Always Arriving
U2 did an interview with Pitchfork where Bono said that the band felt as if they were always arriving, but had never arrived. I liked that interview they did. My biggest takeaway from the interview was that, regardless of what you might think of the band, they seemed like good guys and, for all their fame and notoriety, had maintained at least a little bit of a level head.
The idea itself is a rather nice one and it’s been on my mind over the past few weeks. I suppose as an artist you probably never feel like you’re done. That’s why creating art is a state of perpetually delayed gratification. There’s never done. Because even when the record comes out, you already have 15 new song ideas that have been percolating and you’ve been hearing them in your head a certain way and you’re sitting around doing other things while songs sit in your consciousness.
So even in that most literal of senses, you’ve never arrived. Because the ideas haven’t all materialized and they haven’t arrived and therefore there’s always always more.
But the way it’s phrased, the prospect of arrival itself doesn’t seem so distant. It’s not about desperation or neediness. It’s more about the excitement of creation and the furtherance of things as they move forward etc.
There was a period when I first started making music when I felt so distant from any kind of arrival. It was a strange state of jealousy and dissatisfaction. Nothing was happening at the pace that I had wanted it to and the music wasn’t getting any kind of recognition and it felt like the old days of Annex Records when all that excitement and possbility of life fizzled into a stark and deep abyss and within that abyss was the deafening sound of silence.
Somewhere along the line, and in the last couple of months, that feeling has lifted considerably. I think it has to do with community and with a band and with musicians that I love and respect. And it has to do with random emails from fans and from people that have heard the music in a bunch of different places – on a podcast, on Pandora, at a show – and how all these pieces seem to be like continents slowly drifting into place.
These things happen slowly. And they require patience and they require continued innovation and they require attention. But you begin to reach a point where there are enough pieces in place that the prospect of continuing at that level, even if the level is as humble as the one that I’ve built for myself, seems okay. It seems fine. The slope of the line may not be 45 degrees but it’s not 0. And we’ll play bigger and better clubs and better more convenient times. And we’ll do surprising things when we play. And we’ll write new songs. And we’ll make new music. And the story will continue to unfold. Always in the telling never told. Always arriving. Never arrived.
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