The saga all begins with this song, or just the opening riff of the song. I was in New York City, gearing up to move to Louisville. My daughter was a little over a month old at this point. My wife and I had spent the past week putting all our belongings into boxes. Needless to say, this was a stressful time in my life. As I was running around trying to shut the door on an era of my life, I kept hearing that riff in my head over and over. It was blaring on like the soundtrack to something.
At another time, I would have taken this as a sign that a song wanted to be written, but I certainly didn’t have the time, and why write music anyway? I had gone down that road, and I had come up empty. That’s why I was leaving. My wife had a pretty good job, but I had no purpose in New York. We liked the idea of raising our daughter near family, and my parents were more than happy to welcome us back to Louisville.
I had no illusions about what Louisville would hold in store for me. I had left for New York in the first place because there was no audience for me there. I wasn’t going to pursue music; I was going to raise a family. It was an emotional time for me, as I began the process of transferring my hopes for myself to my daughter. It was all so bittersweet. It was nice to have a purpose again. For the last few years in New York, I had felt like I was in an isolation booth, and my voice disappeared as soon as it left me, and nothing came back. It felt nice to have a purpose, but I didn’t know who I was or would be.
The music of this song was my soundtrack for the next few months. It oscillated from a distant rising in my ears to a dull roar. We moved into a rental house for several months. I began giving music lessons. I would tinker in my studio. I put together a folk band called The Fellow Travelers. We only played two shows together. I was trying to find a place where I fit in, but I wasn’t writing anything. I had all this stuff that I had already written that had nowhere to go, and with a baby in my life, it seemed frivolous, but still the music played.
That time was a blur. I know that I began writing music, but I couldn’t tell you when. I don’t think that it began with this song either. I think the riff rattled around in my head, and the song slowly came to resemble a Mad Libs. It was like I really had to experience the song in order to write it.
Once upon a time
I had a lot of time
Then the clock started ticking
I didn’t know it
I was standing on a stage
trapped inside a cage
When the curtain came down
And I had nothing to show for it.
That sure sounds like the opening to the new chapter in my life, so whether I wrote it all at once or not, the song is definitely the spiritual beginning to my journey.
Being a parent, trying to make a living- these are all challenges that many of us face, but I really had nothing to show for the years that I spent trying to be a songwriter. When I moved back to Louisville, I had friends who had already launched families and who were already established in their careers. I didn’t even know what I was going to do to support my family.
My daughter was colicky, which could be made worse in the afternoon when my wife would head off to work. She would cry for an hour or two, and there was nothing I could do about it. In her calmer states, I would watch her crawl around while I watched (or listened to) the news, which seemed to have a similar effect on me as a colicky baby.
At no point in the writing of these songs did I think to myself, “Hey, this could be a great album.” I thought that I was finished creatively, and these were just the last gasps of a dying spirit. I did not appreciate what I was writing, or that any of it had value. I demoed the songs out of habit, and I began to think of my music as my hobby. I wasn’t trying to “say” anything or trying to reach anyone. I was tinkering with my ships in bottles. I was building model airplanes. I was whittling.
This went on for many years. I wasn’t only working on the material I had just written, but everything that I had written. I had no plan to release any of the music that I was creating. I was just aimlessly creating. Over the years, I began to accumulate the beginnings of many albums (including this one). I had probably developed more than a dozen albums.
At the same time, I was working at CB Sounds in Goshen, producing music with Colin Brown. This was the same studio where I had recorded Lost and Found. I produced several albums with Colin, and occasionally, I would record drums there. I recorded drums for an entire album’s worth of songs that I had written when I was in college. It never occurred to me that the songs I had just written would be worth polishing. And yet…
I continued to listen to “Shit Piles Up” and little by little a video emerged in my mind. That was followed by a story, which ended up becoming a screenplay for a pilot. I shared this pilot with Andrew Dailinger and Kathy Reynolds, and we decided to shoot it in 2021. I believed we might be able to interest someone in picking up the series. So we made a rough edit and shared it with whoever we could, but we really didn’t know that many people, and unlike other aspiring show-runners, we were far removed from the people who make such decisions.
The backup plan was to use the pilot to promote an album, which I needed to finish up. I had been sitting on the album that would become The Dark Ages for many years at this point. A lot had changed since I had begun writing the songs that would become this album. I had written even more songs. I had put together a band, and I was releasing music again. Glen Howerton had asked about when we might do some recording, and I began recording the Navigators as quickly as I could on this album.
I recorded Glen, Tim Halcomb and Woody Woodmansee from the Navigators, and had Kimmet Cantwell sing backing vocals. They all added so much.
So while “Shit Piles Up” isn’t the type of song that gets airplay, I selected it as the single. It’s the song that launched the writing of the album, and the song that gave me the impetus to release the album. Sixteen years ago, I heard the opening riff on my head, and after so much shit, you can too.