05.27.19

   I haven’t been able to rationally explain where I’m at with music lately. To myself at least. We talked the other day in the mountains above Filtzbach, wandering up toward a high lake. Seeing my first rock fall come tearing off the side of the mountain just moments after a small group of friends had left the area. I said…well, I don’t really know how I feel about music to be honest. It’d become a nuisance. Something I just did compulsively because it was always there. When I did the PCT I left all my music at home. I didn’t even have anything on my phone. Nada. I wanted to step away as far as possible. I wanted to hear the wind, birds, footsteps, creeks, etc. I read some quote about how the human eye tired of artifice. Everywhere you turn, copies of vague ideas. Some good. Mostly banal. Mostly easy bright colors that want to sell you another idea. I’d come to view music like this after 20 years of nonstop production, practicing, live performance, etc. Mostly though, I just wanted silence. I wanted to have the capacity to examine my own ideas and see if they stood up on the trail. Some kids had podcasts, audiobooks, tv shows streaming on unlimited data plans. I had nothing…which honestly meant that most days, if I wasn’t working out something about human relationships, ancient wounds, or weighing philosophical diatribes, I was simply listening to the songs in my head. After a couple months I realized I could recall entire albums phonographically and pick and choose from some untapped mental library that somehow held everything I’d experienced from a young child onward. Other days it was whatever random track matched the BPM of my footsteps. But I didn’t ‘miss music’. I didn’t even notice. It was on a small bluff outside Agua Dulce after a few weeks where we split a pair of headphones and listened to Phil Collins in the elements; wind blowing, stars overhead, little airplane bottles of Sutter Home…hard to describe these moments. I suppose I liked Phil Collins before. I definitely liked Invisible Touch when I was growing up…but Phil Collins was like, Paul McCartney or Elton John to me, another megastar who rose out of a sort of proprietary industry window in time and would remain on the radio indefinitely, permanently…but it’s all set and setting. On this particular night, exhausted after another 20 miles through sweltering high desert and eating the same food for the third week straight…Phil Collins suddenly sounded very nice and it all came off as rather human and unpretentious. Half a year later I found myself remixing and mastering six albums all at once. I’d been unable to release volumes of songs because they weren’t ‘perfect’ and they’d just been languishing in Ableton and hard drives for up to ten years. I wanted to be done with it. I was done with music in general. Nothing made sense in that realm when I got home. The studio I built…fretting over acoustics and ADC and analogue mono paths for years…it didn’t mean anything anymore. It sat there. Silent. Dust covering keyboards and guitars. I nearly cringed when I flipped the main power strip. Out there, for six months I listened to Phil Collins, John Denver, and Pearl Jam. When we’d get to a KOA or motel with wifi and didn’t have to share it with 20 other hikers I’d bring up some old playlists…but nothing stuck. Nothing really hit me except Dayvan Cowboy by Boards of Canada, which became one of maybe 5 official Songs of the Pacific Crest Trail. At the end of the day I didn’t mind silence as much as I expected. I was able to unclutter years of misplaced files as it were. To arrange and contextualize things that I’d just flung about in the frantic milieu of my twenties. I’d become a musician because I wanted to know how people made those sounds. That was it. When I got off the trail I knew that composing wasn’t an issue and I’d been on the technical end of things for about a decade. I just didn’t care about writing new material. I had nothing to say. The idea of playing live again made me physically ill and the only conceptions left were so minimal that I didn’t feel obliged to pursue them. For the first five months after returning from the PCT, the only thing I thought about was getting back to the trail. I would have dropped everything and headed right back to the CDT in the spring if it was in the cards…but the post-hike world was fraught with unimaginable unforeseens (that I think we both wish we’d given more thought to) There’s really nothing you can do about 'the future' on the trail. You have to walk. It consumes just about every scrap of energy you’ve got. You collapse after dinner in a heap of smelly hiker dreams and wake when all the little forest creatures start their own sunrise routines. In the wake of all this I haven’t got any profound opinions or insights about music. I think I’m less skeptical of it. Less critical. Then again, I’m so far removed from it right now. I have another (much smaller) studio in Zurich consisting of a laptop, midi controllers, Arturia VSTs, and a couple workhorse mics but I walk in that room, arrange a few things, and walk out. I’m not ready. Not that I don’t feel things. Stirrings. But, if music wants back into my life it’s going to have to speak up loud and clear. I won’t do it for therapy or wring my hands about it. I’m done with that. I’ve got plenty of good summer summits out there on my list in the meantime i.e. there’s got to be something to say.