I lived in a lot of cold places in my twenties. I wrote a song about them, and mentioned five different places in which I’d been cold. I changed the names of some of the places, but other than that, it’s all true. I wrote:
I could feel the wind
I could see my breath
In a log cabin I nearly froze to death
And it was cold.
Now technically, the log cabin was an addition to a a home built around the 1970s. It was a log cabin that the landlord had moved from Indiana, and we had been told that it was from the 1820s. The building standards certainly seemed of that era. There was no insulation, and there were cracks in the mortar, and holes in the wood where termites had built their colonies. So I literally could see my breath, and I literally could feel the wind.
I made a lot of sacrifices as an aspiring musician. I ruined my credit. I distanced myself from friends and family. I deferred again and again on my student loans, and left myself an enormous balance to pay off. I had no savings. I was at a credit counselor at one point and he was asking me questions about what I spent my money on. He had gone through the usual list, food, rent, clothes, socializing and he noticed that a quarter of my income was not accounted for. That’s when I listed the money I was spending on my music career.
I was paying something like $250 a month on a rehearsal space with the band. That might sound expensive, but that’s New York City. I had been trying to upgrade my live sound, which meant a new guitar. We played in Boston a lot, and we didn’t own a van. So we’d have to rent one, and we would have to pay tolls, and if there was a crowd there and we sold enough CD’s, we might go home with a couple of bucks each. Our management sent the band out with stylists to spend a lot of money on clothes, and up our game. Of course, we were buying our own clothes. We spent about $1,000 on an EP, and we paid another $1,000 to manufacture the CDs.
Of course, as I sat at the credit counselor’s office, I realized that my financial problems were the result of my being a musician, and I certainly wasn’t going to give up at the point. We had recorded our second CD, and this one was paid for by Velour Records. We had recently played at Irving Plaza in New York City, which is a sizable venue. We had management. We were closing on a booking agent. We had an audience. We had toured and played at South by Southwest. Velour was planning on putting us on the road. We had been told to buy a van. I felt like I was going all in, and that this was my chance.
A few months later I was in my apartment in Washington Heights, and I wrote “Cold.” It was maybe late September or early October. It was an old building with a boiler, and I think they waited until they knew it would be cold for a while to turn it on. I was shivering, and it brought the log cabin back to me, because my body had memories of shivering inside. And this led me to the attic room I lived in, where the window was broken. And the place in Inwood where the boiler broke. And the place in Bushwick which was a converted factory building. It was a huge loft and one side of it was nothing but windows. I spent $100 each month on the heating, and it was still cold!
I got choked up as I first started playing the song that I had just written, because that cascade of those moments left me with a feeling of having been left in the cold by people, and that feeling grew into a giant a feeling of having been neglected and forgotten. This was at a time when the music industry hadn’t come up with a way to manage music piracy. People were downloading the music that they wanted to, which was reducing the overall revenue in the industry, which had radically changed the business model for all record labels.
I don’t mind folks gettin’ somethin’ for free
That’s the way it should be
But that don’t mean
That it ain’t cold.
Only twenty years earlier, the music industry was printing money. The introduction of CD’s meant that people were not only buying new music, they were buying music that they had already purchased. I remember friends working after school, so they could afford to buy music. I certainly bought my fair share of music with the proceeds of my lawn-mowing money. Of course, you could steal music back then, but it was not the risk-free enterprise that it was in the aughts. At that point, you could download catalogues of music with no consequences. It was perceived as a victimless crime. I knew this because people told me as much.
Less than a year after I wrote “Cold” I found myself in a physical rehab facility having a discussion about musical piracy with my physical therapist. To her mind, downloading music for free was only hurting the record companies, who had been ripping artists off for years. She mainly listened to main-stream music. I explained that every artist that she listened to had been signed by a label hoping to make money selling their music. The less money that labels make, the fewer artists they sign, and the fewer risks they take with the ones that they do sign. As an artist hoping to be signed by such a label, it didn’t strike me as a victimless crime.
At that point I had been touring for about a year, and I had ended up in physical therapy in the first place because of the severe back pain I experienced as a result. Sitting in a van for hours a day, loading equipment in and out of venues had done a number on my back. We didn’t have roadies. My drummer at the time carried all his hardware in a bag the band called “the hernia bag,” because it was so insanely heavy. I remember one point where we were trying to get out of town, and every band member was running late, so I unloaded all the gear from our rehearsal space by myself. I could also remember carrying all my gear (an amp, two guitars and a toolbox full of accessories) for five blocks to the subway all so I could save money on a taxi. I had been my own mule, and one day the mule wouldn’t pull.
The last tour that I had been on before beginning physical therapy- a trip from New York to Wyoming and back- had been a grueling experience for me. I was in such pain at night that I couldn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time. The only relief from pain I experienced was when I was in a bath, which I took in my hotel room several times a night. Riding in a van was a miserable experience, and my suffering certainly didn’t make the ride much fun for the rest of the band either.
As you might have guessed, the problem hadn’t just surfaced. My back had been bothering me for months. As the pain grew worse in my back, it gradually went down my leg. At first I felt nerve pain in my thigh, but gradually it found it’s way down to my feet. Of course, I should have seen a doctor much sooner, but my health insurance was in Kentucky, and I lived in New York City. I couldn’t afford an individual policy, so I had remained on my parents’ insurance plan. The fact that I had health insurance at all was unusual among touring musicians. Many were happy to do without in order to save money.
I didn’t have the option of going without health insurance, because I had survived testicular cancer a few years earlier. I was getting a check up every six months to make sure that it didn’t come back, and I was told that this monitoring was necessary for the next five years. While it had been three years since my final surgery, the shadow of that scare still loomed large in my life. I had been twenty-seven years old, and cancer was not on my radar. While testicular cancer had a 90% survival rate, the 10% who didn’t make it typically didn’t address it early enough, and that sounded like something that would happen to me.
Cancer didn’t just threaten my life, it set my music career back by several years. At the time I was diagnosed, I had recently released my first CD Who are the Navigators?, which had gotten airplay on several stations in my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. I had also managed to go on morning shows, get reviews in the local press, and was playing decent shows in town. Only a few weeks earlier, I had gotten a call from an A & R guy from Atlantic Records. He made it very clear, that if I could sell a few thousand CD’s, I could get a deal. But when I got cancer all that came to a halt. I managed a trip to Austin for South by Southwest in between surgeries, but the second surgery to remove my lymph nodes was invasive, and it took me six weeks to recover.
I could write a whole book about that experience, but both my cancer and my back problems illustrate the precarious state that musicians find themselves in. I used to say that being a musician was like driving a car with no shock absorbers, because you felt every bump in the road. I was fortunate that my parents were able to take care of me, when I had cancer, and I was fortunate that I had health insurance to deal with my back. I knew a lot of musicians who would not have been so lucky.
After a few weeks of physical therapy things began looking up. For the first time in months, I was able to sleep through the night, and the prospect of getting in a van didn’t seem so bad. It had been a tumultuous year. While I was touring from Maine to California, there were a few times that it seemed like everything was going to fall apart. The first problem arose when our drummer quit. We were on the eve of touring, and our manager had asked that we buy a van in anticipation. We had a CD coming out in a few months, and the label was going to put tens of thousands of dollars into promoting it.
While we were able to get a new drummer- and a new guitarist to boot- we missed his backing vocals and personality. But the new additions were great musicians, and while we paid them per gig at first, they became full-fledged members shortly thereafter. However after a few months, it became clear that the new members weren’t happy with our bass player, and we ended up firing him. It had been a difficult decision for me, since I knew that I wouldn’t just be losing a musician, but a friend. Still, I was now a touring musician, and I was determined not to lose that.
Our new bass player was not only a great bass player, but a great singer, and had released a solo album. While the personnel shake-up had been challenging, it seemed like the band was starting to coalesce around a very capable unit. I was the only holdover from the band that signed with Velour, and we wanted to record another album, but Velour had spent all the money they were willing to spend on our last album. So the only way to move forward was to record it ourselves.
Throughout the year, I had been working for a company called Vindigo. I answered customer emails, and I was able to do this work on the road. While on tour, I would get up each morning while the rest of the band was asleep and work until it was time to get into the van. There is simply no way I could have afforded to do otherwise. I had been subletting my apartment out while I would go out on tour, to save money, because the rent in New York was for more than a musician in the beginning of his touring experience could afford.
Also during the year, I began dating my girlfriend, Jesse. We had reached a point where I was moving into her place, and I no longer needed to worry about paying rent. She had a well-paying corporate job. On top of that, I had gotten a $1,500 bonus from my job, so I concluded that I could pay for the album.
We had a tour coming up, and I reasoned that after a couple of weeks of gigs, we would be pretty tight, and we could go into the studio and record the album as live as possible. The last album, Glory, Glory, was recorded as most albums are these days: one piece at a time. Studios are expensive, and recording instruments one at a time takes much longer. I felt that after months on the road, we had honed the songs to where they sounded fully-formed in live performances. This was something that had been difficult to achieve with the previous line-up, since we were a trio. My plan was to record the band at Dangerous Music, over a weekend, and then any overdubs that we might need could be done at our bassist’s project studio.
In addition to “Cold” I had written dozens of songs that were inspired by my relationship with Jesse, and a lot of protest songs about the war in Iraq. This was the album that would become Love and War, Vol. 1. I was approaching this album differently from previous albums. In the past, every album I had recorded was made up of about fifty percent of the best songs I had written, but hadn’t recorded, with another fifty percent made up of recent songs. This time around, I wanted to gather all the songs that I had written over the past year and put them together in a double album. One album would have the heavier rock songs, and the other would be more folky.
The band was concerned that we might be leaving some great songs that had not been released on the table, and so they agreed to my plan on the condition that we record four additional songs. So we spent a weekend after a tour to record about thirty songs. We would later overdub additional instruments. When we left the studio that Sunday there was a real sense of accomplishment. I really felt that despite the twists and turns of the past year, that the future looked bright. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The first blow to my plans came when I was fired from my job at Vindigo. When I first started working there, I was also working for FEMA. I should mention that I began working for FEMA after 9/11, and my time there was focused entirely on dealing with the aftermath of 9/11 in New York. I wrote a daily report that calculated the death toll and the tonnage of debris being moved out of ground zero, as well as the tally of money distributed by various agencies. Prior to working for FEMA, I had not found much work. I had occasionally resorted to busking to make money for a meal, so I jumped at the opportunity to work for FEMA, even though it meant that I was working about sixty hours a week for the first few months. But as the recovery efforts wore on, the work really got to me. The casualty numbers were what everyone wanted from me, but the numbers fluctuated all the time, and I found myself trying to explain to people that the lack of bodies meant that not everyone was declared dead at the same time.
Vindigo looked like the perfect job. It was about 30 hours a week, so I would have plenty of time for my music. It was much lower stress, so I could leave work every day and put it behind me. My job would be to offer customer support via email, which meant that my workload was entirely tied to the number of emails sent in at any given time. My one concern before I agreed to work at Vindigo was that I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to pay rent, if there weren’t a lot of emails that week. The woman who hired me told me that they would pay me for my time regardless of how much work there was.
Fast forward several years, and I was still working at Vindigo. I had gone through about four managers at that point. The company had been sold, which is how I got the bonus to record the album. I was now working alongside other customer support personnel who were being paid half of what I was. Ultimately, they decided that I was claiming more hours than I was working. In the end, they decided that I should only be paid for the time that I was working, which wasn’t the story that they had told me when they hired me. But since nothing was in writing, there wasn’t anything that I could do about it.
I would be alright personally. I was living with my girlfriend, and I was able to collect four hundred dollars a week of unemployment, but I was unable to put any money into the album, and it was unfinished. At best, the album was about 50% finished. Unfinished albums have no value.
The second blow was when our booking agent informed me that they were dropping us. While they liked us as a band, they had apparently been pushing Velour to record another album for us to promote, and Velour had told them that they didn’t have any more money for another album. With a new album, our booking agent could submit us for festivals again, and that’s where the big money is. They weren’t interested in sending us around in small clubs until we cobbled the money together to finance our own album.
What I didn’t realize at that moment, but what seems clear in hindsight, was that I was on the downward slope of my music career. It wasn’t exactly a straight line down, but the heights were behind me. We had played Bowery Ballroom and Irving Plaza- each a thousand plus venue- and now we were relegated to playing Mercury Lounge- which had a capacity in the hundreds. Even that show was one of our last “big” shows in New York. Owing to a transit strike, we had a dismal turnout, and despite having the biggest draw of the night, we were never invited back.
I did my best by myself to shepherd the album into existence. I had planned on putting an EP of six songs out, which would be half of the rock songs and half folk songs. “Cold” was one of the first six to be readied for this release. Getting those six songs mixed used up any money that I had, though. There would be no album, unless something happened. In the mean-time, the band was dissolving. The van, which was the only jointly held property that had any value at that point, needed to be sold. It was an expense that we could not afford.
There was one last tour out to Wyoming. We were going to be headlining a festival in Kemmerer. Getting gigs from New York to Wyoming was no easy task. I had booked all the dates myself. Neither our bassist nor out guitarist felt like it was worth it, so I hired a bass-player and rented a minivan and we headed out to our first gig in West Virginia. I had passed on a couple of gigs because one or more of the band members had a better offer, so I had reached the point where I would take who I could get and fill in the gaps. The tour looked like it was going to be profitable, but then a drunk driver hit our van in Denver, and I had not insured the rental, so I ended up losing close to a thousand dollars on the tour, which is why it was the last tour.
At this point I was still unemployed, so I began to look for some work. I managed to find three of them. I taught SAT Prep with the Princeton Review, I played guitar for an early childhood program, and I was a production manager for a lighting company. I was physically and emotionally exhausted. I booked shows in town, but the audiences were dwindling, and I didn’t know how to get them back.
There were a few rays of hope. For a few months I found myself working in a studio called NuMedia, with a grammy winning producer, Bassy Bob Brockman. The band reunited to record songs in the studio. It looked like we might be able to record an album. The single biggest reason we had never released Love and War, Vol. 1, was because I had no money to pay a mixing engineer. Here we were partnering with a studio, so we just needed to supply the performance. It seemed very promising. We had some of the best sounding recordings I’ve ever made.
What I didn’t realize is that the studio was every bit as desperate as I was. Despite a wall lined with gold records, they couldn’t afford to pay the rent in SoHo. They were trying anything, which is why they were giving us so much of their time. I remember walking by a Tower Records on my way to the studio. Over the next few weeks the prices would be reduced by 10%, until everything was 90% off. Tower Records was shutting down, and it really drove home how the entire industry was reeling.
Bob Brockman had worked with the Fugees, and had a Grammy for mixing Christine Aguilera. He had divorced his wife at the height of his career, and had settled by giving her about a million dollars. Here he was five years later and he was squatting in an apartment and trying to sell weed to make ends meet.
I remember on one of my walks to the studio past Tower Records, I was on the phone with Yaron Fuchs, one of the producers at NuMedia. He was very excited about the song “Why” and he had played it for folks in the industry. The hope was that I could write another ten songs like it, which seemed unlikely to me. I had eclectic tastes, and my writing reflected that. I had been writing a book to complement the songs I had written for Love and War. There were three threads in the book, and one of them was an autobiographical thread. I had shared the book with Yaron, and he called me back saying that I shouldn’t let anyone in the industry know that I was 32. The studio shut down about a month later.
Trying to figure out what happened when is challenging in retrospect, because this was such a painful point in my life. The band gradually lost interest in me and my songs. The audience disappeared. I reached a point where I had booked a solo show, and the only person who showed up was my friend, Liz. My back injury flared up, and I was in terrible pain all over again. This time from trying to move lighting fixtures at the lighting company. Every part of me hurt, and while my girlfriend miraculously stood by me through all of that, I couldn’t understand why.
I had picked up another job working for another SAT prep company when I got the news from my old manager that the television show The Unit, wanted to use one of the recordings from Glory,Glory. The song was called “I Can’t Breathe,” and someone on the set had the CD and they played it in the background for a scene with the idea that it would be replaced later by the music supervisor. They ended up deciding to keep the song in the episode. While I felt all my songs were good, this song was not on anyone’s radar to make money. That random event suddenly breathed new life into my career. The money from the sale of that one song allowed me to begin investing thousands of dollars on my own studio. I began to foresee a future as a composer for film and television.
I only spent half the money on my studio, though. I spent the other half on buying a ring for Jesse. We had been together through the thick and thin, and this seemed like my chance to get married. Ten years earlier I would have thrown all the money back into my music career, but I was beginning to hedge my bets. That was in the late fall. The following Spring, I was asked to write a song for an independent film called Dream Riders. It was the last money that I would see from a film or television placement.
The following Labor Day weekend my wife and I were married. While I had invited several former bandmates, none of them came. It was 2008, and about a month later the housing bubble burst. I don’t know if there was any connection, but it seems like all my prospects in film and television seemed to dry up. Jesse had gotten pregnant, and as we planned our future together, it didn’t seem like there was any room for a music career. When my daughter, Penelope, was born, we moved from New York City to Louisville, Kentucky to be near my parents. Leaving New York felt like I was saying goodbye to any hope of a music career.
Despite having no path to musical success, I had a home studio, and I continued to write and record my music. It was my hobby. I dabbled from time to time in trying to put a band together, but momentum never built towards anything. I became a teacher. I taught music at first, and then I got my masters and began teaching in a classroom. I taught social studies mainly. I wanted music to be something I did for my own enjoyment, and not a responsibility.
I spent many a sleepless night replaying my music career in my head. Unfortunately, I could never point to one explanation for my failure. There were lots of little things, and I beat myself up over each one. I felt as if I was living in the shadow of a missed opportunity, and it was all my fault. I knew no one would shed tears over my failure but me, and it was a lot to live with. I often failed to see the life in front of me, because I was thinking about what could have been.
My old bassist, Cuzin D, had shifted into production, and was making decent money composing and producing electronica. My old guitarist, Naren Rauch, had similarly pivoted to composing for film and television, and was able to support his family. Probably the biggest success story was our drummer, Brian Griffin. He played with the likes of Brandi Carlisle, Lana Del Rey, and the Black Crowes and performed at the Grammys. While I was proud of his success, I felt left out in the cold.
I had suspected as my career headed downward that there wasn’t much of a back-up plan in the music industry. A good drummer, like Brian, can find another band. A composer like Naren could simply make the music that a music supervisor wanted to hear, but I was not the type of songwriter that could write on assignment. In fact, when people ask me how to write a song, I often answer truthfully, that I don’t know.
That’s a slight exaggeration. I do understand the process, but every song that I’ve written has written itself. I have tried to write on command, but nothing good ever comes from it. When the song is ready, it comes out. It has to live with me, and it is only ever born when it’s ready. I wrote a chorus in high school:
sooner or later everyone’s gonna hurt you in the end
The chorus stayed with me for fifteen years, until the verses were written in about fifteen minutes.
Still the hope lives. One day I noticed that my album Love and War, had been streamed tens of thousands of times. I had sold two copies of the CD when it came out. I had no band at that point, so no way of promoting it. It didn’t make much sense. But I began to think that maybe I should start putting the recordings I had been making back out. I started to release material that we had put out on CD, but had never posted for streaming. I still can’t tell you how many streams I’ve had. Hundreds of thousands I imagine. I don’t have access to the raw numbers for anything but Spotify and Apple Music, and anything put out by Velour is a mystery. I asked my old manager, Sean Hoess, for the numbers, but Velour was no longer a record company.
In the music business, hundreds of thousands of streams is not a lot. It amounts to hundreds of dollars. Albums costs thousands of dollars to make. Unless you are a superstar, touring is the only way to make a living in the business, and I knew that I didn’t want to go back out on the road. Still I found the idea that my music had reached so many people to breathe new life into a dream. I began to put music out, and my first effort To Be Free, was a collection of the first songs I ever wrote beginning shortly after I turned 14, and running through the summer after my freshman year in high school. That was volume 1. Start at the beginning, right?
I followed that series up with Volume 7: Victims of the Moon- a collection of folks songs I had written around my freshman year in college. I released some previously unreleased Navigators songs, with an EP that hadn’t ever been available for streaming- Meet the Navigators… again.. I released the first album I had ever released with my band Satori re-mastered with some tweaks to the original. And then I came to a bunch of songs that had never been released by the version of The Navigators that I recorded Love and War with. I spent some time trying to get these songs right.
This effort had begun shortly before the pandemic, and then on Valentine’s day 2023, my father died. I had spent the previous three years intimately involved with my parent’s affairs. My father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s just before the pandemic. The social isolation really put a strain on both my parents. I was the one person who would regularly come over at first. They needed a lot of help. By Thanksgiving of 2020, my father had ended up in the hospital, and my mother said that she couldn’t take care of him. He was an insulin-dependent diabetic, and had never switched to an insulin pump, which meant that he needed four shots a day.
While he was capable of giving himself a shot, he needed someone else to facilitate the blood test, and get the right amount of insulin in the syringe. I was overseeing this process, and I was managing a range of care-givers. All this on top of a full time job as a teacher, and managing a family too. This went on for about a year and half until my parents were in a nursing home. By this time my mother had been diagnosed with dementia herself. In the home, she rapidly deteriorated mentally as my father seemed to lose interest in life. He ultimately died of Covid.
After the funeral arrangements, I got my childhood home ready to sell. I had contemplated moving into it with my family, but I had concluded that selling a house was about all I could handle. Moving my family was not in the cards. But shortly after I had sold the house I had my first summer off in four years. I went up to New York and reconnected with my old bass player, D. He was still a bit of a hoodlum, and vaguely Christian as well as pro-Trump, but very much the same in spirit.
I caught up with Yaron at his studio in Westchester. I played him what I had been working on, and while he was supportive, he was not impressed. He had nothing but nice things to say about my songwriting, but he thought that I needed to spend the big bucks to make a great album. I reconnected with my friend Andrew McKenna Lee who had produced my first album nearly thirty years ago. He had helped with the re-rerelease, and he had mixed some of the Navigators songs that I was hoping to release. Since the sale of my parent’s house my siblings and I had agreed that my mother had enough money to tide her over. We split the money, and I realized that I had money to pay Andrew to mix the songs to where they needed to be.
As I began putting the packaging together, I thought about calling the album “The Cold,” but in the end it became Standing on a Rock. It fit with the best image I had from that era, and it seemed to have more hope in it. Yes, the cold was a place I’d found myself in from time to time, but I think the ray of hope is where I want to be. Even if it’s crazy and makes no sense, I’d rather follow the dream then dwell in the cold.
I’d reached a turning point in my life, where instead of wallowing in regret, I had become very grateful. Jesse had been there beside me through some very dark times, and we had built a family together- like music, something I’d always wanted. I had had a front row seat for my children’s growth. I could not regret being there for any of that. And I realized that I wouldn’t have been there for much of that if my music career had taken off. I would have been away from home for weeks at a time. I would have missed out on even more, than I missed out on. Instead of looking at my past with regret, I began to see my present with gratitude.
I am putting out my best album sixteen years after I started it. It’s not the best, because it has the best songs, but it does have great songs. Brian, Naren and D aren’t the best musicians I ever played with, but they are great musicians. Andrew isn’t the best mixing engineer that I’ve worked with, but he’s a great engineer. I’m not saying that there were better ones, I’m saying that I don’t think there are “bests”. And yet, I say that this is my best album because it meets my highest standard, and I wouldn’t change a note. I have something that I have no regrets about.
I think people should listen to it, of course, but I have divorced myself from the responsibility of how it is received. Whether a few people hear it, or a lot of people hear it is beyond my control. I sure hope that a lot of people hear it, because I have dozens of albums already written. I have dozens of people I want to make music with, and I wouldn’t mind going out every now and then and playing shows. My kids seem to like my music, and they seem to be as proud of me, as I am of them. And I can keep doing this until the day I die. And when I do, they’ll have something of me that they can listen to- something that their grand-kids can listen to. A good song has no expiration date. A good song is timeless.