, and when struggling what any atheist might call ‘sour luck’ my folks were told they had sin in their lives that they needed to sort out.

Now, I don’t care if you’re a christian, but if you are you’d probably have a hard time arguing that christianity isn’t entirely based in fear… fear of Hell… fear of Satan… fear of being ‘left behind’… fear of sex… at this point, I’m not completely sure what the selling features of this ideology are, save for the fact that we are all spiritual beings looking for connection and a sense of belonging, and churches advertise their ability to provide these things on billboards.

Okay… back on track… my folks didn’t have much money, and what they did have they were very careful with – to a fault, really. So much so that most opportunities to invest were seen as high-risk. Even clearly good investments, like real estate provided a level of anxiety that I can’t seem to make sense of now as an adult.

This is the tip of the iceberg, but I won’t divulge much more because; again, I don’t blame my parents and I’m not interested in placing myself above them as though I am superior, because I’m not – However, the message that this lifestyle supplanted in my mind at a deep, subconscious level was one of similar fear.

I grew up to be an adult who was ultimately afraid of failure and afraid of success simultaneously. That might sound like a contradiction, but as far as my art goes, it kept me from pushing myself to do bigger and better things because I was:

afraid to compromise artistically because I might not be happy with the result
afraid to push my art further because that meant leaving my comfort zone
afraid to fail, because any failure I might have would probably be public
afraid to succeed, because if I found success doing something I didn’t love entirely, I’d be stuck doing it anyway
afraid to commit to any band for a long period of time, because I was constantly starting over at the bottom… where I was comfortable
afraid to be alone, because the value I put on myself was tied to other peoples’ opinion of me
afraid to be with people, because of how inferior I felt compared to them

… I could go on like this for days. I trapped myself in a cycle of mediocrity because it was within my comfort zone. Not that the music or the people I was making it with were mediocre, but that my effort to have people hear it was… and these things fizzle out when you don’t try very hard. That’s just how it works.

In the end, I’ve made a conscious decision to not be afraid. At the risk of summing it all up and making it sound simple and easy and quick – it is NOT – I’m not afraid of failure – it’s how I learn, and I’m not afraid of success – because any success is a gift, and it can leave me just as fast as it arrived. Maybe faster.

Really, I choose not to be afraid every day. It gets easier with the momentum of the previous day’s choice.

During the covid times, I stopped mainlining cable news, because it instills fear by constantly showing exceptional situations and telling you they’re normal, when the reason they are newsworthy is because they’re not the norm.

I’m not afraid of Donald Trump.
I wouldn’t have chosen him, but as it turns out, I wasn’t consulted on the matter. I won’t live in fear of the things I can’t control, and who becomes the president of a country I don’t live in is most certainly not something I can control.

What I can do is call out injustice when I see it. I can advocate for people less fortunate than myself. I can use my art to broadcast messages of love and growth. I can challenge the status quo when I see fit. I can support those who need it.

Fear lives in the future, and the future is uncertain.
I live in the present, where there is no fear, and there’s no uncertainty.
There’s just us… doing what we’re doing right now.
So we must act accordingly.

safety last

Obviously I’ll have to preface that title a bit. I’m not referring to physical safety, or emotional safety… I’m not advocating breathing in second-hand smoke or disregarding seatbelts. I’m talking about exiting the comfort zone.

The reason we even have a comfort zone in the first place is because at some point we pushed the boundary. We stepped outside – likely out of necessity, possibly out of peer pressure – and tried something new… we ate fries with (vegan) mayonnaise instead of ketchup for the first time at some point and we never looked back. Perhaps we bungee jumped off a bridge once, and have done it 49 more times since… we tried something new and it didn’t kill us.

All of our great accomplishments, be they University credentials or campfire stories, came from exceptional (to us) circumstances which is what makes them stories worth telling.

I’d go one further and say that the moments of my life in which that my sense of wonder and joy were at their peak, it was under some level of duress, stress, and discomfort – and it stretched me. These experiences for me included asking a pretty girl out, becoming a dad, buying a car, buying my house, playing my first live show, putting out my first album… some of these things I’ve only done once, and some I’ve done dozens of times.

So, the question becomes – what next?

What height will I aspire to reach that I have not yet reached? Or what milestone will I reach for with my next album that I have not yet reached?

I’ve got a few irons in the fire, personally – and all of the are exciting. he most obvious to me is the collection of songs that my band the Confusionaires are going to start cycling through in order to make a new album. We’ll certainly be trying some things we’ve never tried and pushing for some goals we’ve not yet attained.

I want to be able to look back on it with pride. I hope other people do, too… but it’s mostly for me at this stage.

My daughter is embarking on a potentially life-changing experience right away, and as proud as I am of her, the experience is hers. I can’t wait to hear all about it when she returns from the other side of the world.