The Jam Might Save Us All
Thoughts on online music consumption, the ongoing loneliness epidemic and the healing power of communal playing.
In September of 2021, I laid in bed with my eyes affixed to the ceiling, feeling the walls move.
It was almost 1:00 in the morning and my new roommates were still hanging with friends in the garage adjacent to my new bedroom. The gathering had started around 8:00 PM but had transitioned, as I assumed it had always, into a jam session.
Alone in my bed, a new tenant and recently single, I listened to the low thrum of bass guitar - the amp mere feet from my head, its waves penetrating both drywall and puffy insulation - and flipped violently onto my side. I brushed off the swells of irritation and envy and waited for the moment my brain would shift into sleep, two heavy comforters weighing me down.
Today I’ll have lived in this house for a year and a half. In that time I’ve finally come to understand the importance, and the specialness, of that room.
Half of my roommates are musicians, and one of them has set up our garage to be a place of impromptu musical encounters. Two keyboards - one a standard Nord, the other custom made with a tube built-in - hold court among a drum set with optional cymbals, a wooden cajon, and a battalion of guitars and amps lining the west wall like bashful middle schoolers at a dance. In the corner lay two bags of assorted percussion, for whatever the moment calls for: the hiss of a makeshift rain stick; the calming clack of wood blocks; the chime of a triangle; the classic shuffle of tambourines, both with and without heads; shakers of all sizes, from multicolored eggs to a set of maracas, the bulbs quizzically sticky from some sap-like substance. A cheap pan flute lies forlorn on top of the pile, the vernacular unable to be parsed without a pair of adept lips.
In the beginning, I watched as every social happening, from holiday parties to potlucks, seemed to progress the same way. There’d be food, games, talk both small and large. Suddenly someone would sit at the cajon or pick up an acoustic guitar and strum a chord or two in steady repetition. Others would join in, finding things to play or items to pound. The remainder of the pack would either separate from the noise or look on with vested interest. They’d close their eyes and sway their heads, embracing the messiness of the improvisation.
At this inevitable moment I would blanch, wanting no part in the collective experience. Occasionally I’d retreat to my room and, in its cloistering comfort, would pull my phone out and get on YouTube or run through my email for PR albums I may have missed. This was how I engaged with music, not in some circle of strangers where I might run the risk of revealing my lack of conventional training. Besides, the music that usually emanated out of that circle often grated against my ears. Two people might have fundamental misunderstandings about what key they were playing in, or somebody at the drums might be unable to keep time.
It just didn’t make sense to me. Where was the structure? The studio gloss? Where was the attention to detail, the strive for quality? Where was the finished product?
Then, and for the longest time, I held fast to two axioms, each running counter to the other:
a.) I could best relate to the world through music.
b.) Music would ultimately keep me from relating to the world.
The second part I learned after I realized how few people aligned with the specific hue of my passion. Music was, and somewhat still is, a private endeavor for me. I have internalized the process of listening to an album and decoding its secrets, letting it rewrite the glyphs on my heart, as if I were a undercover spy eavesdropping or a student covering his test answers with his hands. All the music I hold dear I subconsciously translate into a language only I can understand. Even now, the way I usually interact with music is through a pair of headphones, the universal symbol for “don’t talk to me.”
I remember it starting in my young adulthood. In my earliest memory of college, it’s an autumn evening and I’m walking from Orchard Hill down to the Northeast dining commons with a patchwork copy of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation loaded into my Walkman. At the time I’m having trouble making friends with my dormmates, those people studying fields of no real interest to me that had also happened to develop agency over their lives even before they had set foot on campus.
I eat alone, I walk back alone, and I sit at my overheating Dell laptop alone. Through a cheap pair of Skullcandies the record seeps into my ears, the harsh blasts of Thurston Moore’s Jazzmaster traveling up through the crimson wires, rearranging me. I study the crystalline chords that open “Cross the Breeze” and the way “The Sprawl” fissures into that wondrous outro: a landscape of windswept trash and brick buildings backlit by the same picturesque twilight framed in my small, blindless window.
My heart begins to race. With no one to talk to regarding this life-changing musical discovery, I turn to Google for validation and find a review from a publication called Pitchfork. Three years beforehand, they had bestowed the deluxe edition of Daydream Nation with a perfect 10, a score I soon garnered was a rarity for the site.
And right there is all the validation I need, for in Nitsuh Abebe’s florid retrospective on Sonic Youth’s “finest” record, I find incontrovertible evidence backing up my feelings. I don’t need someone else to bounce my thoughts off of, so I tell myself I don’t want one. The review is proof enough that I am correct. Its number rises off the webpage into a magnetic monolith I can structure myself around.
In the months after, I seek out other paragons of “good” music: Neil Young’s honest foray into darkness Tonight’s The Night, itself an inspiration for the original title of Daydream Nation; D’Angelo’s game-changing neo-soul document Voodoo; Radiohead’s turn-of-the-century masterworks (of these, my favorite being Kid A); Nirvana’s Nevermind and its ode to early-twenties angst that I play on repeat after my appendectomy; Nick Drake’s contemplative finale Pink Moon; The Velvet Underground’s brilliant debut LP. Then, after looking back, I move forward, keeping up to date on Friday releases and the discussions behind them. Every week feels like another opportunity for discovery, another quest to find the pieces making me whole.
I could not understand then the fallacy I was falling for: this narrow fabricated narrative of what makes music special, a narrative that makes music journalism, foundationally, a dark art. Even at its entertaining best, it fundamentally misunderstands the point of music as an act of creative expression. It takes something that’s designed for multiple interpretations, that which transcends language and invites nuance, and lassoes it into rigid submission. (Determined music journalists deign to play god, and many of us happen to be very bad at it.)
Even knowing this now, the process of viewing music through the lens of a critic is still my default mode. “Music is subjective,” you’ll hear from any rational listener, and they would be right, but there still exist presuppositions of objectivity that I cannot shake based on this runaway train of purported worth from notable writers and storied thinkers and the goddamn Library of Congress. The music that I’ve written over the last decade has also been forged in this iron, this idea that something can always be made better than it once was if enough painstaking effort is applied - a method of songwriting appropriate for an introvert with a predilection to the self-sustaining echo accompanying isolation.
Isolation, of course, might as well be drawn from the same well as all of our contemporary poisons. The injurious side of isolation is loneliness, and loneliness is harming us - killing us - at a profound rate.
Surely you’ve read at least one of the numerous articles insinuating loneliness as a defining struggle of our times. In 2015, Anne Case and Angus Deaton released a paper highlighting a increasing trend in mortality rates among uneducated middle-aged white people. The study, anchored around the suicides and cirrhosis-based fatalities that the pair labeled “deaths of despair,” prompted multiple articles illustrating loneliness as a growing epidemic without an easy solution. These writers focused then on the middle-aged and the elderly, but they still alluded to the growing issue of people my age and younger living lives mired in loneliness.
Every two years since 2011, the CDC conducts a large-scale survey among high school students tracking risk behaviors in regards to sex, violence, and drug use. Of the 10-year trends documented in their 2021 data compilation (released last month), mental health might be the most disconcerting. Between 2017 and 2019, years before the pandemic, reports of “significant sadness or hopelessness” among students jumped from 31% to 37%, and two years later that number jumped again to 42%. Female students in particular saw a huge increase in this phenomenon, from 36% in 2011 to 57% in 2021. In publishing the numbers, the CDC concluded that “young people are experiencing a level of trauma and distress that requires immediate action.”
This is undoubtedly a multifacted issue whose basis, I must assume, rests partly in the rise of socially-oriented technology. Other trends pulled from the same survey (like downward rates in overall sexual behavior) as well as other newly-introduced variables (like middling rates of “school connectedness” and univerally-high rates of “high-parental monitoring”) point toward young people, even pre-pandemic, avoiding in-person social situations in favor of seemingly safe, relatively anonymous online spaces.
Countless studies conducted over the last decade have demonstrated that living our lives in front of screens wreaks havoc on our mental health. Even disregarding the sedentary behaviors that lead to well-established health problems, there’s the lack of sleep stemming from bedroom screen usage, the unsustainable flood of dopamine from ceaseless information processing, and the empty calories of surface-level social interaction on online platforms. It’s all spurred a crisis that continually inspires those of us with far-reaching voices to sound warning signals. Yet its grip on American culture hasn’t loosened at all. If anything, it’s become even more pronounced.
So many of us, especially those younger and less grounded in a healthier worldview, submit ourselves to the illusion of interconnectivity that the Internet’s current iteration presents. Spurred on by bite-sized stimuli, we feel our emotions crest and plummet like a runner’s pulse, our neurotransmitters firing off like Chinese New Year, every day. We’re pummeled by anonymous assaults on our insulae, our brains smoking from the searing brands of advertisements. People we’ve never met live exciting lives in public, keeping us anxiously guessing whether we should live our boring ones the same way. We try to break away but find ourselves inexorably drawn back, the complete corporatization transforming these spaces into a ventricle of the plutocratic heart that keeps our country’s blood pumping.
Some of us merely succumb to the vacuous pleasures of this environment. Others fall for something even more insidious. In embracing the Internet and social media, we’ve also embraced its inferences, one of which is the notion that a life unposted (and uncurated) is no life worth living. Curation - in a playlist, in an Instagram profile, even in textual conversation - cannot help but insinuate perfection. It suggests that there is a right way to go about life, the likes and follows that accompany each post creating a metric that we must measure up to. That metric forms the surface of an ever-rising sea, and as our lives inevitably dip below it, we struggle to breathe, feeling the water choking us, dragging us down into a fathomless isolatory deep.
Naturally, when I decided to pursue a career in music, it started as a solitary process. Unemployed, in a Federal Way apartment with a Gibson SG knockoff and a MacBook running Logic, I layered tracks over tracks in a caffeine-coated mania while the guy I was seeing at the time peddled furniture in Silverdale. I couldn’t tell if the silence I was met with upon returning home every night was fatigue from the job or subtle resentment at housing my selfish undertaking.
I think at the time I was going for a sort of maximalist jangle rock, but nothing sounded quite right. I was working with shitty microphones and my ability to mix was still rudimentary, so when my projects reached an arbitrary end I would listen back and feel so dissatisfied that I would descend into a familiar depression that always seemed to spoil my sense of accomplishment. In the towering shade of my expectations, perfection always seemed to elude me.
Just like in college, I craved validation, but this time it would require far more work to achieve. I’d need to reach out to real bookers, find real bandmates: practice, perform, face rejection. I got to that point eventually, but even conquering that precipice didn’t neutralize the standards that had fossilized inside me or my preconceived notions about what a band ought to sound like, the professionalism and fastidiousness and unplacable je ne sais quoi that accompanies “great” music. I could feel comfortable playing my songs in front of other people, but I could never feel comfortable if those people were responsible for that music, wresting it from my control and warping it through their own perspectives. When another of my bands inevitably fell apart, I decided then that I would stop challenging my postmodern tenets and lean into them completely, which is how I’ve ended up, years later, writing this.
I didn’t start playing music again until I moved into this house, with these people and their tendency to invite others into their musical worlds. I had carried with me my ex-boyfriend’s Yamaha acoustic guitar whose strings hadn’t been changed in years, and on it, I started composing songs meant to invite quiescence, songs meant to be performed solo. By then I had gained confidence in my ability to captivate alone on stage, but still not in my ability to open that power to the contributions of other musicians. Like Tweeting, posting on a forum, or writing a blog post, I wanted to convey my vision in one direction, unimpeded and unreceptive to a reply.
So much has changed about music, and about the performing arts since ancient times. The gulf between the Commedia Dell’arte and a K-pop concert, for instance, is unfathomable. But the actual mechanics of it - the voice of the artist reaching the senses of the audience - has only ever been challenged in rare circumstances, like when John Cage was doing his thing. Otherwise, the vector has largely stayed the same. You play and they watch. Or, you record and they listen. This industry is summarily the business of (in Kim Gordon’s words) paying to see other people believe in themselves.
But as communicative technologies have altered the world over the new century, and as we continue to break apart in their solvent, that vector feels strange, somewhat corrupted. Never mind the likely possibility of spending your capital on the illusion of self-belief, because so many obstacles - labels, managers, executives, PR agents, critics, and now IPO firms - now impede what ought to be a transparent connection. The line between audience and artist feels like a scribble now, like a pen scratched across a receipt, desperately trying to draw ink.
In the wake of accessible recording software and easy-to-use applications, we’ve turned into a culture where anybody can be both a producer and a consumer (a “prosumer,” in the words of futurist Alvin Toffler). On paper this feels utopian, allowing the platforming of voices once relegated to the sidelines via bigotry and/or lack of funds. There are also course-correcting elements to this development, not the least of which is the way it demystifies what people like me have turned the creative process into. (In our quest to centralize the individual voice, as is our wont in America, we ended up mistakenly mythologizing it. How much damage has the pervasive “genius” myth done to us, and continues to do to us?)
TikTok, ironically, might be as joyous as direct music interactivity gets on the Internet. I remember the first time I browsed TikTok’s viral charts only to find Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow” sitting at #10, thanks to a series of videos depicting glitched footage from the video game Skate where a created character looking like Jesus flies over the stage at Mach 3, arms in a T-pose.
Pearl Jam was my guiding light in high school, and back then I internalized “Even Flow” as a tortured, theatric tableau of homelessness lacquered by the empathy embedded in Eddie Vedder’s fierce baritone. But in these Skate clips, which feature just the chorus and Mike McCready’s little wah-wah shred right before it, the song curdles into its surface elements. The gruffness of Vedder’s voice and the bombast of its classic grunge, both instantly drawing a line between the 90s and its status as a golden era of skateboarding, make the song a perfect little punchline to the clip’s morsel of humor. Delightful moments like this abound there, and they consistently fly in the face of my pretentious personal philosophy.
It’s easy to see why so many people have latched on to this wild new form of expression, young people most of all. Youths historically want nothing more than their own piece of the culture, especially if it’s actively rejecting the status quo. To an extent, I applaud that rejection. I think siphoning some of the pretenses off of music by removing it from its context is necessary to shrug off the stuffy canonizing we’ve committed over the last six decades. There’s always room for those still interested in discovering the history behind that canon, but freeing music up for the sake of a different kind of creative expression is exciting in its own way.
That is, of course, as long as that practice is done for the true benefit of its users. I can’t imagine that’s the case. TikTok and YouTube provide spaces where people can express themselves in bold unprecented ways, but the content we produce is all done ultimately in the service of the platforms. All of our creations are fuel for their furnaces, wool for their crocheted quilts. For the stink of monetization, we abide by their regulations and design our creations around a fickle set of preferences that pushes specific entries to the front and leaves the rest of them behind. We’re tempted by the prospect of fame but those efforts, in cruel supply-and-demand fashion, become less and less valuable as these spaces become flooded by our works, their creators increasingly faceless as their creations are slotted algorithmically into anodyne playlists.
If we only aim to be consumers, we’re still invited to operate in distinctly creational ways. We engage with the entirety of recorded music as though it were a children’s museum: making playlists, sending songs to others, interacting with a personalized algorithm that designs daily mixes around our private tastes - all tasks that prioritize music as a deeply personal endeavor.
Even TikTok, which removes the limits of music as a tool of personal expression and allows for collaboration in the process, still requires you to interact with the platform. At a baseline that requires the same commitment to social media that anything else requires: being tied to a screen, scrolling endlessly through other people’s entries, feeling the sugary high of your brain scrambling to ingest it all even as the fantastic locales, the magic tricks, the sheer confidence permeates your boundaries. The necessity to self-promote is really only suited for the small subset of extroverted personalities that can handle constant self-promotion. Freak virality, meanwhile, rarely provides long-term benefits to the producer; this is a phenomenon that’s easily observable on any given platform, where even substantial gains in viewership and followers frequently point to temporary interest in the personality itself, not in the product created by that personality.
You might comment, and your comment might be replied to, but the displacement of the words feels hollow. You might try to make a clip of your own and discover how difficult it is to put something together resembling what you just watched, your own insecurities plaguing the effort. When it's finished and you release it there’s the initial rush of viewership and approval, even though it comes in the form of cold numbers and digital heart icons and strings of laudatory words from tiny circular profiles. And then time passes, and you're still alone with your screen, and the system demands you do it again, lest you lose this potential bounty it has momentarily offered you. All the while there’s some creeping dissonance regarding how many people seem to be engaged in your content and how little of it feels palpable, what meager percentage of it reaches your spirit. You never see anyone else struggle with this, and no one else sees you struggle.
The complete assimilation of this dynamic, and of the entertainment industry in general, into our culture has caused us to conceive of music solely within the context of consumerism - which, thanks to the development of targeted ads through online data theft, has itself shifted even further toward the individual consumer rather than the demographic. Consumerism has no goal other than the acquisition of goods and services, and today it produces the best results when it prioritizes each of us individually. Indeed, it’s stunning how personal, and private, the act of engaging with music has become, compared to the community-based activity it originated as, and what it continued to be thousands of years later. And because it operates in this odd uroboric way, where we ravenously devour whatever makes its way into our feeds, it’s destructive in a way that doesn’t feel sustainable. We eat and we eat and we don’t question who’s cooking the food, or where it’s coming from, or why we can’t stop.
This is not to say that it’s impossible to physically connect with others in such an environment. Community through the performing arts still exists, expliticly in the way fans collect at shows. There’s a distinct satisfaction in being physically surrounded by like-minded individuals, like the person standing next to you at a concert whose mutual interest led them to your exact location. But live music is becoming more and more untenable. It’s becoming more common for artists, even those with devoted fanbases, to cancel tours based on their economic viability. And those artists that can tour, from Bruce Springsteen to Taylor Swift, are subject to parasitic ticketing practices that have spiraled so out of control that the opportunity to see these acts live is afforded only to those with disproportionately-high disposable incomes.
There’s a part of me that wants to understand how it’s all connected: this tangled web of progress and legerdemain, of academia and philosophy, of race and class and power and greed that has somehow brought me to believe, for the longest time, that I cannot connect to other people through music. It’s a “truth” that feels antithetical to its provenance.
I have some creeping feeling that it’s linked to the notion that so much art in America feels like a survival tactic, a coping mechanism to deal with how our realm has morphed into this cold unfeeling place that fails to nurture us on even basic levels. We generally don’t think about music the way so many other cultures who are so much less privileged than us do, these cultures we call “third-world” who graciously, communally, sing and dance in respect for the world around them - a respect that reflects the way that world, and all its natural beauty, returns it in kind.
Then again, it’s the same part of me that automatically creates that divide through ruthless intellectualization, the parts of my brain I so desperately want to shut off. In too much history and too much pretense, I’d forgotten how to enjoy music’s purest gifts. I’d taken for granted the simple strumming of chords on someone else’s beat, a creative process that results in actual creation.
It was my roommate Jordan who first convinced me of the power of jamming. He’d been working on converting me for quite a while, trying to get me out of my shell. He’s a few years younger than me but has done more to challenge my preconceptions than anybody else. My favorite is when he pushes me to ask artists that I’m interviewing why exactly they want to be in a band because he’s personally fascinated by the answer. It’s a valid question, perhaps more so than ever before.
Musically, I relate to his girlfriend more than him, because we both feel most comfortable preparing songs for performance. Jordan also has a band, but he prefers something a little more freeform. He loves sitting down with other people, strangers even, and wrapping keyboard licks around their chord formations, maybe soloing on a mandolin around A and E. He could do this for hours. Many a night I’ve seen him do it, and I’ve certainly heard him do it into the early morning, feeling the walls move.
I think he must have noticed my distinct reticence toward those parts of our gatherings when the jam would break out. He'd reach out to me specifically to get on a guitar as he took his position at the Nord. I'd weigh the invitation, feeling terrified. I know a handful of major and minor chords, but my songs are built on ersatz fingerings, open strums, and capo placement. My life, non-coincidentally, is built on anxious predictions and negative assumptions. What if someone tells me to jump to C# and I can’t find it? Am I even a musician then?
It took us a while to get on the same page, but one night something finally clicked. The previous Sunday I had attended Conor Byrne Pub’s famed Open Mic Night, a weekly opportunity for aspiring singer-songwriters to hone their craft in front of a live, supportive audience. (For a collection of people trying to promote themselves as independent creatives, it’s as communal as anything I’ve encountered in Seattle.) At some point in the night, I convinced a handful of musicians I had never met before to come to my place and play together the following weekend, an impulsive prospect whose follow-through truly never happens in this city.
Yet we all committed, and that Friday we were in the garage, Jordan our surprise leader. He was the only person who truly understood the assignment. The rest of us, including me, had our own baggage. Fascinated, I observed as we struggled to enter the same current, each of us having operated on our own wavelengths for so long. One of us turned the volume knob down on his guitar to keep from overtly fucking up. Another, an electric violinist, attempted to navigate around the energy of our repetitions, mostly choosing to blanket each of them in a steady buzz of amplified legato. Yet another sat in front of a microphone and frequently froze, failing to find words fittingly poetic or profound. Jordan leaned toward his mic and start singing a monologue about poop.
For people unused to it, this kind of musical improvisation can be so intensely vulnerable, kind of like being on a nude beach for the first time. There’s no place to hide behind your ideas of what music is supposed to sound like. There’s no pretense, there’s no chest-puffing or underlying measure of skill at your instrument, and there’s certainly no room for individual agenda. If an agenda does exist, it is in the harmony and melody everyone is constructing together, and the more harmonic or melodic it sounds, the better it feels to know you have accomplished it with such unique ingredients. Its spontaneity further adds to the specialness; the end result, by nature of the process through which it was created, cannot be repeated.
But then to call it an end result misses the point completely. I’ve “jammed” with my own bands a ton of times, but it was all in the service of urgently jolting the creative mind awake for composition’s sake. This kind of jamming bears no such goal. Our notes aren’t piling up in the center but sublimating into the ether, never to be thought of again. Every strum or hit lives in the present moment; every flub or mistake is laughed off and soon forgotten. We’re not there to land on the seeds of a hit song or to discover if we have the chemistry to form a real band. We’re here to open ourselves up in ways we don’t often get the chance to anymore - to, in other words, be human.
I want to stress here that, while this is all new stuff to me, I’m not trying to propagate some fancy discovery. Modern musicians have been communally jamming for ages, and if you live in a city, chances are you can find a place that benevolently hosts weekly or monthly jamming sessions. In Seattle, the Nectar Lounge in Fremont has been hosting Mo’ Jam Mondays for years now. So yes, this might all be obvious to some, but it feels so radical to me in the current era.
For one thing, it seems impossible to replicate jamming’s ineffable charm in an online space. You could conceivably attempt some type of video call or connect through one of the many jamming apps currently in development, but that still requires a stellar Internet connection, and even then you’re limited by inherent lag issues. Currently, the lowest amount of delay between audio sources is about 67 milliseconds, which is still a significant amount of delay in regard to precise timing or uptempo rhythms. Future improvements to connection speed might make online jamming more viable, but the separation of space feels as synthetic a substitute as anything else. You really need to be in the same room, watching someone’s fingers land on a chord that you can imitate, making clear eye contact, and letting the acoustics of the room warp the sound around you.
For another, the barriers to entry are surprisingly permeable. Because partaking in a jam frees you of your ego, your identity matters not one iota. For a brief moment, it’s incredibly refreshing to not feel as though you are your skin color or your place of birth, your gender or your sexuality, the thoughts in your head or the things you’ve done - those supposedly-ingrained facets of your personhood that have come to represent us in the minds of the terminally online.
The only part of you that might matter is your capacity to be musical, and even that means less than you would think. Many jams are built around simple pattern recognition where the group moves between as few as two chords or notes. Some are even content to sit on one note and drone (one of the most famous examples being La Monte Young’s Dream Syndicate). In my experience, those who have yet to pick up a guitar or sit at a set of keys are usually delighted to find they can be as integral to the group effort as the professionals. Perhaps it would be better to say that the only thing that matters is the capacity for others to pick up on your own sense of musicality, which itself is such an easy, pure, selfless act of social connection. If someone can only play one or two chords, meeting them there makes all the difference.
And, of course, my favorite: if everyone is an equal participant in the making of the music, and if the goal of the music itself is to just be present in each other’s company, where’s the financial incentive? If the music industry is people paying to see others believe in themselves, jamming is essentially all of us paying nothing to believe in each other, and feeling that belief well up inside. There’s no gulf between the artist and the audience if everyone is the artist and everyone is the audience, and that makes this casual form of socially-based transcendence wholly unmonetizable.
Until - and I hope, I really really do, that this never happens - such a time when some enterprising individuals find a way to exploit this concept by renting out luxury spaces for upper-middle class individuals to drink red wine and learn how to get free. SoFar-ing the whole thing, if you will. Pray that day never comes, and reject it with every fiber of your being if it does.
After I had written enough material for a full solo set, I made moves toward hosting my very first house show. In the wake of venue closure after venue closure, the house show circuit continues to thrive in this city, and Jordan’s been wanting to turn our house into something akin to a regular performance spot for a while.
I did everything right, or at least I believed I did. I drew up an incredibly crude poster, in the same mid-fi fashion I always managed to execute my music in. I messaged everyone I knew, I posted on social media, and I even recorded my very first Instagram story to advertise the show hours before doors opened. I got a bunch of likes on my posts and a series of texts asking for directions, and soon my confidence rose as I envisioned the sight of a packed house sitting in rapt attention as I commanded the space with the contents of my psyche.
Nobody came.
Well, two people came, but that is far from an audience. I didn’t do myself any favors by retreating to Portland for the week. Nor did I consider the fact that one of the performers on the bill had played roughly twelve shows in the last three months, and that the other had traveled from Vancouver without a work visa and thus couldn’t advertise the show out of legal fears. Still, I could feel the familiar sinking of my heart (the same sensation borne from countless unsuccessful birthday parties when 8:15 PM rolled around and only a couple of people had shown up. I drank my second White Claw and pushed the memories out of my head.
Luckily both people were sociable enough and able enough to elide over the awkwardness of the situation that our little group had turned into a gathering. And, like seemingly every gathering in my house, we found ourselves magnetically drawn to that garage and its many tools of reinvention, Jordan leading the pack. We took one look around the space and decided then to damn the old plan. We would conspiratorially turn the night into an impromptu jam, featuring our hapless pair of guests. It helped that they were also both musicians in some form or another.
As the night progressed, I could sense their worry at a potentially dreadful evening melt off their faces. One of them, a coworker of mine who I’d normally known to be reserved, got the chance to demonstrate his surprising knowledge of jazz standards. His fingers smoothly found the chords to “Lullaby of Birdland” as our Vancouver transplant cooed along, the corners of his mouth curling into an easy smile. The other took the keyboard beside him, delightfully switching between Jordan’s presets.
The songwriters who planned to play that night took turns doing renditions of their original material, but instead of sitting in polite attentiveness, we all joined in, fucking up their heartfelt creations with dissonant blasts of wah-wah and simplistic drum beats. We could have been apologetic, but we were too ensconced in the swirl of our sound, grateful that those songwriters were courageous enough to give part of themselves up for our collective merriment. We slowed down, we sped up, we looked at each other, and tried to time up our changes.
And I sat there with a jazz bass in hand, remembering the customary urge to cringe and instead feeling my muscles soften, the heavy rusted armor I had once thought grafted to my skin beginning to loosen.