On Beginnings & Endings
Writing (& Releasing) “Somewhere Else”
I’ve begun to lose the sense of what an ending actually is. When you spend so much time lost in not knowing where to begin, it can begin to feel like its own state of being, over and over again, never knowing which is the way forward until you’re already halfway down the road. I’m pretty sure it’s just a good old fear of dying that keeps me from recognizing the interwoven endings in something that I’m “waiting” to start because ending something feels final – or so we’ve been taught – and nothing, except death, ever really is.
So that’s how I eventually settled on beginning this essay because, in a way, it’s what the song’s about, but also because I promised myself I’d find something more worthwhile to say other than “hey, my song comes out on Friday and I’d like it if you give it a listen.”
I guess ruminations on death are somehow better than flagrant self-promotion.
This is a beginning and an end in more ways than I can innumerate. I wrote this song four years ago, recorded it two years ago, filmed that video one year ago, and will finally release it this week – restarting my process of releasing music after starting and stopping four months ago when the old world came to its own abrupt end.
And the song itself is about changes, about running away, about ending something, starting something else, but taking that old thing with you anyway. Even the damn recording process had its own stops and starts: it was one of the first songs we learned as a band and yet our original recording was scrapped and redone entirely.
I guess what I’m saying is I’m ready to finally put this song and the rest of this album out, to end that period of my life that I only now realize is only the beginning.
While I’ve got two more singles after this one, and then the full album after that, “Somewhere Else” is the title track, and it’s the song I’m most proud of. Its evolution tracked and matched mine as a person and an artist: it started similar to how you hear it above, solo on a guitar, but an acoustic guitar with a folksier vibe, a traveling song with a train beat and brushes, that old, well-worn style of life on the road, of traveling somewhere dusty and forlorn and far from home if you even know what that is anymore.
Except, here’s the thing: I was living 15 miles from where I grew up, and I am not a fucking bard.
I was trying on hats – literally and figuratively – trying to find one that fit me, and none of them did because I wore them all with a fear of looking foolish. The earliest recorded version of this song is a video[1] of baby-faced me wearing a literal hat that I almost never wore again because it seemed like such a costume sitting there on my head. When I left New York, I brought it with me and hung it on my wall until one day, almost four years later, I realized it looked sweet if I flipped the brim down and stopped worrying about being something I wasn’t.
Maybe it was New York or maybe it was just innocence, but when I got to LA, I realized I was a kid from New York who liked wearing hats. So, this song that started off as a folk tune that I sung in some vaguely country tone that was decidedly not my own turned into something different as I drifted into a new beginning.
It was a Tuesday night about two-three months into my time in LA. I’d recently became friends with a guitarist I met at the Hotel Café who’d taken me under his wing a bit, teaching me to believe that my music was meant to be taken seriously. His name is Zach and you can see/hear him in all the videos and songs I’ve released.
Now, Zach’s an old school cat in that he takes his blues jams very seriously, late-night dive-bar affairs with dudes set up in the corner playing loud until as late as everyone can stay awake, which is later than pretty much anything in LA stays open. On this one Tuesday, the usual crew couldn’t show up, so Zach, not wishing to go even a week without his clubhouse meeting, scrambled and gathered a hodgepodge of some of the best musicians I’ve ever seen. Plus me.
These were dudes who toured with several of my favorite bands/artists, and, as someone new to LA, this was not yet blasé. These guys so thoroughly out credentialed and outclassed me that I was too terrified to even pick up a guitar, but when I was finally convinced, I got up there with Zach, and, to my surprise, this drummer hopped up behind me.
He was new in town too. We’d never met. He knew nothing of my music. But we started to play “Somewhere Else,” and, having no idea that I’d imagined some train beat bard’s tale bullshit, he heard the drive, the push, the edgy restlessness in the song and he hit it way fucking harder than I’d ever imagined, and it made me realize that what I needed to play was rock & roll.
His name was Matt, and you can also see/hear him in all of the videos and songs I’ve released.
And that night made me realize who I was as an artist: it was the beginning of me going back to where I came from, ending who I had been in order to be who I always was.
When all was said and done I found a rock song with a story, one very similar to my favorite song of all time[2]. What started off folksy and slow turned hard and fast, and then, when that wasn’t working, became a balance of the two – beginning with a solo guitar, then joined by a piano, a harmonic guitar lead. Then, as the song builds, a bass, a drum beat, an organ, a chorus of voices. What starts as sad and melancholic turns into a big fucking party, a celebration of racing away, because what I was finding was what I’d left behind – a new beginning as my original self.
This song shaped the direction of my life, my music, and, hopefully, my future. It comes out on Friday. I can’t wait for you to hear it for the first time, and I can’t wait to finally move on to what comes next. Until then, I’ll probably keep ruminating about death and endings as I wait to realize that the next thing has already started.
[1] 10 internet points if you can find it
[2] 15 internet points if you guess it in the comments