Ojo Taylor

Blog

  • A Personal Note on Anagnorisis and Peripeteia

    Photo: Getty Images//Getty Images

    𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐧𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐬: “…𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑙𝑜𝑡 𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑎 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑔𝑒𝑑𝑦 𝑎𝑡 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑜𝑛𝑖𝑠𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑔𝑛𝑖𝑧𝑒𝑠 ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑜𝑟 ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑟 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑒𝑟’𝑠 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑒 𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑜𝑟 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑒 𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑜𝑓 ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑜𝑟 ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑤𝑛 𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛.1” It is, “𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑢𝑑𝑑𝑒𝑛 𝑎𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑎 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙 𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛, 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠 𝑎𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑜𝑑, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑓𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦, 𝑡ℎ𝑒 ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑜’𝑠 𝑖𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑜 𝑎 𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑝 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑎𝑛 𝑜𝑓𝑡𝑒𝑛 𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑜𝑛𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑐 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑖𝑛 𝐴𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑎𝑛 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑔𝑒𝑑𝑦.2”

    𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐢𝐚: “𝑎 𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑎𝑙 𝑜𝑓 𝑐𝑖𝑟𝑐𝑢𝑚𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑠, 𝑜𝑟 𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑝𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑡.3” Says Aristotle, it is “𝑎 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒 𝑏𝑦 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑣𝑒𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑖𝑡𝑠 𝑜𝑝𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒, 𝑠𝑢𝑏𝑗𝑒𝑐𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑟𝑢𝑙𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑜𝑟 𝑛𝑒𝑐𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑦.4“

    They often go hand in hand, and in Aristotle’s writing, “𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑚 𝑜𝑓 𝐷𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 (Anagnorisis) 𝑖𝑠 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑎𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑑 𝑏𝑦 𝑃𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑝𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑖𝑎, 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ 𝑔𝑜𝑒𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐷𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑖𝑛 𝑂𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑝𝑢𝑠…5” Oedipus is the classic example, where he realizes at once that he is his father’s murderer and son, and the son and lover of his mother, and of course this changes everything.

    In the last 9 months, I have experienced a lot of anagnorises around a number of really fundamental components and relationships of my life so far – with family at every level, friends, associates and colleagues, where I live, my place in Christian music and all that has gone with that over the years, my place in religion and spirituality, my place in music-creation, my place in academia, each with different turning points.

    This probably started more like three years ago since moving to the PNW, but the peripeteia has been profound especially the last 6-9 months. It has been one of my life’s singularities. Before even realizing it, I have been referring to it as “inflection points” with my therapist, all converging around the same point in time. And I have had a number of inflection points, turns, changes, that have been completely organic as a result of the discoveries, the realizations, epiphanies, anagnorises.

    It has been hard, sad, crippling at times, and I have suffered from grief and depression over all of it. But it is also liberating, life-giving, and has opened paths forward, irreversibly altering the landscape. What I am learning to navigate as a result of discoveries and their inflection points, is the nuance of love, detachment and letting go, acceptance, and indifference, each showing up in various ways and combinations at different levels. Thank you for reading.

    1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anagnorisis
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    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anagnorisis
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    3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripeteia
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    4. ibid.
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    5. ibid.
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  • My Mailbag: On The Music and History of Undercover

    Dave Swaney has been coming to Undercover concerts since the early 1980s, he tells me. We were able to spend a little time together at our performance at the House of Blues in 2022 and over pizza he told me he had a lot of questions about the workings, music and history of Undercover over the years. He sent them to me not long after, and dammit Dave, I’m sorry it took me so long, but here you go!  

    (more…)

  • Thou Shalt Not Lie!

    It was literally written in stone if we are to believe the tale. Jesus calls Satan “the father of lies,” and Sam Harris refers to lying as “the sin that paves the way to every other sin.” We are taught from the youngest age that we should not lie and we learned that the punishment can be severe because the consequences of lying are severe. But also true is that from our youngest years, we are put in a double bind. Not only are we taught that we mustn’t lie, but we are also taught that we must lie. There are times, you see, where telling the truth could hurt someone’s feelings, or result in some kind of social faux pas or that it’s just too complicated. Thus the little white lie, that “harmless” even virtuous act of lying that nobody will ever find out about (we hope). We’re taught that we should never lie, and yet we are not taught what it means to walk through life truthfully. We are instead socialized into the nuance of good lies and bad lies, the art of lying, that some people “can’t handle the truth,” and so we manufacture acceptable answers that are not truthful. 

    Sam Harris, in his little book, “Lying,” suggests that none of us will go to bed at night “without having told several lies over the course of the day,” and that roughly 10% of all communication between spouses is deceptive, 38% among college students.  I think we even harden ourselves to how we come to accept our many untruths. There are some folks who actually pride themselves on being “honest to a fault.”  I take that to mean that they are not of course, that they do not have the same understanding of honesty that I have, but rather what they mean is that they are blunt, which is not at all the same thing. Nobody is honest to a fault. 

    All of this requires that we have a common understanding of what lying is and what constitutes a lie. That line can be hard to navigate. We can even lie by saying true things. We can lie by not saying anything at all. Harris defines it thus: “To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.” Seems simple enough and yet it is so very difficult – as anyone who has kids knows. It is an act of courage and strength to be truthful when it’s required of us, to have hard conversations. 

    “Does this outfit make me look fat?”
    “Daddy, am I going to die from this disease?”
    “Have you ever been unfaithful to me?”
    “Should we tell our mother of your terminal diagnosis? It would crush her!”
    “What do you think of my new song?”
    “Is Santa Claus real?”

    When I started therapy years ago, I wrestled with my discomfort of not having a solid ethical understanding and basis around what it means to really walk through life truthfully. We aren’t taught how to do that in religious texts and the institutions of socialization perpetuate the paradox of the imperative against lying vis-à-vis the situations where it’s (apparently) necessary. To whom do I owe the truth? How much of the truth do I owe people in different contexts? What is the ethical way to deal with people who insist on answers but don’t deserve them? Where do boundaries come in? Is lying ever justified, and if so when, and under what circumstances? How do we integrate a full commitment to being truthful with kindess?  What do we make of the white lie? (Hint: don’t do it! The smallest lies erode trust and even white lies are associated with dissatisfaction in relationships.) 

    I remember the exact day I asked my therapist these questions to try to understand lying and truth-telling and the huge impact it has on trust, on all of our important relationships, on our own reputations. I asked her in the context of marriage. They’re hard questions, and I remember her answer well.  It was not that far from Harris’s. When we are asked a direct question by our partners, we owe a direct and truthful response and we are entitled to the same. That still left a lot of real estate to try to understand and navigate these questions, and it’s certainly way too much for a blog post. But the bottom line is that people deserve an accurate picture of the landscape on which they’re basing their well-being. To deprive them of this is to deprive them of their autonomy, their ability to make life-decisions based on an accurate picture of reality.

    The frequency and ease with which we can move into and out of truthfulness and how important this is to everything valuable in my life set me on a long path of liberation that I imagine I will travel till my end of days. We don’t lie always with malicious intent (although we do sometimes), but sometimes as a matter of convenience, weakness, cowardice even, shame, avoiding responsibility or accountability, to make ourselves look good, or maybe because sometimes we don’t know how, how to use the right words, how to be truthful with kindness, grace, and growth as the goal but without sacrificing truthfulness.  

    I actually teach from this little book by Sam Harris. What could the ethics of lying possibly have to do with the music industry? It doesn’t take long for that question to answer itself. If we want career longevity, if we want our reputations to precede us as someone who is on the level, someone whose word is solid, someone who will “give it to me straight, someone I can trust,” whose “praise will not be mistaken for flattery,” all things in short supply in the biz, the truth is right at the center. From artist management and learning to level with our artist-clients without dragging them in to every detail, to working with our bandmates, other artists and gatekeepers it’s right at the center. 

    What does it mean to walk through life truthfully and how do we learn it?  For me, an interest in ethics, years of therapy and my education took me down this road. Later, Sam Harris and “Lying” became a catalyst to more rigorous studies in ethics more generally. Picking up a used replacement copy for $9 led to writing this. I recommend it. The hardcover version includes an interview between Harris and the philosophy professor that changed his life at Stanford as a bonus and even still, the whole book is only 95 pages. It’s not a comprehensive treatise but it’s a good read with lots of examples and nuance, excellent as food for thought and perhaps a good starting point for further inquiry for anyone interested. 

    I can’t write about lying without thinking of the lyrics to the song The Trouble With Lies, by  Adam Again, written by the late Gene Eugene, my friend and partner at Brainstorm Artists, who also intimately understood this battle.  

    The trouble with lies
    Is that you start to forget where the real man hides

    The trouble with lies
    When you tell them you still got to sell them
    With the look in your eyes
    Oh, that’s the trouble with lies
    As far as I’m concerned
    With the lessons I’ve learned
    I’m determined to try and survive
    Without lies

  • There Is Only Time for Loving

    Zdzisław Beksiński

    “There isn’t time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.”

    Mark Twain

    Balloons, roses, chocolates, teddy bears – It’s just another commercial quasi-holiday that has been easy to ignore, like Christmas and Easter, only vaguely rooted in historical events, times and places. And yet in all these, there’s a seminal idea, hard to throw out along with all the stanky cultural bathwater, in this case of idealized (and often toxic) romance. Of course we want to express our love for those dearest to us, and what kind of bastard would avoid doing that just because of the cultural pollution surrounding the date?  There are some of those bastards out there!  Perhaps better to put the whole thing on our own terms, whatever that might look like – a good snog on the rug, a nod or a wink, some kind expression or gesture, perhaps without even acknowledging the date. 

    Nothing has been more important to me in this life than to do my best at understanding and only then learning to practice love. You’d think that would be easy, or at least easier, given how much lip-service it gets in religious texts, yet the Bible neither defines it nor tells us what it is. It only gives us examples. It seems to me there’s nothing more central to the human experience beyond mere survival. Some surrender the latter for lack of the former, which tragically seems to make the point. 

    I see throughout the year posts on social media celebrating my friends’ life partners – birthdays, anniversaries, other rites of passages and celebrations. I react to them both with joy that so many of you are experiencing these intimacies, and yet I feel a twinge each time (yes, each time) because such has not been my lot in life so far, for any number of reasons. I often think of my friend Gene Eugene’s line, “all you lucky people…”

    I do not ask for or want sympathy. My life is rich and full, and love comes from many places. I have had seasons of romantic love – I’ve climbed up on that altar – and seasons without it. I’ve enjoyed both, and have learned to recognize, appreciate and celebrate the puts and takes of each, and there are many!  Sometimes it’s 51/49 one way, then 49/51 the other, 60/40 one way, or 40/60 the other. And yet, there is that twinge, that fantasy of what might be, what’s possible, learning to love at that level, in that context. Of course sometimes there’s no place lonelier than inside an unhealthy relationship too; puts and takes. 

    There’s a lesson somewhere in all this. In all conditions andcircumstances, there is love. Love is always possible.  The 80-year study in this link on What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness,concludes thus:

    “Good, close relationships are good for our health and well-being, this is wisdom that’s as old as the hills. Why is this so hard to get and so easy to ignore? Well, we’re human. What we’d really like is a quick fix, something we can get that’ll make our lives good and keep them that way. Relationships are messy and they’re complicated and the hard work of tending to family and friends, it’s not sexy or glamorous. It’s also lifelong. It never ends.  […] Our study has shown that the people who fared the best were the people who leaned in to relationships, with family, with friends, with community.” 

    May we all lean in a little today, however that looks for you. Someone is there. May you not only feel loved, even a bit, but perhaps more important, may you feel that the love you have to give is well-received.

  • Our Table

    I used to enjoy sitting at our table, watching you eat, 
watching you enjoy your food, every bite you took.
You didn't know but I watched as we talked.
Sweet potatoes, salads, stir-fry, spiced by ear,  
your tiny hands, nourishing yourself with food I prepared,
bought with the fruits of my labor.
I watched you enjoy every bite, each an infusion,
my love for you diffusing into you, 
spoons full of love. A portion of my vow,
what spring does with the cherry trees, but more,
It was one way that I just knew.

  • I Am Your Father, V – Fathers Day

    Any man can have a kid as they say, but it’s another matter altogether to be a father. I had to learn as I went, to cobble together what it meant to father and how to do it. I had to do so over time and under the consequences and impact my childhood was having on me in real time and in hindsight. Yes, as a kid we had food on our table, I had a roof over my head and clothes to wear.  We lived under a dark cloud though, a constant storm on the horizon, never knowing when it was going to thunder or when lighting might strike, and it did strike. 

    I can have compassion on my own father, knowing that he also had no father (my grandfather was an honorable man as far as I knew. He was away in the Navy, a survivor of Pearl Harbor and those were very different times) and was abandoned by his mother to be raised by her mother, a non-English-speaking Austrian who did her best. I understand he also did the best he could in a different parenting epoch. I know many of you had fantastic fathers, imperfect perhaps but you never felt unloved, unsupported, and were dearly valued. I know many of you didn’t. Maybe most of you are somewhere in the middle. 

    What makes the difference? For me it was two things, no three. First, when it became unavoidably clear that my relationships in general were suffering and that the results of my life were not what I wanted or had expected, I begin going to therapy. I was skeptical of it, it was frowned up by those in the Church (unless it was “biblical counseling,” the biggest load o’ shit this side of the rapture), but I did it. First for 6 months, then for a year, then straight for 14 or 15 years, sometimes twice a week. 

    “Close your eyes and imagine that terrified seven-year-old boy.  Imagine being there with him, in that situation. Go to him. What can you say to him?  What can you do?  How would you console and comfort him and get him through this?” 

    I am in therapy again now since last summer. I hope it’s a life-practice for me as I continue to try to unravel the mystery of myself till my last breath. 

    Second was my education, which was more like therapy 2.0 than anything else. I’ve talked about all this before, and I beg your indulgences. I didn’t need a degree although I wanted one. I knew I needed to invest in myself and my brain. I thirsted for it. I used to pour through the school catalogs exploring majors and minors, things that looked fascinating and wondrous and there were so many. There was one class that jumped out at me though, and that was Sociology of Marital Dissolution. I enrolled right away and it was so fascinating I kept taking sociology classes related to the family and ended up with my degree. Often I was the only male in my classes. This is tragic. It’s a topic for another day, but consider again the thought at the top – it’s another matter altogether to be a father. There’s a crisis of masculinity in our country and it shows up right here. It’s a learned skill set, but you have to want the skill set and commit to it. Otherwise it’s just sperm, and as Jethro Tull said, “Your sperm’s in the gutter, your love’s in the sink.” 

    The third big difference was the three gentlemen you see in these photos. Fatherhood doesn’t end when the kids turn 18 or leave home. They start their own families, yet we parent forever. I’ve watched them closer than they realize and see how they have done better than I, as I have hopefully done better than my ancestors. It’s strange how when we are young we look up, and when we are older we look down, and if we’ve done it right, look inward all along the way. I’ve learned from them, even if the window of opportunity to practice what I’ve learned has long since closed. I’m not as essential to them now as I was when they were small. That’s just a fact, even though I do know I am important to them. It’s just different now. But there are other things to practice, now and still. It would be a lie to say I have no regrets, and I do wish I could have some do-overs. The job now is to live in such a way that I don’t add anymore to that list. 

    I am not looking for consolation, reassurance or validation. It gives me a sense of humility to see how well they have done with their kids, to see how they love them so, how they dawdle over them and keep them, how their kids lean into them for love, security and safety. As their kids – my grandkids – get older, they will have their own challenges and m y sons are already rising to the occasion in sometimes long-term difficult circumstances. There’s a role for me here too, but they have this station now. 

    It’s not just watching them father that I learn from either. I also learn about my own fathering in the practice of our ongoing relationships. We are not estranged. There is lots of love. We have fun together and simply enjoy each other. I see where my weak spots are as I pay attention and work through those (therapy, remember). I try to be as available as I can be and to give of myself, to listen, to accept each wherever they are, different as they are. Well, I learn all kinds of stuff – about responsibility, courage and the truth, about myself, about them, about being a dad, but mostly about what it means to be a man, the kind that can be a father. Only a man can father.

    I am happy for those who had great childhoods with real fathers. I admit I am somewhat envious but glad to hear it exists. Some of us have fathered ourselves or had other father-images or role models. Some just got through it, lucky to survive. Like many other holidays, this is a tough one for many people. To all, wherever you fall on this continuum and especially to these three young fathers, I hope you can find the best thing about what today could mean to you – whether it’s celebrating, mourning, reflecting, recommitting, whatever it might be, and somewhere at least, find a portion of love, from wherever that might come, even if you have to close your eyes and give it to that child you knew years ago who needs you still.     

  • A Brief Thought on Love and Heartbreak

    Let us forget with generosity, those who cannot love us. – Pablo Neruda

    Writing songs is hard and the hardest part is the lyrics. I don’t know a single writer who would disagree. We spend a lot of time talking about lyric in our songwriting classes – cliché the song-killer, the risk of cowardice with “You done me wrong” vs. the courage of self-disclosure and vulnerability in song, all kinds of nasty, tricksy pitfalls. College is a hotbed of the kinds of experiences that can dash us against the rocks of overused hokum. 

    So yes, we have some engaging conversations, especially about love, and in one such conversation we were talking about how to avoid common uses of humanity’s most powerful construct. It’s hard to do that without drilling down on some hard, heady questions – what is love, what are some of the nuanced uses of the word, is it really love? – all that stuff. I often suggest they avoid the word altogether in favor of painting it – don’t tell us, show us. Describe it vividly. I know, lots of great songs use it but I especially discourage use of the phrase, “I love you.” It’s more often about a sense of attachment and need than anything else, and it can be so gutless and toothless. We like to think it’s unconditional, but it’s often not. We expect something in return. We feel vulnerable. When we say, “I love you,” to our beloved we expect to hear it back, and if we don’t, well that’s a real problem! It’s a quid pro quo. But how dare we?!

    I asked my young charges what the highest, most loving thing to say is when someone says, “I love you” to them. And they all say it – “I love you too!” I objected, and said right off the top of my head that instead, I think the best thing to do is first take it in, and then say in return, “Congratulations,” or “How great for you!” Their eyes went as wide as saucers and mine did too, I guess. Say that in response to your other and it’s a trip to the doghouse for you, you arrogant shit! But, saying either is truly better! It reflects back on the lover, not on myself. It builds up, acknowledges and honors the other as that kind of person who can love, who has learned to love, who has practiced and gained some mastery of love, who actually loves, and who loves me, with all my many flaws. It’s admirable and respectable. It sees the highest calling of humanity in my partner. It is not a statement of need or expectation on my part. I understand that sometimes it’s just an off-the-cuff proclamation and we don’t need to make such a big deal over it, but this is more about how I think about love generally and behind the scenes, and how I would like to practice and write about it. 

    What about heartbreak? What can we say about the other side of this, where the theater, landscape and context for love is stripped away from us, even if we initiated it, altering every fabric of our world? I was listening to Etta James sing, ”I’d Rather Go Blind,” one of music’s finest laments:

    So you see, I love you so much
    That I don’t wanna watch you leave me, baby
    Most of all, I just don’t, I just don’t wanna be free, no    .

    I was just sittin here thinkin’, of your kiss and your warm embrace.
    When the reflection in the glass that I held to my lips now, baby
    Revealed the tears that was on my face    .

    Baby, baby, I’d rather, I’d rather be blind, boy
    Than to see you walk away, see you walk away from me.  

    Heartbreak from finished relationships seems to me to come from the same place, especially in music, from a place of weakness. I am heartbroken. I am wounded. I am bereft! Woe is me! What is to become of me? I admit, there is not much worse we can go through in this life than losing those we love more dearly than our own lives and we rightfully grieve. Is there nothing to be done to console ourselves from that which is completely out of our control and yet so vital?

    What if we can again turn it around? What if heartbreak, rather than somehow representing the power someone else or some relationship has over us, how great someone made us feel, the person we think we are when we are together, actually instead reflects who we actually are and our own ability to have loved?! What if it’s not as much a statement of the other at all, but a statement of our own strength, our own capacity to love, to have learned, to have chosen someone to try to love with, to have risked having the course of our life altered, to have actually loved another, flaws and all? Does it hurt any less? Yes, I think it does. It still rightfully hurts like hell. Congratulations! I do think it helps indeed and it gives me a lot of hope. I can love. I loved. I climbed up on the altar and I allowed that fire to consume me as best I possibly could.

    In responding to expressions of love by empowering the other, we love. In responding to heartbreak by acknowledging and empowering ourselves, we practice love of self and self-care, and still honor the object of our love rather than lash out in pity, anger, or retribution. We acknowledge our willingness and capacity to have given ourselves to another, to have committed, to have risked it all. This is not their path anymore. This is your path. Let them go, not with the arrogance or apathy of, “Well that’s their loss,” but with an honorable sadness and grief, with generosity and kindness. Let us also hope we will be similarly forgotten. Breathe and smile at least a little on the inside, standing a little taller and more fortified knowing that you will go in and go out loving.

    I’d Rather Go Blind, written by Etta James, Ellington Jordan & Billy Foster, © Arc Music, Arc Music Corp.

  • On Turning 65

    Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of an Old Man and a Youth, c. 1500-1505

    A while ago, on January 2, 2011, I wrote a reflection piece called Reverse Resolutions – 11 Reflections on 2011. I suppose it’s normal to reflect like this on days of passage and that would include a 65th birthday.  It’s hard to believe that last article was 10 years ago already, but so that goes as we age as well. Don’t worry, I’m not going to burden you, dear reader, with 65 reflections on the occasion, but taking stock of a few things is not a bad idea from time to time.   These are not resolutions or revelations that I woke up one morning realizing after an epiphany – it’s just things I’ve been thinking about lately.

    The Call to Therapy

    This is my second real go-round with therapy. I went for 14 or 15 years straight some time ago and I’ve said many times that it’s made all the difference in my life. My current therapist and I have been meeting electronically since the pandemic began. I sign in to a virtual waiting room and when he comes online, I get a chime from the system. It’s lovely and reminiscent of a Tibetan singing bowl and when I pointed that out, he said it’s like a Buddhist call to meditation but in our case the chime is calling us to therapy, to health, reflection and accountability. That’s pretty good. We always start with a little small talk and that includes “How are you?” I never quite know how to answer that and last week we jumped in right there and we both agreed that if we’re not dead or wanting to be dead, it’s a good day and we’re doing fine. This is life at 65.   

    Currency

    One thing we hopefully learn over the years, some of us having made at least a few foolish financial decisions in the past, is the importance of honoring and respecting our money and our own labor. One way to think of currency is that it represents a measure of opportunity, nothing more, nothing inherently important about money in itself. We cash it in so to speak – we spend it – on opportunities, for other things we value – necessities, experiences, gifts, charity, freedom from debts to others.  But this isn’t about money, and that’s not what I’m talking about, dear reader. It’s important to honor our money but I feel like the only real currency I have now is time. There’s just not a lot of it left, and it’s all downhill (or uphill, depending on your perspective) from here.  What’s left is not all going to be great, some of it not even very good. My body’s as good now as it’s ever going to be and that’s sobering. Every day is increasingly expensive. I have a sense of urgency and a sense of waste and cost when even one single day slips by without having made the world a better place for someone, invested in myself somehow, or without having lived.  We think we have time. We don’t. My time informs everything that follows below from here. 

    Choose Your State

    I hate platitudes as much as anyone.  But sometimes little gems of wisdom come dressed up as platitudes and might be worth a second look.  So it was for me with the idea that we can choose happiness. How stupid; ridiculous! Right? Right?! I mean, If we could choose happiness, wouldn’t everyone simply choose to be happy? No, they wouldn’t. First, some people need to be miserable, and for some, it’s all they know. Second, it’s not a switch that gets flipped. It’s a practice like most things of value in this life. The more I’ve thought about it and deliberately made conscious choices about my own reactions and responses, I’ll be damned, the more I found myself really evened out emotionally and genuinely content. I don’t have time to feel like shit. I have also discovered that someone else’s feelings, attitude and behavior do not obligate me in the least to respond in kind or in any certain way at all. My friend Pastor Brian Q. Newcomb turned me on to the idea (and we play with it every once in a while) that we don’t have to attend every argument we’re invited to. The same goes for many other kinds of invitations we get, rooted in other folks’ internal stuff. I don’t have time for that shit. 

    Love

    That’s not to say that I am relieved of my obligation to love. In fact, it requires me to know what love actually is, to have the wisdom to figure out how to practice it on difficult emotional terrain, and then to have practiced enough and be courageous enough to pull it off. Some people need misery and some folks will not allow love into their lives. You will not be able to love everyone. There are certainly obvious loving gestures and acts of kindness – feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, things like that – the ones we all know. But in the end, the love you practice through the course of a day or a relationship is sometimes not going to be the love that others recognize as love at all or even as useful or virtuous. Wish them well, do whatever good you can, learn, and then go where your love is celebrated as love. Again, time… there is no time to waste your days and effort when it’s not received or appreciated. 

    Health

    I signed up for Medicare a couple days ago. That alone is a welcome to oldness. Health is the bull in the 65-year-old china shop. I talked about it above a bit, but here’s the thing. It’s not only the bull in the china shop, it’s now also the proverbial frog in the pot, where we begin reaping the consequences of lifestyle choices we made years ago. And even if we’ve been pretty good at making adjustments even at early ages, shit just happens. I’m a vegetarian, very near vegan (cheese, dammit!), not overweight, don’t drink or smoke, and until the pandemic I’ve been working out religiously 6 days a week for as long as I can remember. And even with that, my ears are getting worse, my bad cholesterol has been creeping up and is now too high (“How can that be, when I eat the way I do and work out as much as I do,” I ask my doctor?  “Genetics,” he says), I have an eye floater in each eye at risk for retinal detachment, two meniscus tears in each knee from years of running and playing basketball, and because I grew up in Southern California roasting myself to a crisp at the beach, I have to get my skin checked every year. My gums and hair are receding. I used to see the doctor once a year for a physical, but it seems that now I always have a next appointment on the calendar. And I consider myself pretty lucky and pretty damn healthy, all things considered. Back to the frog. There’s going to be a time when it will be too late to make changes, especially the big important ones, where the point of no return has been reached and past. The best time to plant a tree may have been 30 years ago, but the second-best time is today, like it or not. Those years are gone, but it’s not yet too late to do something – yet. 

    Work and Retirement

    This is what’s supposed to happen at 65, right? I’ve never been one to look forward to putting myself out to pasture and spending the rest of my days golfing and fishing. I imagine that might entertain me for a couple months (actually not even that because I don’t golf or fish, but you get the idea). I’ve known too many people that retired and were dead less than a decade later. I’ve also known people who got bored with it after a lifetime of making plans for it, and then went back to work. My job brings me an incredible amount of meaning. Viktor Frankl found that meaningful work along with love are two of the most important elements of meaning and purpose for human beings. I expect to work as long as I can. The alternative in my world is not golfing and fishing – it’s irrelevance, and that is just not something I can accept. Here again, I consider myself lucky. I’ve spent almost 100% of my career doing things that blur the line between work and play. I’d do it for free (“Wait, you want me to teach History of Rock, and I’m gonna get paid for that?!”). I encourage my students to find that place in their lives, where they are enriched by their work, where it gives them a sense of mission, purpose and meaning. It’s not for the paycheck, it’s for the other currency. How do you want to spend your time? Do that. Yes, there’s a way, and the path goes right through a shit ton of hard questions. Retirement… pfft.

    Religion

    Yeah, no. The conversation hardly even interests me anymore other than the impact of religion on society, especially toxic here in the U.S.

    Spirituality

    Whatever that is – let’s call it a nurturing of the inner life. I want to be a better person, to increase my capacity and become more and more a part of the community of beings, human and otherwise. I want to leave a legacy of love and kindness and I feel a very long way off from that ideal still. Most people in the U.S. believe that atheists have no morals or sense of spirituality. This is just raw ignorance and nothing could be further from the truth. Since I’ve left the supernatural and all theologies by the wayside, it’s like having fully awakened at last. I would like to increase my own enlightenment and spiritual depth. The legacy idea is powerful for me right now. I have a musical body of work and will keep working on that, and students whose lives I’ve helped influence, but when I die, what I’d like most is to be missed (please never refer to me as having “passed.” I will have died, not “passed.” Honestly, what are we so afraid of?). And that doesn’t come just from a body of work. It comes from love, kindness and generosity, from having made people’s lives a little better, from helping them get in touch with what it means to be human. I’d like to have been an example, a help and inspiration to others, and that’s enough. I know I have to do more than I think is necessary too. There’s always a gap between what we feel we’re giving and the love people feel they are receiving. Be the one who loves more and tries harder.   

    Sexuality

    Lots to be said about aging and sexuality too, another elephant in the room. I don’t have a lot to add to what’s out there, other than to say that it changes as my body changes and I have no intention whatsoever of going gentle into that dark night of asexuality. I read recently somewhere that masturbation in old age is not really about sex as much as it is a system check. Sex is something that has to be cultivated and nurtured, even if how it looks is different. Touch, caressing and being caressed are so central to being human that I can’t imagine life without it.

    Consumerism

    Jesus, we spend a lot on unnecessary, stupid shit.  A trip through almost any big-box store is almost embarrassing if you really look around and think about it. Part of my learning to honor my own labor and money has been taking a hard look at what is actually essential in my life and trying hard to let go of everything else. Possessions become our prisons. For me, paring way down has freed me to travel and spend more time on music and teaching. It’s lovely. Here again though, it’s not just simplifying (another platitude) but a realignment of values.  

    The James Baldwin documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” although mostly about race, depicted this aspect of middle-class aspiration and  Western values powerfully. Many songs, movies and books have done that too, but that film was a real eye-opener for me in a blunt, cut and dried moment. The convergence of spiritual growth, a sense of meaning, the move away from religion toward a desire to understand what it means to live a more ethical life has resulted in looking beyond myself and my little world, to the rest of the world where there is real suffering that I can actually do something about, even with modest means. I can channel the difference between what is essential and what I earn to charities that are accountable and efficient, where the dollar gets to the ground to feed and immunize children, to provide malaria nets (more important than you might think; the actual cost of one net is less than a dollar, and that alone can save a life), clean water and education. There are all kinds of reasons and excuses we have that keep us from donating to such causes, and I’ve finally been convinced that the money I can give can save a life just as surely as pulling the switch on that train about to run over a stroller. I will leave the rest to you to explore if it so calls you, but Jesus, we spend a lot of money on unnecessary, stupid shit and whether this is ever part of any legacy or not, I have to sleep with myself. 

    Family

    It’s everything. Each family structure and composition is different and it’s been such a great life-lesson to learn to honor the many types, especially those whose makeup, origin and culture is so different from my own. I confess that I am out of touch with a lot of my own family members and it’s sad that in almost every case it has been because of religion or politics, usually both. The only time I am the one who cuts the chord is when it becomes abusive or disrespectful. But I am NOT out of touch with any of my kids, and by the gods, I will spend my last and dying breath if I have to, working to make sure they know they were loved dearly, not just in word, but by action and example. It’s also how we can know there’s no hell. God is better than I am, I imagine, and there is nothing that will come between me and my kids, even if they were to abandon me. Nothing. This can be hard sometimes too because we all have family dynamics. It again requires that I know what love actually is, that I have the wisdom to figure out how to practice it on sometimes-difficult emotional terrain, and that I have practiced enough and to have courage enough to pull it off. 

    That’s enough for now. I might add more as it comes. After reading the post from ten years ago, I realize this one’s more urgent, a bit less lofty, a bit more “Get-off-my-lawn” with some “I have no more fucks to give,” thrown in too and hopefully a little Zen. Well, I’m 65 now and there is that currency, after all. We think we have time and we don’t. Ten years have passed since the last post. How many of those do I have left?  

  • The Sound of Metal and Me

    I watched Sound of Metal last night, guessing I might see parts of myself in it. It had a number of interesting angles for me. First, the main character, Riz Ahmed as Ruben Stone, is the drummer in a loud, intense and thrashing band, and then of course the fact that he goes almost deaf literally overnight and then completely deaf when he has cochlear implants surgically inserted. I have profound hearing loss but I’m not deaf and it didn’t happen overnight. Nor do I have implants, but the question of how to cope with hearing loss as a musician is a serious one.  There are personal and professional aspects. Who wants to work with a record producer who wears hearing aids, after all? I’ve made light of this by saying that Beethoven was deaf and if he could do it, I can do it. Ha ha. 

    There were two powerful lines in the film for me, both delivered by Paul Raci’s character, Joe (oddly enough), the head of a school for the deaf. The first is when he assigns chores to the students, and for Ruben, the now-deaf drummer he writes on the white board, “Learn how to be deaf.” That’s Ruben’s work, his chore, to learn how to be deaf. I never really thought of it that way, even though it is work to learn how to navigate the world and life and music when you can’t hear. It’s not something you can read about in a book and then have the skill set.  

    The second was when Joe refuses to consider deafness a disability and says that he doesn’t consider deafness something that needs to be fixed, that this idea is central to the philosophy of his school. I never thought of myself as disabled and still don’t. But it is a serious condition that impacts every aspect of my life. 

    I first found out something was wrong when I was about 14 or 15 years old.  Our school gave us hearing tests.  They told me and my parents that I had hearing loss and that it was nerve deafness, likely hereditary and that nothing could be done to fix it – no surgery or meds. Nothing became of it, but at least now I knew I had hearing loss and it showed up more and more over time.  I had to ask people to repeat themselves and got teased for it. Jim used to call me “deaf-head” (it was endearing – we all had “head” nicknames in the band – blockhead, chowderhead, knucklehead, and I was deaf-head sometimes). I had to turn the television up more and more over time and struggled in movie theaters. My life was loud though so I suppose that masked it too to some degree.

    It didn’t help that I was in a loud, intense and thrashing band myself. I wonder how many hours we spent rehearsing in small rooms as loud as we could, often just to get over Gary’s cymbals and snare, the guitar also really loud, a bass amplifier with an 18” JBL speaker powered by a Trace Elliott amplifier literally right next to me, and then the keyboards, for which I had Uncle Dave Hackarth build me a headphone amplifier to run them through. It’s kind of like mainlining the keyboards right to your eardrums.  But at least it blocked out some of the other noise. I was told somewhere along the line that people with hearing loss actually have a lower threshold for pain from loud noises, and whether that’s true or not, it was true for me. 

    When people find out that I can’t hear (and it’s not hard to find out), most assume it was from being in the band and prolonged exposure to loud music.  It wasn’t, of course, although being in a band surely made it worse. Explaining over and over that that wasn’t the main cause was too tedious so I just kind of smiled and nodded when all the deaf-rock-guy jokes came, and they came.  Ha ha.

    It seems I was doomed genetically.  My father was hard of hearing and eventually had to get hearing aids.  Both of my grandfathers had profound hearing loss, and some of their brothers were very nearly deaf. They became my crystal ball in a sense – what things might look like for me down the road. I knew I’d have to do something about it eventually when I was running out of headroom on all the volume controls, when people started saying everything was just so loud and when I was eventually asked by my family to consider hearing aids.  This was maybe around 1990, but we weren’t done making loud records yet, at least for a few more years. 

    Sometime in the mid-1980s I had decided to go back to school.  Both of my parents and one of my brothers had advanced degrees and I always knew it’d be in my future sometime.  I didn’t need a degree, but there were lots of classes that looked so interesting to me just from a personal growth point of view and I could schedule my time between tours and records to attend classes. I chipped away at it 6 or 9 units per semester until I finally finished my B.A. in 1994.  Hearing loss meant I had to sit in the front row, as close as I could get to the professors, and hope they spoke clearly, and they often didn’t (professors and teachers – please speak clearly and consider that some of your students may not be able to hear you well).  I also realized then that I relied heavily on reading lips to help fill in the gaps of what I couldn’t hear.  If I couldn’t hear a word clearly, I had to look for other clues. Sometimes you have to piece together what is being said without hearing some of the words, and this is guesswork and not always accurate.

    People with deep, powerful voices are easiest to hear.  There was one engineer at the studio we used to work at who didn’t have such a voice and he also had a bushy moustache and beard which made it very, very difficult to hear him or to read his lips.  I had to ask him more than almost anyone to repeat himself and sometimes (as others did too) he dramatized literally yelling what he had said, hands cupped around his mouth.  He didn’t mean anything by it but I’m sure it was frustrating for him to always repeat himself. It was frustrating for me too.  You learn pretty early on to avoid asking people to do that as much as possible, and as a result you miss things that are said, or try to guess at what was said and then listen to people laugh and laugh because what you just pieced together, or the question you thought you were answering, was not only NOT what was said but made no sense in the context of the conversation. So we sit it out sometimes, and the sense of social isolation increases. No, actually we sit it out often rather than burden a conversation or make fools of ourselves. I watched my father sit off by himself at family gatherings, purposely removing himself from conversation simply because he couldn’t follow along or participate. We also make liars of ourselves when, not wanting to ask people to repeat themselves, we just nod as if we heard and understood what was said. It’s really a nod of surrender, of relinquishing our role in dialog.

    School was tough that way, but I sure did love it and grew from it. I’ve often said that therapy and my education have made all the difference in re-socializing myself after a rough and abusive childhood. A couple professors strongly advised me to go to grad school and to reach high.  I’ll be forever grateful to them for believing in me more than I believed in myself, even though I had the grades and the test scores. I had the good sense to heed their advice, and because I had five kids, I had to stay local. I ended up at UCLA at the Anderson Graduate School of Management and began studying there in 1994 immediately after finishing my undergrad.  

    This was going to be a different proposition than attending a regular state university, especially in the amount of tuition I was going to have to pay for two years. I was 38 when I started grad school and was on the back end of my time as a touring and recording artist and record label owner. That’s another story, but my objective was to prepare myself to take my art and experience to another level, beyond CCM, at least. I was long-over it. I figured that if I was going to pay that kind of money for an education, and to sit in front of world-class professors, guest speakers and students, I might as well hear what they’re saying. I broke down and got over all the psychological barriers (“Hearing aids are butt-ugly and they’re for old people!”) and called the audiologists at CSU Fullerton. They fitted me with my first pair. 

    There are videos on social media of babies and other folks who put on glasses or wake up from a corrective surgery and see or hear for the first time and we can see their reactions. It’s like the moment in Wizard of Oz when the film switches over to color. There’s a lot to that, but this is also where the “learning to be deaf” idea shows up again, except in this case, it’s also learning to hear. I clearly remember walking to my car from the audiologist’s office once my hearing aids (ear trumpets as I call them) were ready. You pop those things in and all of sudden the world is full of sound!  And not just sound, but sounds I had never heard – routine, workaday, unremarkable sounds. This was such a strange experience because I had no context for the sounds now intruding on my brain for the first time. They’re not all good sounds either. The world is a noisy place and if there is any upside at all to hearing loss, it’s that we can silence everything by taking them out. But there were two sounds in particular before I even got home from that appointment that I had no idea existed. The first was the sound of change in my pocket, the coins making the jingly sound they make when I fiddle around with them. I’d never heard that but it was easy to trace the sound to my actions.  

    The second one stumped me. On my drive home I kept hearing a knocking sound, steady but periodic, and I wondered if something was wrong with my car. But it wasn’t that kind of knock and I finally figured out that it was the keys hanging from the ignition bumping up against the steering column as I drove. I’d never heard that either. Even today I have to ask people what certain sounds are because I have no context for identifying them. It was also a challenge to know how to put my own voice in context relative to the other sounds in a room. When I was still new to hearing aids, I remember being taken aside by another student at UCLA and being told that I was speaking loudly. Calibrating output as well figuring out the input was another aspect of learning to hear. It was (and still is) a very real challenge that I had never before considered.

    A few years after UCLA I had the opportunity and means to go back to school yet again, almost as an afterthought, to take a few music classes. I had no objective in mind other than that – to bring music back into my life a bit. I had sold my interest in my production company while at UCLA and the band was inactive. One thing led to another though and I eventually found myself in another graduate degree program in music theory and composition. I don’t have an undergraduate degree in music though so I had to take a bunch of classes as pre-requisites to even apply to the Masters program and most of those classes had pre-requisites too. It took five years to finish all that, but it was truly about the journey, not the destination. As Lloyd Rodgers, my mentor and composition teacher used to say, “We’re on the slow boat to Mazatlán.” But of course hearing figures in again, not only hearing in the classroom but in what I was writing. 

    I had written a process piece for two pianos and remember playing a draft recording of it for Lloyd and two other professors in a classroom one day.  I was very nervous but they all really liked the piece, said it was well-written, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. But then Lloyd asked me why the range of the piece was so compressed, meaning it didn’t make full use of the highs and lows of the piano. I had to think about that, and my answer was that I can’t hear the high notes! Often, when hearing starts to go, you lose the high frequencies first – the sizzle and sibilance in sound. The higher overtones are the first to go and yet it is the overtone series in sound that allows us to differentiate one kind of sound from another, a trumpet from a kazoo, and one note from another.  When the higher overtones are missing, it’s very difficult to do either. I realized I couldn’t identify notes when they were up there in those higher registers.  When I was writing, I actually had to move everything down an octave or two to hear the interplay of the parts and voicings of the chords, make sure everything worked right and made sense, make any adjustments and then move everything back up to the higher octave. But that’s why I had written that piece in a tight mid-range of pitch. I couldn’t hear it any higher. 

    Another example of this was at a sound check we were doing before an Undercover concert in a big church somewhere. There were bells in the tower and they started chiming a musical pattern, probably announcing the hour or something. I love the sound of bells and have used them on many songs and records. They have a rich tone and at the same time are kind of wild in the sense that the overtones of metallic materials are very complex!  That’s why bell-making is an art and other metals very difficult to work with when constructing instruments. During this sound check I pulled up a bell patch on my keyboard and began playing along with the church bells; or so I thought. Gary looked over at me from behind the drums and asked what the hell I was playing. I told him I was playing along with the bells. He told me I certainly wasn’t, that the notes weren’t even close!  The other guys looked aver and agreed with Gary. But I was playing the notes I heard from the bells. The explanation is that I was missing so many of the overtones that the notes I heard were not the notes everyone else heard.  I was missing the overtones necessary to hear and play the right notes. 

    I have a dear friend, Dr. Andy Vermiglio, who used to fill in for Gary on drums from time to time.  I don’t remember how this happened but he had begun his Ph.D. in an audiology concentration and was conducting research at the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles. He knew I had hearing loss and asked if I would like to come in to the Institute for a series of tests that would contribute to the data that would go into his research.  I agreed and the $35 for my trouble didn’t hurt. He told me I’d be there for a couple hours at least. He ran me through a battery of tests including the audiogram most of us are familiar with, where we hear tones at different frequencies and push the button when we do, but then there was also a test called HINT, the hearing in noise test. When you can’t hear, these tests are very frustrating, because well, we can’t hear and we’re trying really hard!  This particular HINT test involved trying to pick out a particular person’s voice and the words that person was saying in various noisy environments like restaurants or parties. I finished all the tests and it was indeed frustrating as usual, and exhausting. I waited while Andy tabulated and interpreted the results. 

    A few minutes later he came to discuss everything with me and he told me (I’ll never forget this visual) that his data set from all the other subjects was in a certain range and he held up his hands about a foot apart from each other to signify a range of data. Then he said, your results are way out here, and reaches out his right hand about as far as he could reach. “You’re working really hard to hear,” he said.  I heard that loud and clear. I was an outlier. We talked some more and he made some recommendations about hearing aids and I thanked him. I’m still grateful to this day. 

    Since then I’ve moved to Virginia to teach music at James Madison University and have updated my hearing hardware 2 or 3 times since. This is normal every 4 or 5 years. Technology changes quickly. I’m lucky that there’s an audiology clinic and department at the university and I’ve forged some good professional relationships with the staff there. I even gave a colloquium at the JMU School of Music in 2017 on Aural Health for Musicians with my audiologist, Dr. Melissa Garber. We’ve been able to track my hearing over the years which is good. It’s progressive and getting worse, which is bad. The last test I had, my word recognition in my right ear was down to 12%. That means that I was able to actually hear and repeat back to them only 12% of the words they said (there’s a scene in the film of what that test is like). I always knew my right ear was worse. I have not been able to talk on the phone using that ear for many years. I simply can’t understand what’s being said. Word recognition is not the total measure of hearing loss. It’s one aspect. It doesn’t mean that I only have 12% of my hearing left, but that my word recognition is at 12%. Music is different. Strangely, I need that right ear with its 12% word recognition to hear music and other things coherently. Music doesn’t work the same in just one ear, even when it’s the better of the two. Even as bad as that right ear is, I need that ear.

    I’m often asked how music sounds to me. Does it sound muffled, out of balance, shrill, dull, anything else?  How are you able to write and produce records?  The easy answer to that is that I’ve been listening to records my whole life and I hear them the way I hear them. That’s all I know. I try to do what sounds good in the way I’m used to hearing things sound good.  As it gets worse though that’s not going to be good enough. I have started using other people to mix songs and records, sticking to the writing, performance and recording of instruments.  There are things I just can’t hear anymore and I tend to overcompensate for that.  

    After I got my hearing aids, the band recorded a new record at my home studio.  I was mixing the record with my hearing aids in, and Jim and Sim were sitting behind me on the sofa. Jim told me that the hi hats were blazing loud!  Sim agreed. I leaned in and listened, and listened again, harder and harder but couldn’t hear it. In fact I could barely hear them at all. I asked if they were sure and they were flummoxed that I couldn’t hear it. Blazing loud, they said!  Well, I took out my hearing aids and all of a sudden, there were those hi hats, blazing loud as they said. The hearing aids were compressing the high frequencies so I could push them louder and louder and it wouldn’t make any difference. I had them way too loud because that’s where it sounded right to me with the hearing aids in. I took them out and from then on have never worn them again when I’m working on music because I’ve lived my whole life hearing music the way I hear it, with my own imperfect, naked ears. 

    Even in classical music where the dynamic nuance is so important, the super-soft moments are just gone to me. Gone forever actually, and that’s pretty sad if I let myself think about it. But there is Beethoven after all and I can still hear okay when I can make use of the technology we have today that Beethoven didn’t have. The worse problem for me is not music, challenging as that can be. It’s in relating, communicating and isolation, especially from people I love. 

    I have had to learn to hear but I am also now having to learn how to be deaf. Technology grows by leaps and bounds, but whether it will be able to keep up with my own loss is doubtful. It’s not perfect as it is. Hearing aids do not get me back to normal hearing but they help a lot. I’ve known that I will eventually have to learn sign language (and probably already should have started), if for no other reason than to make it easier for those near me to communicate with me. That crystal ball of my ancestors’ isolation stares back at me otherwise. I probably won’t go deaf completely, but this is probably splitting hairs. It’s going to get tougher. I’m grateful for what I can hear, but learning to live each day with profound hearing loss is truly a lot of work. I have to learn the best ways to navigate it. It’s not fixing it. It’s not something that CAN be fixed, after all. There are tools though, like sign language and writing, like reading lips, like hearing aids, like headphones and amplifiers, and most of all, like the grace of those who also have to live with my hearing loss. 

    And that, my friends, could include you. Even if we don’t know each other, you certainly know someone who suffers from hearing loss, some more severe, some less. Perhaps they are afraid or reluctant to bring it up or admit it. There is stigma and caricature around it as I suggested.  It’s an old-person’s problem.  It’s granddad. Get him his cane, his rocker, slippers and his cardigan sweater. “Eh? Speak up, Sonny!” We can do better. Hearing loss knows no age boundaries or barriers. I haven’t thought of my own hearing as a disability, as something to be fixed, even if it does have to be managed. There are more-kind and less-kind ways of dealing with people who have hearing loss. I’ve highlighted some of those here.  Maybe I can summarize. This won’t be a complete list, and I’m sure I’ll add to it (I’ve seen some really good articles about relating to persons with hearing loss and will keep looking), and perhaps you can add any ideas in the comments below, but so far: 

    1. Please don’t say “Never mind,” especially after having been asked once or twice to repeat.  The message there is that we’re not worth communicating with. We know we’re hard to communicate with. We want to hear important things though. We don’t like asking you to repeat yourself any more than you like repeating yourself. In fact we probably like it less and are more apprehensive. We are more likely to self-isolate to avoid this than to actually be isolated by others. But “never mind” does that.  
    2. Please don’t dramatize yelling or the hyperbole of cupping your hands around your mouth to get your message through.  Again, we know it’s hard.  Please be gracious. 
    3. Reconsider “jokes.” They’re hurtful, even if we grin or chuckle along with you.
    4. Know that we do not want to burden you and are likely to self-isolate in certain circumstances and conditions (noisy restaurants, etc.). Please work with us here. Asking for a private table in a less-crowded part of a room helps. Even more drastic is asking for a certain restaurant because it is not as noisy as others. Take the initiative to ask if your hard-of-hearing loved ones would prefer that. It can be a big relief.
    5. We know that what we respond to is what we think we heard and may not be what was actually said.  We have to fill in blanks and gaps.  It’s ok to laugh – I’ve learned to as well sometimes – it’s funny, after all, but please know it’s also really embarrassing for us.  A little grace and kindness go a long way. 
    6. If it seems like we’re ignoring you, we’re likely not. We just can’t hear you! I often tell neighbors and colleagues that if I ever don’t respond to a greeting or something, it’s probably because I didn’t hear it.   
    7. Musicians – please get your hearing checked and for the love of the gods of thunder, take care of them. I know lots of people who are afraid of what they might find out.  I can assure you, it’s better to know where you stand. 
    8. Watch the movie. It’s fantastic. And subtitles are your friend.

  • Podcast with Drunk Ex-Pastors

    Screen Shot 2020-05-11 at 12.10.41 AMAbout a year ago I got a message from Christian, who asked if I’d be interested in being interviewed for their podcast, Drunk Ex-Pastors. Well, that name alone…!. We exchanged messages over several months…

    “We have a lot of listeners who are struggling as they come out of religion. My co-host is Catholic but we both lost a lot leaving evangelicalism behind. I eventually left Christianity behind completely. I think our listeners will appreciate hearing your story simply because I know many of them are facing losing a lot or have lost a lot. Many of our listeners are still Christians but hold their beliefs less dogmatically than they previously did. I’m agnostic but relate to atheism more than theism, and my co-host, Jason, while largely agnostic, leans towards theism. It’s possible you’ll get some pushback from him. He states often that he thinks atheists are just like fundamentalists. Just to prepare you. Also, we both grew up listening to Undercover!”

    We finally sat down to chat just after New Years, and it was clear right out of the gate that these guys knew their stuff, had struggled like so many of us do, and as a result knew just where the fulcrum questions were regarding faith, faith and the arts (“Are the people you know in Christian music sincere, or…”), and the dynamics of deconstructing. They were gracious hosts and I consider them both new friends. I hope you’ll give it a listen and perhaps a share, and if you enjoy it, check out some of their other episodes.

    Listen here.

    Screen Shot 2020-05-11 at 12.31.36 AM