It's a cool Saturday morning. The sun is coming up through gray clouds. It rained last night, which I love - good for the flowers. My dog Joey and I were just outside looking at them. And I got to thinking, the way I always do when it's quiet enough to hear myself.
I have written songs my entire life. In high school alone I wrote over 950 of them and then I stopped counting. I have no idea how many songs I've written total. Thousands, probably. I have songs I forgot I wrote. Finding them again feels like running into an old version of yourself on the street.
For a long time I thought this made me unusual. Odd, even. People around me seemed to wait for inspiration. I never understood that. If you're a songwriter, you write songs. That's the job. That's the whole thing. You don't wait. You show up and you do it.
It wasn't until later in life that I found out my musical idols were the same way. We didn't have the internet in high school. You only knew what an artist's publicist wanted you to know. So I had no idea. What I was doing in my bedroom felt solitary and strange. Turns out I was in good company.
I saw Prince at Paisley Park in October 2015. He was playing in the small NPG Club room, electric piano, synths, a tight little band playing jazz-funk. He was calling out chord changes and arrangement ideas on the fly. The band just knew what to do. And I stood there watching and had this moment: he is doing exactly what I would be doing if I were up there. Not magic. Not lightning bolts from heaven. Just a guy who knew his instrument, knew his sound, and kept moving. That night something clicked for me. What I was doing wasn't so far from what anyone else was doing. The mythology of it dissolved.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped trusting that.
The social media world got to me. I started trying to write songs in styles that weren't really mine. Pretending to be excited by things I wasn't actually excited by. Trying to compete on other people's turf and then trying to out-compete them on that same turf. I built an online presence, a brand, a teaching platform. I was creating content instead of creating music. I was performing being a songwriter more than I was being one.
I've spent the last several months deliberately unwinding all of that. Quieting it down. Stepping back from the noise to find out what's actually still there underneath. And the answer, thankfully, is that the music is still there. The love of it hasn't gone anywhere. It was just buried under a lot of trying.
This past week I had time off from my day job. I wrote three songs. I took naps. I sat outside with Joey. I felt like myself again in a way I hadn't in a long time. I have today and tomorrow before I go back to the other version of me, the one that pays the bills. That version is real too. But it is not the deepest version.
I'm at an age where I think about time differently. Since Prince died, there's been a kind of quiet countdown running in the back of my mind. Not morbid, just honest. We only have so many seconds. I think about my songs as the record of a life lived on my own terms. People might not find them now. But someday, maybe the people who knew me will look back and understand what I was doing all those years in the studio by myself. That matters to me.
My music doesn't sound current. I'm not chasing a publishing deal. I'm not competing. What moves me is 70s and 80s R&B warmth, pop melody clarity, lyrics that have some weight to them. I'm not apologizing for that anymore.
Which brings me back to the flowers.
Standing there with Joey this morning, I realized something. The flowers don't know about algorithms. They don't compare themselves to the other flowers. They don't worry about whether anyone is watching or whether they're doing it right. They just take the sunlight and the water and they grow. They reach for the sky and open, regardless of what's happening around them.
I think that's all I'm really trying to do. Bloom on my own schedule, in my own direction, in the soil I'm actually planted in.
Maybe that's enough. Maybe it's everything.