Dear B

This is a piece I’ve been thinking about for a while. I suppose there are several real reasons why I’m sitting down to put it together now, but there are two things, in particular, which are standing prominently in the front of my mind right now.

I’ll get to the second – and probably more significant – thing a little later. I wanted to begin this by letting you know that, as I write this, I’m a little more than a week away from the release of my first record on a real record label. I have no idea what will happen after next week; nothing of consequence, in all likelihood. Nonetheless, to deny or downplay what a big moment this is for me would be a massive fraud.

I’m 36 right now, and the fact that I had to work up the nerve to record that number in this piece should tell you everything you need to know about how comfortable I am with that fact. You’re seven years old and, even by now, you and I have been talking about music for years. It’s something that has come naturally to you since before you could speak in complete sentences, so you’ve heard bits and variations of the following story before.

As you know, I began playing the guitar when I was 12 years-old. It was something that had interested me for years but up until that point my life revolved almost entirely around basketball. I was a tall kid with a pretty decent, though not exceptional, amount of athleticism and physical coordination. I was also living in Illinois during the heyday of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and the great Chicago Bulls teams. Throughout elementary school I’d gotten into the music of hip hop artists like 2Pac, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dog as well as rock bands such as Nirvana and The Red Hot Chili Peppers, but I was a basketball player first and foremost.

However, I was also a writer. Your Grandma Angie got me started on my first journal when I was around your age. I wasn’t crazy about reading but I did enough of it to provide more than enough fuel for my unusually active imagination. I mention this because I honestly feel this was the key ingredient in the combination of factors and events that led to my obsession with music. By the time I reached middle school, I was already trying my hand at short stories and poems. Hardly any of it was any good but the point is the seeds of creativity and artistic expression had been planted and sprouted deep roots in my psyche long before I ever picked up a guitar. Without that, I think it’s very likely the guitar would have ended up being a teenage hobby and little else to me.

The reason I’m writing this, of course, is because the guitar became infinitely more than a hobby for me, and it didn’t take long. I began by taking weekly lessons at a local music store. That also didn’t last long. Though I was too young to recognize all of this at the time, my teacher was a middle-aged guitar player who had apparently played the local scene for years. However, this was in Rockford, Illinois, so the “local scene” consisted of nothing more than rural or suburban dives and sports bars and maybe a few summer festivals and county fairs. This guy lived his life well outside the bright lights of the big time and it showed in his hunched shoulders and his desperate attempts to color his bleak outlook on existence with bits of weak humor.

Needless to say, his instruction and teaching methods left me less than enthralled. I don’t think I stayed in lessons for more than a couple months and all I got out of it were a few tab sheets and scales.

Thing is, that was all I needed.

It would be a few solid years before I reached even the lowest level of competence on the guitar. As you are learning now, it’s a very hard instrument to play, most especially in the beginning. Most people who start playing the guitar don’t make it through those first few months. I was one of the few who kept practicing and practicing despite how unnatural it felt and how awful I sounded.

I was dragged through those first few tough years on the guitar by a passion for music that was growing at an out-of-control pace. I couldn’t find enough new music and I couldn’t consume enough history and information behind all of these endlessly fascinating stories, characters, and moments in a world that seemed to be too good to be true and made just for me. Playing the guitar almost wasn’t a choice that was up to me; it was simply a natural part of this ongoing metamorphosis. It didn’t matter at all that I wasn’t any good yet. I was part of this world now and the guitar was my companion and guide. It was never going to leave my hands.

This is when I started to accumulate all the stories I’ve begun to tell you about over the past few years. As you surely know, I will continue to tell you as many of these stories as I can recall and, at some point, it’ll probably be whether you like it or not. What I’m hoping, though, is that this letter will be the first in an ongoing series of pieces in which I’ll tell you my full versions of everything I remember and everything I have loved most about my life in music.

Once again, I must be honest: Of course I’m doing this for me. I love music and I love to write about it and this gives me an ideal excuse to recycle everything I’ve ever tried to write about in music.

While I can’t deny that, the truth is also that I feel compelled to do this because I need you to know how and why you are responsible for getting me to the point I am at right now.

In order to do this, I have to get some bad news out of the way first. To see how much you’ve loved music from such a young age has brought me so much joy and excitement, I could never adequately explain all that it means to me. At the same time, I can’t deny the omnipresence of this very small but impossible-to-ignore sense of sadness and dread that I feel when I see how much you love music. I feel this because I’m your father and, while I certainly can’t predict what your journey will look like or exactly where it will go, I have a general sense of a lot of the things that are waiting for you if you continue down this path.

One of the first and most important things you will learn is that no artist – certainly no musical artist – achieves any sort of competence nor do they produce anything that approaches greatness unless they have dealt with some sort of pain and tragedy. One worry I have is that you will be seduced – as nearly all young artists are – by the allure of excess, destruction, and dysfunction. One of the first and most important lessons I will teach you is that you will never have to go searching for these things.

There is a quote from Buddy Guy, one of the most legendary and influential blues guitarists in history: “The blues ain’t about black and white. It’s about the good times and the bad times. If you ain’t had a bad time in life, just keep living.”

Life will provide you with plenty of bad times all on its own. I can’t stop that and you never have to encourage it. Just keep living and keep trying to be better.

I also can’t do anything about the fact that the odds are always going to be against you as a musician. I won’t be able to stop the feelings of insecurity and heartbreak you’ll feel when you have to play to an empty bar or when some music critic or blogger tells you that your work sucks. I can’t stem the anger and confusion of watching less-talented musicians enjoy breaks and success that you can’t find. If you want to be a musician, you’re signing up for a losing proposition. You’re volunteering for anguish. Life in music is not a meritocracy; it’s a casino. Your art and your performance – and, by extension, your deepest emotions, fears, and memories – are the only currency accepted.

If you’re the true artist I think you are, then reading this will do a whole lot of nothing to stop you. If you’re my daughter – you definitely are – then reading all of this is actually going to make you more curious and eager to be a musician. I can’t teach you about these harsh realities myself. You won’t understand any of this until you go through all of it on your own. Each time you learn one of these things, it will break your heart.

This is the bad news. I’m not writing this because of the bad news, just needed to get that out of the way ‘cause I’m your dad.

The good news is that it’s worth it. Everything.

I’m writing this as a nobody musician who has never had anything even resembling success in my music career (not even sure I can call it a “career”). I started playing in bands when I was 21. My journey over the subsequent 15 years has been nothing if not confusing and confounding. By now, as a married father who is pushing 40, I suppose it would be easy for bitterness to begin to color my view on my life in music. Believe me, I’ve been tempted by bitterness.

Now that I’ve arrived at this point, I wonder if there might be only one thing that has kept me from becoming another drop in the infinite stream of broken, bitter artists. It may be true that the only thing that has kept my love for music as fresh and exciting as ever is you.

As I said earlier, you are the one responsible for getting me to this point. To understand why that is, you have to understand the person I was before I became your dad. I won’t go into everything, but I suppose the quickest way to say it is that I really wasn’t doing well. I’d had a few unlucky breaks with my family life as a kid and my health as a young adult, but I was also responsible for doing plenty of things that made my life harder than it needed to be. By the time I graduated college, I was a person who hated myself. I took that hatred out on the entire world around me and I allowed that hatred to keep me from making any progress anywhere, but especially as a musician.

I had lived so long in that mentality that I was resigned to feeling that way and living in that manner forever. But then you came along.

Before, the only reflection I ever saw was the person looking back at me in the mirror. I hated that person for years and it would have been easy to continue hating him. You changed all of that. You were my reflection and you were perfect. You were a part of me and I could not do anything but adore you.

It was really only one change in the grand scheme but that one change altered everything about me. For the first time I ever, I had no choice but to acknowledge that there might be some good to me. Before you arrived, that was a laughable notion to me. So if I could accept that, what else had I been missing out on? What if – for example – I actually had some worth and talent as a musician? What might THAT mean? Does that mean that I can do things aside from just playing the guitar? Could I sing? Could I play bass? Could I program drum beats? Could I produce my own music?

At an age when I should’ve been slowing down and settling in, I felt completely rejuvenated. By making that one change, you had granted me an entirely new lease on my life as a musician. Before I became a dad, I’d only ever played guitar in bands. After you were born, I started my own group as both guitarist and lead vocalist. Before I became a dad, I never could have had the confidence to try and produce my own music. I always assumed I needed the knowledge and abilities of others. As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, right now I’m about a week away from the release of my first EP on a record label. This EP will feature four songs that were written, performed, and produced by no one but me.

Earlier, I mentioned that there were two main reasons why I’m writing this piece right now. Now that I’ve thoroughly explained the first reason, I’ll tell you that the second reason is something that happened just a couple weeks ago. It was 4th of July a couple Saturdays ago and we spent the day out on our driveway hanging out with our neighbors. As I typically do during these kinds of summer days, after a while I went to the garage to fire up my amp and plug in my electric guitars.

As soon as you saw me doing this, you ran inside and grabbed your electric guitar. You’ve only been playing for a few months and you’re still learning your first few songs, but you couldn’t miss the chance to play through my amp. What you didn’t (and couldn’t) know was that I hadn’t plugged in my guitars in weeks and I was really excited to play out in the garage, so it kind of annoyed me when you came and took over my gear. Also, I hadn’t given you the proper instruction on how to use my amp and electronic gear, so you started pushing buttons and unplugging things like the 7 year-old you are, and I snapped at you. You ran back into the house with your guitar and I knew right away that I’d fucked up.

I’m proud to say that I haven’t had many moments like this as a father, and maybe that’s why the guilt struck me so hard and so fast. I played my guitar for the neighbors for a few minutes but I felt like complete shit. I wasn’t enjoying myself at all.

You came back outside and I apologized to you. You seemed to accept my apology, but I still felt awful. I think that was the first time I ever considered what it might feel like if I ever turned you off from the guitar or from music in general. It was also the first time in years that I could remember what it was like to truly hate myself.

I needed to apologize to you because I would never be able to live with myself if I did anything to turn you off from music. Regardless of what did or didn’t happen over the past 15 years, now that I’m here, music is the greatest thing that I can pass on to you. That is why everything has been worth it.

If you continue in this music life, it will take you places and provide experiences that are beyond compare. These experiences could happen on a Saturday night in one of the world’s great stadiums or arenas or they could happen on a random Tuesday at some shithole dive bar that you never heard of until you had to meet someone there for drinks. This life will provide you with memories and friends that you won’t trade for anything in the world. You’ll wear cooler clothes and have better stories than anyone else at the family cookout. You’ll meet painters and actors and comedians and chefs and countless other creative folks who will expand your horizons.

And through it all, you’ll never lose the thrill of music. It will bring you comfort and respite in the bad times and it will make the good times into great times. You will have access to magic that makes you young forever and transports you to far off places whenever you wish.

This is what I’m passing on to you and this is why it is all worth it. I would go through all the heartache and anger and confusion and everything else a thousand times over if it gets me where I am today. I hope this new record takes off and that I achieve enough success with it to start making music for a living. In all likelihood, though, not much of anything is going to come of it. The truth is that neither outcome will make much of a difference to me. I didn’t make this record because I thought it would make me rich and famous. I made it because you helped me finally realize that I could.

My love for music was all mine for most of my life, but it survived and kept growing because of you. That is why I need to pass it on to you. Again, whether you like it or not, we’re in this together now. That’s where my new story begins, so I hope it’s OK if I keep writing as many of these stories as I can think of.