Reflecting on a Journey
Embracing 40 with Memories, Music, and a Brand New Sound
Today is the last day of my 30’s. Yup. 40 years old tomorrow.
It’s easy to reminisce on days like these. For some reason, the memories flow clearer and smoother on days when your focus is yourself and all that you’ve experienced so far on this journey.
There’s the cloudy years. This is what I call the years 0-10. You have some memories, but the vast majority of them are blurry at best. Pictures help, stories from parents help, but your own memory is really mostly remembering feelings and settings rather than clear facts. These memories get overlayed with years of distance and anymore I find myself only referring back to 3-5 stories from then at best, none of which are in order. My memory of Christmas when I turned 5 and my memory at 7 hanging with my friends playing Nintendo happened at the same age. It doesn’t matter that they were 2 years and that we lived in two different US States at the time.
Memories are funny like that. You think back with the perspective of yourself now and all the experiences you’ve had sense come with it.
The teen years tend to often be looked back with a romance that isn’t always warranted. There was so much happening and new opportunities every day that it’s hard not to look back and feel nostalgic. So many paths to choose from without the foresight of what they hold. Looking back, you know the story of the path you ended up choosing, so it’s the wonder of ‘what if’ that keeps you coming back to these memories.
My 20’s were dark years. This is where I experienced a lot of hard lessons in life. I experienced a lot of good ones also, but the major events of this decade were rough ones. Failed relationships, failed careers, all the things I was in such a rush to get crumbled as quickly as they came. No one sat me down and stressed the importance of patience and as a result I jumped into too many things that I wasn’t ready for.
It’s hard to hate too much on this decade though because this is the decade that I turned to playing and writing music. In a way, it was the birth of how I would define myself today. If there was a BC and an AD split in my life, it would be 25…or was it 26?
It led me down the path I live now. It led to countless gigs, hundreds of written songs, though some very poorly. It led to the creation of South Dakota Songwriters which helped me meet and organize the growth of the craft in the Black Hills. Yes, it led to some incredible mountain tops, but damn those valleys before them we deep.
Leaving my 30’s is bittersweet. All the lessons I experienced in my 20’s I came to finally understand in my 30’s. Maybe I’m just a slow learner, or maybe I need this much time to really process who I am. It helped that I met the love of my life at 30 and that stability sure gave me time to settle and truly understand who I am. I still have much to discover, but having her these past 10 years allowed me to scrape off the build up and get back to my core.
This is a bit of the story behind my song “Brand New Place”. I needed a new place to start over and rebuild myself, and I needed someone who would be patient enough to let me. She gave me that and I’ll forever be indebted to her because of it.
I honestly believe my 40’s will be a decade of intense growth. My 30’s rebuilt the foundation I built my life on from the one that lay in shambles from my 20’s, and now it’s time to re-construct who I am to become. I hope you all stay tuned.
With that, I wanted to share a key moment with you all. Finding one’s “sound” in music can be a daunting task. Most of the time I don’t think about it, but with me recording recently, it’s all I’ve thought about.
A few days ago, I recorded a live take of my song Brand New Place, and deployed minimal mixing and mastering techniques. Upon listening back to it, I was moved to goosebumps and tears. It sounded like I had finally gotten out of my head what I had been hearing the whole time. My oldest told me this morning that every artist has their own sound and “I think you just found yours dad.”
I think she’s right.
So as I role into my 40’s, here’s a gift to you all. My sound. Much earlier than the album so thanks for being a subscriber! This is what I have been trying to share with you all and this is how my upcoming album will sound like.
Cheers all.