17d • Journal Entries
Figuring It Out Isn’t About Answers, It’s About Becoming Who You Need to Be
Journal Entry
Well, here I am on the final days to close up the album that we’ve been writing for the band since the fall of last year. I go into Harlem this weekend to start the recording process and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a certain weight to that. Walking into a studio in Harlem carries something with it. The streets up there have seen so much music pass through them that you can almost feel it in the pavement when you step out of the car. There’s history baked into those buildings and when you’re about to lay something down in a room like that you want to make sure you’re bringing something worthy of the walls.
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Generally, as we get close to the crossing of the line to the final parts of building out this new birthing of music, Scott Sharrard, our producer, will be sending me some snippets of information before we get to the studio to put his historical correctness of the process into my writing. That’s how Scott works. He understands the lineage of what we’re doing and he wants to make sure the details are right, that the writing carries the weight it needs to carry before we ever hit record. He’s asked me to look at some lyrics on one of the songs that is particularly specific, and it’s one of those songs that I think we all believe is going to be the hit of the album. You know when you’ve got one of those. The room gets a little quieter when it comes on. People stop what they’re doing and just listen. Everybody feels it.
Now even though we’re not really doing the vocals for the album this weekend, because we’ll probably be overdubbing that over the next couple of weeks, the goal is actually to try and get the theory of the song at least straightened out before we record the main back line of all the instruments. And that matters more than people realize because it has a meaningful impact on the song in general. If the players don’t understand where the lyric is going, the instruments don’t breathe in the right places. The whole thing has to be connected. Basically, in this particular song, the lyrics have identified that the theme is about when you’ve just got it figured out how to make life shine. You’ve found the groove, you’re in it, the pieces are falling into place, and then you look up and the hands of time are spinning quickly and you’re running out of time now. That feeling. That gut punch of realizing you just arrived and the clock is already moving.
If you want to put this in perspective, it’s pretty much a standard life lesson, which is we tend to oftentimes figure something out and then just at the point that we’ve reached the mountain, we look up and there’s a bigger challenge right in front of us. We’ve surmounted the last mountain we climbed, caught our breath for maybe half a second, and we’re faced with just the next challenge. And typically time is right up against us now. That’s the part that nobody really talks about at the dinner table. Everybody talks about the climb. Everybody celebrates the summit. But nobody mentions that the summit is just a clearing where you can see the next range stretched out ahead of you, and your legs are already tired from the last one.
Time is the enemy of all things constructed. That’s just the truth of it. And being able to make correct quick decisions, being able to not freeze up when the pressure is real, that often weighs in our heads when we’re trying to build momentum up the next hill. You’re standing there with your hands on your knees trying to figure out which direction to go and the sun is already lower than it was when you started thinking about it. The ability to do reasonably good pattern recognition like a good chess player is often how you solve it, with a bit of creativity mixed in. You’re reading the board, you’re seeing three or four moves ahead, and you’re making a call that isn’t perfect but it’s the best one available to you right now.
There are certainly no clear instructions on how to figure out life. Nobody sat us down and walked us through it. It’s a game of reading signposts and staring into the unknown and for the most part greatly attempting to make strides in your life without any guarantee that the direction you picked is the right one. You’re walking through fog most of the time and every now and then the fog clears for a minute and you can see a little further down the road and you make your adjustments and then the fog rolls back in and you keep going.
Figuring it out on the way is really mainly about becoming who you are on the way. That’s the piece that took me a long time to understand. The figuring out isn’t a destination. It’s the thing that shapes you while you’re moving. Defining one’s character is a sum of your ability to steer and seize the day to build a better tomorrow for yourself. Every decision you make under pressure, every time you pick a direction when you’re not sure, every time you get up after the last hill knocked the wind out of you, that’s the raw material of who you become. It’s not the easy days that define you. It’s the ones where you had no map and you walked forward anyway.
Frankly, as my song has put it so bluntly, the days will surely come to an end at one point. Have you done what you’ve come to do here. That’s the question underneath everything. That’s the question that’s sitting in this song and honestly it’s the question that’s been sitting in my chest for a while now. And the lyric that holds it all together, the one that says it cleaner than I ever could in a journal entry, is just this. “Get ya’ some, before it’s gone.” So take today and go figure it out.
The lesson here is something that touches all of us whether we’re making an album in Harlem or just trying to get through the week. You will spend your whole life climbing mountains and every single time you reach the top of one there will be another one waiting. That is not a flaw in the design. That is the design. The figuring out never stops. The clock never pauses just because you finally found your rhythm. And the only real failure is standing still while the time runs out, waiting for instructions that are never coming. Life doesn’t hand you a playbook. It hands you signposts and fog and a finite number of days, and the person you become is built entirely out of what you chose to do with those days when nobody was telling you which way to go. So get ya’ some. Before it’s gone.
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Figuring It Out Isn’t About Answers, It’s About Becoming Who You Need to Be
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