My friend Alexandre Lunsqui – an exceptional musician, professor, thinker, and composer of truly questioning music – said something a few years ago that remains key to my life today. I can’t even remember the exact conversational context now, only the simple statement "I want to wake up and think about music." It really struck me then and the line has stayed with me since, such a clear and concentrated expression of singular purpose and codified passion.
I have always felt that my best friend (besides my wife) Jason Lind has labored as a remarkably underrated and unappreciated visual artist. One of the most truly creative and original people I know, he possesses an unrelenting imagination and love of ideas, and whether with others or left to himself he is constantly constructing rich, unique worlds across a spectrum of media and formats. Nonetheless, I’ve watched his best skills go to waste again and again as he's passed from under one shortsighted boss to another, with only the rarest exceptions. Jason and I have been creating art together pretty much since meeting in high school, and working through ideas and projects with him continues to rank among the great joys of my life. One of many positive consequences of choosing to reengage my real life has been the opportunity to spend more time collaborating him and other people like him again.
It’s been an interesting process this last year+ as I’ve had more space for compositional work while at the same time initiating and re-initiating a number of ancillary projects. Among these, one in particular has allowed me and a bunch of important people in my life the opportunity to do something together, and this project recently landed us in the Hollywood Fringe Festival. In my professional roles over the last few years I’ve grinned-and-bared-it through countless exceedingly boring and unpleasant conversations/meetings/social events, and I already have too many memories of looking around the room and wondering what the fuck I was doing with my life that I had found myself surrounded by a roomful of lawyers and other utterly disconnected and powerhungry people. Hanging out in the beer tent of the Fringe Festival these last few days and meeting so many interesting, authentic, and adventurous individuals, it’s been such a pleasure of a tangible reminder to stop from time to time and just look around and see where I have returned to, breathing a sigh of relief that I stopped with that other game before I’d gone too far and sacrificed too much of myself.
It has taken a few years for Alex’s statement even to seem like a real possibility to me, and the fact is that I do still have to wake up and think about something besides music first. However, I'm much closer to that other reality now, and these days the money work is direct and quick and flexible. The real key is that when all that's finished I still have most of my day to think about my music, my family, and my ongoing body of work - whatever else my amazingly talented friends and I might come up with on any given day.
