Patient Mistress

When I went through a mind bending breakup in 2013, it was accompanied by a nervous breakdown, with a sprinkle of Panic Disorder. At the time, I played trumpet for a big Baptist church on Sundays for a little cash. The guy next to me ran a local music store in town. I hand’t been my normal chatty self in weeks and he took the time to ask me how I was handling everything.

He listened. After church, he offered to take my trumpet with him to clean it. It had been years since its last cleaning. Outside, it was smudged up like a toddlers backseat window, and inside, it smelled like the Ninja Turtle sewer home. So, I let him. When he showed up the next week, my horn was immaculate. If not for the worn down silver from my acidic palms, it was a brand new horn. I picked up my jaw and asked him how much.

“Nothing,” he said.

My eyes brimmed. I hugged and thanked him.

“No matter who comes and goes in you life, this horn is always going to be there for you. Don’t ever forget that. You don’t owe me a penny.”

The tears did not hold back.

This week, I got the final mixes for my next album, Elseworthy. When I started recording them in 2023, I didn’t realize how it would grow. On a whim and a sense of frustration with my lack of output, I spent three days in Manchester, KY, at my mom’s house, sitting in a room with all the instruments I could bring in my Prius, an iMac with Logic, and some cheapo mics I had collected over the covid years.

I tracked out all the songs I wrote either on a road trip or about a road trip. These songs spanned the years from 2014 when I wrote Postcard after my first solo road trip, to 2019 when I wrote Grain Within the Rye while house sitting for some people. Many of these songs are the regular tunes Dream Jurnal sang when we used to play at The Daily Grind, Phat Bites, JJs, and the Corner House.

I planned on releasing these songs ten years ago, but “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”. I was focused on relationships, children, money, lawyers, and careers, but these songs waited for me to come back to them.

Music is indeed a patient mistress.

She loves you unconditionally, and lets you love her anyway you need. Music never forgets you, and when you finally come back to her, she will embrace you with the passion of your first violent fall together.

So it is with all things that call to you: drawing, singing, origami, road tripping, pottery, photography. They’re waiting. I have to actively ignore the voice insisting I am wasting my time and effort if no one pays me. This money obsessed world forces that lie down our throats. If I want to write a poem, compose a song, or paint a tree, I don’t have to get anyone’s attention. My reward is joy. In fact, when I do it for the sake of it, my joy increases. I was not made to make money, I was made to make.