Shadows Always Long For Doubtful Shine
I invited the band members to gather in the green room for dinner last night so we could reconnect with the source, which is our friendship, and take a moment to collectively reflect on the beginning of the year, including the album, and define where we wanted to go from there. It was inspiring to listen to them and have a better understanding of their personal perspectives. Everything went so fast that we kind of felt dislocated from the tight unit we worked so hard to become over the last couple of years. The initial album phase somewhat created a sense of conscious self-preservation until it became every man for himself at some point. When you hit that relational isolationism, you basically allow somebody else’s process to wipe you and your vision out of the equation. It’s the inevitable outcome of disunity. It’s surrendering your soul to a stranger, making him the master of your destiny and of your pre-programmed obsolescence and eventual demise. As heartbreaking as it is to admit such an easy surrender on our part, it was also deeply comforting to open up about that obvious observation.
“We are so easily ‘domesticated’,” I said. Regardless of the incredible perfect storm I was in — from my affective life disaster, my health problems being increasingly more concerning than I thought they were, followed by my incapacity to rebel against somebody else’s all-schedule-no-soul direction, up to my unwillingness to expose the emotional distress I was in creatively — I realized that our fear of disappointing, of missing a significant opportunity, or of upsetting the person we hired to facilitate the gestation of what we wanted to give life to had considerably contributed to us completely missing our mark, most of it being the result of our past relational fractures and their painful stigmata, of years of perpetual hustling, and of being isolated in our own wounded universe. I thought that slowly getting out of that thick hopeless fog would naturally produce just enough courage for me to say “No”, “Adapt or go home”, “Enough”, or “It’s over”…
It’s not that easy to enfranchise yourself from a long season of abuse, let alone heal from those brutal traumas, especially as a group. Last night, honesty brought us right back into the light, which is not an instant state of inner freedom, but a beginning. It is no less fabulous of a sensation, but you have to be real with yourself, even if it can be discouraging to make that very first step all over again… Every new “step one” is a miracle of resilience, even more so as a band. You either admit the ridiculousness of the situation in which you maintain your insecurities or you keep roaming around aimlessly. If there’s something we can all agree on is that we are sick and tired of submission. It’s important to remember that we all met in the context of a church, where the pastor would use his sermons as a way of reminding us all frequently that who we were as artists, the type of music we were doing, who we were surrendering to, and the places where we were performing that so-called art was not only wrong but that it was evil. When you’re continuously fed with those religious pieces of garbage, shamed with those lies Sunday after Sunday, and made guilty of those supposedly terrible sins — which aren’t (Jesus would say fucking Amen to that ;)) — in a wicked attempt to stop the expanding nature of young people’s growing faith in widened spiritual perspectives, there is no other way but for that controlling dogmatic type of malicious bullshit to stick with you for a while. Even if you don’t realize it, it affects your psyche, profoundly… And while you want to believe that you have emancipated your mind from that self-serving righteousness, you haven’t entirely; doubts kick in almost immediately when you want to say “NO”.
In fact, we rarely talk about that period of our lives. It’s almost taboo for some, while it produces an instantaneous type of aggressive response for others. We all greatly suffered from those years. I almost knocked that pastor down and out of my house when he came to shame me some more. That was the end. I often dreamed that I was killing him… Not so much for Christian fellowship, right? But it gives you an idea of just how screwed up we were and why it’s healthy to readdress that matter sometimes. It explains a lot of things, such as why I froze and disappeared when Ben and Jeff were begging me to wake up and realize that the whole process wasn’t “US”. They constantly pleaded for me to intervene and stop that whole masquerade. I apologized for that to the rest of the band last night. I should have talked right away, but I didn’t. I will apologize to Mikko as well at some point. He became what I let him be and he did what he thought was right for us, I suppose. He’s a wonderful person that just wasn’t the right fit for us. We were looking for a creative facilitator and I let him become an artistic “reshaper”. He was genuinely invested in the record… I wasn’t.
That’s why I decided to stop that experiment with him and to start everything over and assume my words, my songs, my journey and to own it all. I keep saying that I want to bet on myself, but I can’t even do that — or anything else — if I’m not “ME”. Right or wrong, good or bad, it doesn’t have anything to do with any of this. It goes back to honesty and the willingness I have to expose myself for real. That’s what I shared with the rest of the band, along with what I wanted to address in the record — elements that were never taken into any kind of consideration at any moment in the previous production approach. So from now on, those personal themes, feelings, sensations, and perceptions will be at the very center of our creative motion. And that’s enough of a reason to be grateful for the disastrous phase that initially went on recently. It would only have been a complete waste of time and resources had we kept going for the wrong reasons. That’s our starting block.
We now have to find what lies between what we don’t want to be and what we want to become through that new creative voyage and how to reimagine everything without rebuking anything I have already sincerely shared with you. Well, we’re about to find out! While we did comply and submit to what felt like a well-defined formula, thank God it didn’t work. While the shadows of our insecurities always long for a greater length of doubtful shine to keep surviving, let’s discover what we can collectively see when we widely open the shutters of our fears to the full-blown blaze of our communal unity!
It’s not that easy to enfranchise yourself from a long season of abuse, let alone heal from those brutal traumas, especially as a group. Last night, honesty brought us right back into the light, which is not an instant state of inner freedom, but a beginning. It is no less fabulous of a sensation, but you have to be real with yourself, even if it can be discouraging to make that very first step all over again… Every new “step one” is a miracle of resilience, even more so as a band. You either admit the ridiculousness of the situation in which you maintain your insecurities or you keep roaming around aimlessly. If there’s something we can all agree on is that we are sick and tired of submission. It’s important to remember that we all met in the context of a church, where the pastor would use his sermons as a way of reminding us all frequently that who we were as artists, the type of music we were doing, who we were surrendering to, and the places where we were performing that so-called art was not only wrong but that it was evil. When you’re continuously fed with those religious pieces of garbage, shamed with those lies Sunday after Sunday, and made guilty of those supposedly terrible sins — which aren’t (Jesus would say fucking Amen to that ;)) — in a wicked attempt to stop the expanding nature of young people’s growing faith in widened spiritual perspectives, there is no other way but for that controlling dogmatic type of malicious bullshit to stick with you for a while. Even if you don’t realize it, it affects your psyche, profoundly… And while you want to believe that you have emancipated your mind from that self-serving righteousness, you haven’t entirely; doubts kick in almost immediately when you want to say “NO”.
In fact, we rarely talk about that period of our lives. It’s almost taboo for some, while it produces an instantaneous type of aggressive response for others. We all greatly suffered from those years. I almost knocked that pastor down and out of my house when he came to shame me some more. That was the end. I often dreamed that I was killing him… Not so much for Christian fellowship, right? But it gives you an idea of just how screwed up we were and why it’s healthy to readdress that matter sometimes. It explains a lot of things, such as why I froze and disappeared when Ben and Jeff were begging me to wake up and realize that the whole process wasn’t “US”. They constantly pleaded for me to intervene and stop that whole masquerade. I apologized for that to the rest of the band last night. I should have talked right away, but I didn’t. I will apologize to Mikko as well at some point. He became what I let him be and he did what he thought was right for us, I suppose. He’s a wonderful person that just wasn’t the right fit for us. We were looking for a creative facilitator and I let him become an artistic “reshaper”. He was genuinely invested in the record… I wasn’t.
That’s why I decided to stop that experiment with him and to start everything over and assume my words, my songs, my journey and to own it all. I keep saying that I want to bet on myself, but I can’t even do that — or anything else — if I’m not “ME”. Right or wrong, good or bad, it doesn’t have anything to do with any of this. It goes back to honesty and the willingness I have to expose myself for real. That’s what I shared with the rest of the band, along with what I wanted to address in the record — elements that were never taken into any kind of consideration at any moment in the previous production approach. So from now on, those personal themes, feelings, sensations, and perceptions will be at the very center of our creative motion. And that’s enough of a reason to be grateful for the disastrous phase that initially went on recently. It would only have been a complete waste of time and resources had we kept going for the wrong reasons. That’s our starting block.
We now have to find what lies between what we don’t want to be and what we want to become through that new creative voyage and how to reimagine everything without rebuking anything I have already sincerely shared with you. Well, we’re about to find out! While we did comply and submit to what felt like a well-defined formula, thank God it didn’t work. While the shadows of our insecurities always long for a greater length of doubtful shine to keep surviving, let’s discover what we can collectively see when we widely open the shutters of our fears to the full-blown blaze of our communal unity!
