When I was twenty-six, I considered putting music on hold as an artistic endeavor. 2020 was not an easy year for anyone, but working in the field of healthcare left me burned out and asking myself what really mattered.

No one cared about my music in the way I wanted them to. Friends and family would give everything I created a fair listen and, usually, tell me they liked it, but I wanted more. I wanted people to react the same way I did when I first heard the music that transformed me, setting me on a collision course with guitar, drums, mixing, mastering and producing music. They were supportive, but they weren’t moved like they were when I first started.

As a teenager, the act of creating music, even pale mimicry, was transformative. I put things together in new ways – ways that felt unique to me. Everyone was excited about that, but as a young adult, progress slowed when my loose college schedule graduated to a full-time career. I thought I was losing the magic. I could make things that sounded good and were more “me” than ever, but they couldn’t catch up to the more complex feelings I had as an adult.

The COVID-19 pandemic certainly introduced new feelings. At my lowest point, I sat in a room with our employee health officer guarding the door, waiting for me to speak to a therapist about setting up an appointment during a two-week leave of absence that started the moment I told my boss about some terrible thoughts that were beginning to resemble plans. They released me into the hollowed-out world of summer 2020, and I was more interested in therapy than music. But I had to try to save it – to fight for the artistic potential I always imagined for myself.

I went back to my basics. Drums with barking hi-hats syncopating intriguing rhythmic flows. Bass lines following lock-step to the drums. Chord choices blurring lines between fae whimsy and cold finality. Bringing these elements together has always been my specialty, but over the years I had forgotten the heart and soul: lead guitar.

I started with guitar a decade before, first inspired by the leads of the enigmatic virtuoso, Buckethead. As my tastes expanded, so did my style, and I was ready to show it. The track was called “Inner Love.” The instrumentation was great, and while in retrospect, the song was too repetitive, I had built towards a proper guitar solo at the end. I locked myself in my room one night and tried to record it.

Hearing the solo I recorded still cracks my psyche like a glow stick. It’s the feeling that signing my name with a pen is a farce compared to this guitar solo that says “Look! Here I am.” Spectral, icy twinkles of clean melody blasting off into a rip-roaring, face-melting riff that outros, perhaps forever, into an extraterrestrial line of staccato. It sounded like going to the afterlife and meeting everyone you loved at a concert that will never end. A sizzling venue. A party with aliens. This was a new beginning. I decided it would be the keynote track in a new album, titled “In Bloom,” and I had to share it with everyone.

No one felt the same way about it. My Buckethead covers from high school garnered more interest. The best response I got was “it was interesting.” I posted the song on a forum to get feedback, my first time doing so, and upon getting the simplest questions in return, I folded and removed my query.

I couldn’t describe the existential drop in my heart when someone asked me “what exactly do you want feedback on?” I couldn’t answer. I could only wonder why there was such a pit between the act of creating and the act of sharing.

Looking back, I understand the snare I had found myself in: my emotions drastically outpaced my knowledge of the medium. I had learned enough theory to jump as a kid and set my sights on the moon as an adult. It turns out, flying requires much more dedication. “Inner Love” needed some work. I should have asked for specific feedback and approached the process like it was a craft, but that wasn’t who I was back then.

Instead, I slammed the door shut on music. I stopped writing and left “In Bloom” half-finished.

A year later, as the excitement for those songs had all but faded, I came home on holiday. My parents were eager to see me again. My mother, ever supportive, asked me how music was going. I let her know in gentle terms that I probably wouldn’t be working on it any time soon.

She understood, which actually hurt my ego. Perhaps I wanted her to freak out and question why and beg me to keep at it. Instead, she told me she loved all the music I had made and was sure I’d find happiness elsewhere.

“I feel like no one cares,” I said. “It’s deflating to know that I won’t make an impact on people with my art.”

My mother smiled and told me a story – my own story.

~

When I was in the 3rd grade, I was assigned a difficult project in my Friday art class: create a picture book that tells a story. As a child who felt he couldn’t draw, this was a daunting task, but something magical happened.

I had such a vivid story in mind. We had a harlequin Great Dane named Rikki, and recently she had stolen my shoe. I chased her around the house trying to get it back. Yes, this would be a great story to tell to my friends, I thought, but I can’t draw a dog that does Rikki justice. She was a beautiful creature, massive in every right, with a spotted coat and a black tail that looked as if it had been dipped in white paint.

Dipped in white paint…

I knew what I could do. That week, I wrote the book: “My Dog Stole My Shoe.”

Every page described a different room in the house that I traversed in my mad dash to catch up to Rikki. I drew our sofa, a TV, some socks on the floor, a bed – all of the simple things I could handle drawing. At the right side of every frame was Rikki’s paint-dipped tail, the rest of her out of frame, surely on to the next room. The book takes the reader on an epic adventure through my house with a comical crescendo:

“Turns out, that wasn’t my shoe!”

I remembered it as my mother described it, but she had more to add. You see, she’s an art teacher herself. Elementary school, in fact. Every year, she gives a lesson to her classes. Young art students seem to always reach the same difficulties as I did – not being able to handle their limitations – and my mother always has the perfect lesson:

She shows them my book.

Every art student in her school, for the last twenty-plus years, has seen my book. They all oooh and ahhh and cross their fingers and pray as we see if I can get my shoe back. They ask my mom about Rikki and her paint-dipped tail. “Was she really that big?!” And at the end, the class always busts out into laughter as I make my big reveal that it wasn’t even my shoe. My mother’s lesson is simple: work around your limitations and you can make something like this. She says it always works.

If a lack of perceived impact closed the door on music, this story blew the whole house down.

Turns out, I had a big impact on an even bigger audience, but that wasn’t really what made this special. My mother loved my art enough to share it, and that was enough. Plus, I was able to be my own audience member, being so far-removed from its creation! Good job, kid!

Some art lives in a museum or in a record store. I’m proud to have art that lives in an elementary school. My mother’s support has helped me reset expectations and approach my new projects in a healthier way, these days as a writer and storyteller. I’m excited to see what happens next. Turns out, fae whimsy and cold finality make for great stories.