Learning Faith Turns 10
Walking the line between burnout and brilliance
In 2013 I was touring non-stop in Texas, the Midwest, Northeast, Europe and the UK.
After 5 years of living in Austin and soaking up great music, I felt my songwriting was at its peak. But I was battling persistent health issues, including the infamous Austin allergies which wreaked havoc on my voice.
Leaving town to start a tour was also challenging. Getting out of Texas by car is at least a 5 hour commitment. Once I was out there, I was lugging equipment, driving myself, playing to way fewer people in some places than a person with several critically acclaimed albums could reasonably expect. I felt an enormous internal pressure to prove myself, to prove the attention I’d received earlier in my career was still worth it, that my art had value. The reviews were still great but the audiences were meager. It was like beating my head against a wall. I was exhausted all the time. I also developed the beginning of carpal tunnel, brought on by a combination of driving posture and playing my beloved J200, a jumbo acoustic way bigger than my tiny frame.
I regularly had emotional breakdowns alone in my car, in hotel parking lots, rest stops, while driving. At one point I started voice memo-ing the things I would say to myself in those moments. I sent a couple of those recordings to a friend. He said I should turn it into a podcast - maybe it was art. I never did. It was too much intensity to keep spiraling through. My life on the road felt like a near-constant flood of hot tears, anger, desire, exhaustion. Looking back, I don’t know how I did it.
I felt driven by passion, or confusion about what a balanced life could really look like, or fear that I had hit my peak and it would all be downhill from there, too afraid to imagine something better. It was, in retrospect, the end of the first half of my adulthood and the beginning of the second. '“Hello,” the Universe was saying. “Welcome to the limitations of a human body!”
Plenty of critics, music-lovers, die-hard fans, the machine of the music business will tell you this pain is what makes great art.
I think that’s partly true, to be honest. The pressure that creates a diamond of a song sometimes has to come from having nothing else to lose. But at some point the suffering has to evolve from survival to shrewdly chosen battles. From “my life is so hard and the only thing I am living for is the songs that will come out of it” to “the world is in pain, and I’m familiar with pain, so how can I take care of myself while still tapping into something larger? How do I serve the world without destroying myself?”
I won’t lie - I still don’t fully have the answer to this.
I will say that a massive shift happened in my career when I stopped trying to prove something and started showing up just wanting to share what I can.
This month, Learning Faith - the 2014 album I wrote during this personal crucible turns 10.
In 2013, I was out there, showing up with very little sense of grounding, but I was playing those songs with my entire soul on the line. Learning Faith wasn’t a concept for me - I was living it on some level, just hoping the next steps would appear. I started venturing back into social justice topics during that time. Two of the songs on the album, “Dear God” and “If There’s a God” were inspired by what I witnessed in the Texas legislative chamber during Senator Wendy Davis’ filibuster against anti-reproductive choice legislation. She was reading letters written by people all over the state, begging the Governor not to close down the clinics. I am glad I was tuned into my storytelling skills enough to make some of those stories into songs and to witness the power those songs had when I performed them.
Here’s ‘Dear God’:
In honor of this ten year anniversary, Learning Faith and the live album we recorded at the album release show, Bootleg are both %15 off in my Bandcamp store.
A live video of ‘If There’s a God’ from the Learning Faith release show:
While you’re on my Bandcamp, please consider picking up my latest single, The Big Table, all proceeds from which are going to support World Central Kitchen, who have returned to provide meals in Gaza even after losing 7 of their aid workers. Handwritten lyric sheets, signed by me are also available for a higher donation.
