Ad Infinitum by Jim Fitzpatrick
I am a musician. I am almost thirty. I have released twelve albums. I have been on tours across the United States. People listen to my music on multiple continents. People have told me that my songs mean a lot to them. Some have also told me that my music encouraged them to start making their own. The largest crowd I have played to was roughly three hundred people. I was a high school Junior. I can’t get any labels to listen to my music. People I know are getting famous off of their’s. I have a day job. I work forty four hours a week. I live in an expensive city and sleep in a room made out of particle board in my friend’s apartment. I have little time to dedicate to my art. I have been working on the same album for almost two years. Once it is finished, after countless attempts to get labels to listen, I will probably release it myself, and struggle to sell one hundred copies. After that, I will keep on playing and writing. But why?
I can’t give a clear answer. For the most part I create and perform blindly, disregarding the the impracticalities, yet I occasionally fall victim to whispering voices of doubt projected by societal expectations. They say “You should give it up.” or, “You should go back to school.” “Why do you play concerts at people’s houses if you’ve been making music for so long?” And, sometimes, I think they have a point. Alternately, there are moments in my creative life that are so pure that they smack me across the face and knock the garbage nay-saying voices right out of my ears.
This is my most recent moment of deliverance.
Last winter I found myself holed up in my apartment after a blizzard. I was feeling cabin fever, so I walked to the record store. I scored a few classic 90’s post-hardcore gems, and listened to them under my lofted bed. I had been stuck in an emotional rut for over a month, and the intimate listening experience was something that I had denied myself for some time. It felt good to be with the records and to cut through the fog.
After sitting through five LPs and a handful of seven inches, I stumbled upon a record I thought I had lost some time ago. It was a split between midwest post-hardcore bands Brighter Arrows and Locktender. I got the record after seeing Brighter Arrows play in Saint Louis some years back. They ended the set with their song “Entirety.” The extended bass line and the chiming guitars gave me chills in a way that I hadn’t felt in years. I arrived at the show jaded by the current state of punk music, and the Saint Louis music scene in general. I left reminded that music holds sacred truths that transcend those dramas. I had been transformed. When I found the record again in my collection, I knew I had to give it another listen, despite my fatigued ears.
I flipped the record to Brighter Arrow’s side, and soaked in their two tracks, “Eternity” and “Entirety.” When I listened to “Entirety,” I was transformed the same way I was transformed almost four years prior when I first heard the song. The first half sounds optimistically desperate. It echoes the sound of a mortal grasping with their finitude, riding the choppy waves in a sea of time. The last three minutes of the song play out with the bass line and drums, creating a sturdy calm in the water, and the guitars twinkle like raindrops pierced by sunlight. It resolves with the feeling that the mortal has found solace in his finitude. The sea of time is an eternal sea, and he is happy to float until he simply can’t hold his head above water.
When the record ended I was shaken and changed. I had to tell Jake, the guitarist and vocalist of Brighter Arrows. We hadn’t spoken in years. I sent him a simple text, letting him know that I listened to the song, and that it moved me deeply. I ended the message by thanking him for making such a wonderful piece of art.
Jake’s response came a few hours later, and it moved me further. He told me that earlier that evening he was playing guitar in his church service, observing Maundy Thursday (the Thursday before Easter, in which Christians celebrate The Last Supper). He had been feeling disconnected from his creative side, and he was
struggling to find a reason to continue playing music. As he was playing in his church service, he began to think about the guitar line for “Entirety,” and how he had felt so comfortable as a musician at the time the riff was written. It helped him to regain focus as he was playing on stage with his fellow church members. After he left the stage he soon got my text. We were moved by the same song at the same time, on different sides of the country. For Jake, that synchronicity was the sign that he needed to know that he should continue to play.
I believe that when an artist creates something they are creating it as a subconscious message to themselves. They give the art life, and in return the art gives them further clarity to move forward. When the art is given to the world the artist’s message gives clarity to those who receive it. An even greater gift comes when the artist hears of someone receiving their message and, as a result, is changed. The artist is changed further by the message encoded in their creation, and the message was changed or amplified because it changed other people. The song that my friend Jake helped write spoke a message to him when he first made it, and it spoke again to both of us on Maundy Thursday of 2016 when we heard it simultaneously one thousand miles apart. The message was clear and sweet. It said to us, “Keep going” •
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