on musician friends

When I was fourteen I ran a zine club out of a then-fledgling art collective in Missoula, Zootown Arts Community Center (aka the ZACC). Technically, we had adult supervision, but the group morphed from me and overseer Debbie, to me, my best friend, and our selected peers. While the group wasn’t invite-only, it always felt a bit exclusive. Perhaps this is more to do with the niche of zine publishing and its relative obscurity by the late ought’s, particularly among junior high attendees. Smart phones were not yet ubiquitous, but things like payphones and Kinkos had fallen by the wayside.

I digress. Our group met after school on Thursdays, where we’d write weird poetry, make collages, and create whatever bizarre things kept us functional through the banality of a suburbanized middle school experience. 

One of the girls in this group, let’s call her K, was a burgeoning musical talent. Although her interest in music, in retrospect, was mostly externally imposed, she was an exceptionally educated, gifted musician. Her voice, professionally trained, was clear and sweet and powerful, and could fill a city block unaided. Her songwriting was insightful, especially for such a young person. Best of all, she would play for us, her friends, at the drop of a hat. 

My family is full of musicians. I’ve always gravitated to them, lured in by acoustic nods to Hank Williams that remind me of my granddad, or piano that reminds me of Sundays in the kitchen. I’ve done my time playing passable cello, some less-than-stellar guitar, and now drumming. I also sing all the time, though my friends might say that I more inflict that upon people than anything else. 

K performed frequently in town–if she’d stayed on that path, I imagine she’d have become an itinerant icon of Missoula, though I won’t deny she maintains a cult status here–and so it was that we her friends went to cheer her on at an open mic competition at a now-defunct Irish pub.

Maybe I’m biased, but I still think she should have won. The guy who did simply brought a bigger group to vote for him. Among the performers was one boy, a weedy sprig of scruffy hair with a junky acoustic, who performed under the name The Sky Looks Pissed, a line ripped from an Ingrid Michaelson song. He played a shivery, tongue-in-cheek rendition of You Shook Me All Night Long that brought the house down. As a group of fifteen-year-old girls, we were collectively smitten.

This was Ethan, though I didn’t know an Ethan from a John Allen yet. Our paths would cross again a year later, after the zine club and its requisite social bonds had disbanded. Now Ethan performed with a band named The Whoopass Girls–the original name of The Powerpuff Girls, which frustratingly few people seemed to know then or now. Ethan and I bonded over this fact, over indie movies, over Taco Bell and Playstation 2. 

We bonded over DIY music. This was Ethan’s home planet, or at least its closest habitable moon. He would play me songs as he came up with them, share demos and lyrics, link me to his more obscure side projects. I soaked it all in, enamored of the artistry–or its lack. Ethan’s music ranged from punchy pop-punk to moody stream-of-consciousness. His shows were always ill populated, on a weeknight, usually in a storefront that doubled as a shirt shop during the day. Naturally there were also quite a few basements. 

After a while, I started recognizing myself in Ethan’s music. Little references–one time my actual name–that only made me want to dig deeper, listen harder, listen again. A lyrical riddle, or a shared memory made larger than life. I can still remember the words to some very, very deep cuts from this era.

This is the siren call of the musician friend. My mother, who had worked at a storied jazz club in Phoenix in her 20’s, unsuccessfully attempted to warn me off dating musicians through my teens–but my first love was a bass player, and to be honest I don’t know what she expected.

Musicians are a tricky breed; they know too much about music to simply enjoy it anymore. My adolescent tastes, admittedly sugary or at least rather commercial, made it easy for K and Ethan and those that followed to get snarky with me. There is, I speculate, a type of anxiety that musicians possess where, if someone likes music the musician considers beneath them (or beneath their aspirations, anyway) then that person must not truly get their music. I suppose the analog for writers would be showing a friend your work and having them gush about how it reminds them of Sarah Dessen, instead of, say, Joan Didion–you might not hate them for it, but you sure wish their reference point was a little more dignified.

Musicians in particular, I’ve noticed, seem to struggle to feel seen, even by other artists. Paradoxical, as they are often born performers. Maybe that’s the catch. Writers put to paper what they mean, or draw attention to the negative space of their intention. Visual artists transcribe the abstract into the physical. Musicians are sort of stuck halfway between these two points.

Fair enough. I have struggled over the years to articulate what exactly it is I get out of being around people whose creative world isn’t mine. Particularly when its practitioners seem to live in an edgy state of near-constant anxiety over how their work is understood by even–maybe especially–their close friends. My best guess: there’s simply a generative quality to being around good art. The illumination of art that engages our senses brings deep, rich gifts of imagination. And I’ve always loved that. I think my other creative friends love it too. We can fuel each other through our own inspiration.

But the other tricky thing about musicians is they are very skittish about your appreciation. In fairness, I do have a sort of carnivorous, consumptive bearing, and my big, buggy eyes gleam when I’m so much as in the same room as good live music. I once had a boyfriend, nominally a jazz pianist, tell me outright that he didn’t think I knew enough about music to enjoy his. While in retrospect that is a very funny, very pretentious comment for a person to make, in the moment it frustrated me. Artists who are able to gain creative nutrients from the work of their friends build immense synergy toward their own projects. They amplify. But then, the jazz pianist never bothered to read much of my work.

Life moved, adolescence to adulthood, and any early, misguided aspirations of becoming a part of the music industry sloughed off from me (while, ironically, my personal ties to the music industry actualized). I focused on my own creative talents and honed them far enough to not wish for a different modality. The bass-playing first love still invites me to his shows. The jazz pianist is helping me shop for a car.

Recently, Ethan posted to Instagram to say that his band, Mido Skip, would be performing their last-ever gig. He and his partner of a decade were moving to Tennessee.

Of course I took pains to be there. Ethan and I had fallen out of contact years ago, a couple messages per half decade at most. But I knew something would be off for me forever, if I didn’t catch his last downtown show. 

In a three-act lineup, Mido Skip headlined. Their show was at, of all places, the ZACC, though the organization now lives in a different building and has no zine club run by baby hipsters, to my knowledge. Eschewing the stage, Ethan and his bandmates rolled a living room rug out on the floor of the venue. That way, we could all crowd around, peak intimacy. Ever the showman.

I expected to feel nostalgic. That didn’t prepare me for the sensation of being hurtled back to my late teens. Suddenly it was as it had always been: Ethan, intense and brooding, pure dynamics, and me, adoring and feeling somewhat unworthy of the sudden, jubilant love pulsing through me.

A stage crush is an electrifying thing. It might lay dormant for a decade at a time, but it’s only that. I cried through most of the set, happy and sad. Seventeen again. Watching a guy I liked play his heart out on the living room rug. Life had taken us far in the years since our closest days. This dude who used to sing the last Google search on my computer is good reasons not to kill myself  to me from the dirty driver’s seat of his Mustang was here celebrating a new chapter in his life. The me who once fantasized about an opulent and expansive existence, terrified I would never be brave enough to have that, had made good on her hopes. But in some ways, we hadn’t moved an inch. I mean, we were still downtown on a weeknight, wearing all black.

On the subject of musician friends, no shadow looms larger or louder in my consciousness than my buddy Shane. Shane is burdened by genius, essentially a musical savant, and intensely skilled after 25-ish years of dedicated work. He’s got the chops, and manages to embody a sound particular to Missoula Valley, a sound that is present in the likes of Modest Mouse and the work of Colin Malloy. Strong country fundamentals elevated by a certain indie warble, like hard wind through a screen door. Haunted and intelligently rustic. 

Shane is someone who could, genuinely, do anything he wants with his music; he chooses to facilitate the scene here. When we were in our earliest 20’s, we would sit in the park and I’d make up stupid prompts for songs, which he’d gamely play on an acoustic: Play me one about a rodeo clown. Do a song about Rasputin as a sort of warrior-poet. I’ve seen him perform in bands with his exes, in bluegrass trios, with childhood friends, completely solo. I take an intensely selfish pleasure from his music, because I find it creatively invigorating. At one point, we were English majors together (also briefly roommates), and perhaps that’s what shines through most clearly in our dynamic. I would gently characterize us as brain twins, but that’s only in matters other than music.

So what is it about his music? He thinks mine is trash, tells me I can’t sing about once a fiscal quarter. I have trouble knowing if I’m supposed to give or withhold approval for his songs. Both feel oddly perverse. Sheer adoration seems offensive to such a longstanding friendship. But feigning indifference would be a deception. At his shows, I usually sit and breathe in what I hear, and let that germinate in me how it will. I have admittedly gotten good writing material out of this over the years.

I am constantly called in and pushed back by the waves of sound that radiate off of the musicians in my life. Someone said that music decorates time. It decorates the very air, slips like liquid into the cracks of a person. As an aimless, undersupervised kid, music was a sort of Bible for me; lyrics were often the only guidance I had to go on for pressing metaphysical questions. So many of my ideas–The Killing Type among them–saw their early inklings in music, the feeling of certain songs, the stories they unspooled so quickly and skillfully. To compress a resonant narrative into four minutes is a feat by any measure.

I suppose I’m writing this to try and make sense of what the music of my friends does for me in particular. It’s not uncommon for friends to cross-pollinate each other’s work. Sometimes I catch things I’ve said or done in the works of my peers–sometimes they catch their words in mine. A rich tapestry, to be sure, but surprisingly fraught. Not because we’re all hyper-competitive about each individual line we originate. Not because I’m selfish with my bon mots. I suppose it’s just that I’ve struggled always to articulate what it is, exactly, about K’s music, Ethan’s music, Shane’s, that made me more creative. Something about synergy, something about love. When I was seventeen, Ethan wrote a song with the line:

The dog we saw on my birthday when I escaped the fall

You made me feel alright

And I’ll miss that night, I’ll miss that night, I’ll miss that night

In commemoration of an incident that winter, on his birthday, where our plans for the night were sidelined by the errand of comforting a dying labrador. I had felt exquisitely embarrassed, as dying dogs are neither fun nor celebratory, and yet Ethan’s heart somehow transmuted that experience into love.

When K was fourteen, she wrote a song about a dream she’d had. The dream–and I do think the statute of limitations has expired on this one, K, if you ever see this–was about none other than Shane, who was our already-poetic classmate and the target of much girly ardour in our year. All I can see is mountains now, he’d said, in her dream, and that’s what she built her bridge on. And that too was an act of love.

When I came back from my circumnavigation of the globe, strong and sad, heartbroken and hopeful, I’d sat with a pint at an open mic at a brewery. Shane, King of the Open Mic and Setup/Teardown Toady (and, incidentally, an EQ champion, who adjusts and adjusts levels until every act that takes the stage has a fighting chance, even if that just means adding volume and subtle reverb), played second or third.

I have put up a good fight, am viciously positive by nature, but–I can’t lie–this year has challenged me on every front. I’ve been exhausted, at points, and hurt. Deeply hurt. Lonely and far from home. Shane sang a song of his own, the kind of lurid narrative that makes my imagination fly:

Captain Kavanaugh’s Colonial Coffee

Comes all the way from Sumatra

He’s an intrepid explorer of the Far East

And the Arabian Peninsula

He’ll get you to the Port of Boston

In the middle of the night

He’ll get you to where you’re going to

I promise you, my friend

And I wished, ardently, that I’d had this song with me as a comfort on my big, solo journey, from the Far East, to the Port of Boston, and everywhere in between. It’s the type of earworm that gets stuck in your head for days. It’s the type of song that replenishes a tired, anxious heart. I promise you, my friend.

We have a chance to inspire people in unexpected ways. Perhaps inspiration, too, is a type of free-floating love.

Writing a song for a person is like a confession, like writing them a poem. Love takes many forms, but music is perhaps the medium most ready to express all of them. So where you have music, you have love. And, at least for me, where there’s love, there will always be music.

I don’t let people shittalk my taste anymore, and happily this appears to be a behavior that drops off for all but the most pressingly grim people as we age. I doubt I’ll ever see Ethan again, or K, though life is a lovely wheel. And I still don’t know if it’s correct to be overt with Shane about the fact that, even if we weren’t good friends, I would still be a fan. But I keep listening to all their work. And I keep writing. And I have to believe that, despite my mother’s early warnings, I am on to something to surround myself with musicians.