Switchfoot and Johnny Cash

Well, I really should write about the weekend and all the cool stuff I did, but all I want to write about now is how I've spent all evening reading Johnny Cash's autobiography and reading Switchfoot's tour journal. I've spent all evening with people talking to me who until know have just been voices singing to me from my speakers. There's Johnny Cash, talking about writing these songs, his childhood, not making a mystery of anything--just talking about stuff like I would. Hanging out in Memphis with Elvis, meeting a great piano player who's probably famous now, seeing one of his song titles and being brought back to the cold rainy day in Germany when it came to him out of the blue as he plucked his $5 guitar. Then spending an hour and a half reading "The Daily Foot," daily blurbs from Carl Diebold, who apparently owns the video company who does SF's videos. I'm in October '05, and they just got to Chicago after going around the west. What is just stirring me up inside is that I'm seeing what their life is actually like on tour. Basically, the bus, the venue, and tons of radio stuff. Every city they stopped at Jon and some or all of the guys would trek to some radio station's little studio, Jon plays "Stars" acoustic and talk, and they do tags like "Hey, I'm Tim Foreman of Switchfoot, and you're listening to Greg and Diana in the morning on WWKZ 93.6." They get driven everywhere in busses, vans and shuttles since they have no cars. They were excited when there was a Target across from the gas station and they could do some shopping, 'cause all they ever really see is the venue, the hotel, and the radio stations. A couple times they found out there had been a radio contest and the winner got to have SF play at their house. So they ride to some random house and play in a livingroom packed with 60 people, Jon playing acoustic, Chad playing a box, and Jerome displaying his amazing tambourine skills :-) The pedestrian roll of their lives is punctuated by "The show," when they walk up the stairs to the stage and, in Carl's words, "a fire is lit under the band's feet." The writer's blase familiarity with the stage, the show, the band, setting up shoots for music videos, radio spots, being on Jay Leno and other such things which the rest of us only see on our screens or hear in our speakers is tantalizing and mesmerizing to me. One night Nickel Creek was playing at the venue SF would hit the next day, so they popped in to the show, and when Carl stopped in at the band's bus that night Jon was talking with one of the guys from NC. So the next day two people from NC go to the show, and they bring them up for "Shadow Proves the Sunshine" and they play violin and mandolin for it! Like, dude! So now Jon's buddies with Nickel Creek. And he's played on a hundred radio stations, and he just seems like a charismatic guy who thinks deeply and randomly, and can just pop out songs and jokes... I dunno. The more I find out about Switchfoot, the more I respect them, and I dunno...the more they seem like me and my friends. And that's what's unsettling me right now. All I read, from Johnny Cash to Jon Foreman, just makes me want to do that myself. I can totally see being a Jon Foreman if God continues to bless my songwriting and musical development. I could honestly see Pure Boss opening for Switchfoot on their next tour and doing a kick-butt job at it. And when I tell people about the SF concert and hear Jess say "That'll be you someday, John," and hear Mrs. Harvey look at me and say that God will give me songs like that, I start to think maybe I could actually be something, actually touch this world that is mostly a fantasy, singing to me with perfect music, seemingly removed from real people and real life. But those brief moments of hope, those times when this possibility pops up in my heart as something that could happen, I don't let them go. Even as part of me reserves in the unspoken depths of my heart the possibility that some day I could be singing my heart out in my songs before crowds, drenched in the colored lights that lift you out of this world, those thoughts seem stupid and foolish when I think of talking about them to Mom or Dad. Just to picture the look on their faces as I pour out these grandiose dreams, while I sit here lazing my life away, studying Chemical Engineering, crappy at most of my instruments, and doing absolutely nothing to genuinely pursue moving towards the music industry. And as Dad put it, "You're just not that good." When I set these dreams next to Mom and Dad they become ridiculous (as in, worthy of ridicule) and I'm ashamed of even letting myself think for a moment seriously about them. But still, in that corner of my heart, is the knowledge that these artists I listen to and love came from a real life like mine, and the weight of their music, the quality of what they did, won over the crowds, the gigs, the radio stations, and the studios. And honestly, I just wonder, if these thoughts are as infantile and stupid as I usually come back to feeling they are, why is God seeming to stoke them? Maybe I shouldn't be reading this book, or the tour journal, but second guessing the past relative to God's will is pointless and rather theologically incorrect. So here I am, and this desire in my heart is burning away, at times hurting almost more than I can describe. So I say to myself, should I start seriously working towards fulfilling this desire? Switchfoot worked the local circuits and the lowly tours for years and years before "Beautiful Letdown" started really jacking them up. Am I prepared to do that? John, look at yourself. Nobody gets to where these great icons in your mind are without years of hard hard lowly work! You ARE foolish for thinking of the end product without the ploughing, sowing and patient watering that goes into it. But I cannot picture turning my life into that--the local band that's dinky but you throw your life into it...then the almost unknown band that opens for some bigger band on tour, then, glory from heaven, they get signed by a real record company! THEN you hit the recording as a newcomer to the industry, doing what your told, working away, and THEN you hit a serious tour and start courting the public in city after city, drive after drive, away from home and church, surrounded by an industry soaked in sin, begging you to inflate in your own ego. Me? Doing that? Doing even a part of that? Pure Boss? Yeah - stand back and laugh at me. I scorn myself along with you. I'd like to take the sensitive artist line in the first half of the movie--*sniff* "Laugh at me now, but I know the music in my soul will take me there"--but that's a movie, and this is cold hard real life: the most unforgiving, most unromantic, most dry and withering machine ever known. Those nights on stage, this perfect music playing right now from my laptop, is an escape from this real world, and those that become the ones PLAYING that escape are unspeakably far between. It's stupid to think I could do that. I'm stupid, I'm lazy, I'm not skilled, and I'm inflated with ridiculous pride because a few good friends actually like a few of my songs and a few people actually like my band. I'm so, SO far from professional musicians that one can but laugh at the preposterousness of it all. And the corner of my heart keeps burning.

Which pretty much just leaves me praying a very confused, half ashamed, self conscious prayer. Lord, I don't even want to ask about what I want to do, it sounds too stupid to even say out loud, but I do just pray that you would do Your will through these feelings that are all stirred up right now. I see them leading in one direction, but You may have totally different ends in mind, and I just pray that you would accomplish them. If this is meant to be a raw nerve that never really heals, a thorn in my side, then please use it to mature me as you designed it to. If it's leading to something different that what I picture, please bring it about. Just do Your will, I pray! That's all I can want, because seeking anything else will lead me to heartbreak, terrible struggle, and gnawing hopelessness. All of my music except tired licks on acoustic guitar is totally dependent on You--You can give grandly, or you can withold barrenly--so I can only hope of doing what You want with it. If you want to take me or Pure Boss anywhere at all, it's going to have to come from you. Just help me follow what you want me to do NOW. Now as in right now, as in getting up on time, as in having devotions like I'm supposed to, as in not sinning in these painfully obvious ways, as in serving Mom at home eagerly, as in investing in the geode riches of family and true friends, as in not being a stupid, blow-off, lazy, half-cocked, childish kid. Whatever of that picture of how things should be in my mind is actually how it should be, Lord, please help me to do it.

Right now what I would like most in this world would be to send an email to the guys in Switchfoot proposing Pure Boss open for them, they check us out, like the fresh happy music they see, and we tour with them. If it wasn't the real world outside this room, I think that could happen. Beyond that, I would at least really like to get to hang out with Switchfoot, and especially to talk to Jon Foreman for awhile. And I would really like to be Johnny Cash's friend. He just seems like he was an amazing, deep, rather non-pretentious man, and reading his book is like reading what I would write if I had lived what he lived.

Anyway, enough ramblings from the delusional loser. These things were burning so hard, I just had to write them out as fast as I could type. I may edit it later, or I may leave it as the unvarnished product of the sum of my mental and spiritual capacities at the moment of feeling.

I point my finger up, for up there is the only thing I can end this post on or put my mind to rest with. God. Nothing is too ridiculous or improbable for Him to do, and nothing can make humble real life as scintillating and rich as He can. Either road is sufferable only in Him, and He has many other roads in His mind than those two I can see. Thank goodness. Thank God.

--Clear Ambassador

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2am: I just read through Jon Foreman's lengthy ramblings about "Nothing is Sound," including blurbs about each track. Real quick, he said himself thing after thing that I have thought myself about these songs, this album, and the music. That was way cool. Mostly, though, I was literally stunned into mental silence as I read the following:

"Anyhow, here's a tune that was written on new years day 2004. I pulled an acoustic demo of the song together and threw it on the pile of songs we had for the record. We loved the way the vocal sounded on the demo- raw and honest so we kept it. To sing a song about the new year in march just wouldn't sound quite right, so the vocal on the record is the first time I ever sang the song: 1/1/04."

The vocals on that song have consistently been one of the most affecting and personal parts of the album to me. And that was the first time he sang it! No words could express what that means to me. Unbridled, unaltered, untouched; that first shot at a song that you never ever get back again. Caught on tape and put into the album. Breathtaking. Heartaching.