Concrete View

As I write this I’m sitting at the window of my apartment in Miami, looking out at what used to be an incredible view of the river and the ever-growing city. I watched a flat expanse turn into a beautiful scene of light, color, and movement, amplified by the eternal sunshine and vibrant green of the palm trees. It was like waking up to an oil painting each morning, in an apartment with one entire wall of floor to ceiling windows. It was a piece of art in itself, it needed no additional decorating.

In the years since I’ve lived here, I watched a massive retail development wipe out the green, saw a school get knocked down for a new luxury condo building, and now I wake up each morning to dozens of men in hard hats and bright colored vests suspended from cables at direct eye level, knocking, drilling and pasting together what is becoming a monstrosity of a building that is slowly erasing the entire scene.

I have spent most of the last two years in this apartment complaining, getting perpetually annoyed that I can’t record any music between the noise of construction, the constant running train that is now amplified by the concrete mass enclosing it up against my window, and the otherwise constant barrage of planes, cars, and oppressive bachata music pumping from the boats passing by. Every morning, I bolt like a ninja from my bathroom to hide behind a pop up screen that separates my bedroom area to avoid being seen in a towel by the men suspended outside the window. I wake up to drilling and smacking and yelling. I now only record music on Sundays, since that’s the day there is no construction and the rest of the unruly people are still hungover from the night before. I have installed a permanent ugly white curtain held up by a pole and black plastic clips in order to hide the concrete abomination outside. A place that once offered a space of peace and inspiration now feels like a shrinking box, and in each day that passes, I am making more and more excuses and accommodations to convince myself that this is somehow still a sustainable place to live.

This shouldn’t surprise me. I’ve been dodging around ridiculous circumstances to accommodate an outside agenda my entire life. In all my relationship history, I’ve never been the one to leave. I have been dumped 100 percent of the time. Not to say there is something wrong with me (or maybe there is), but no matter how atrocious the behavior or blatant the signs, no red flag or raging dumpster fire was large enough to get me to leave. I always found a reason to stick around. This led to some nefarious moments that would make any sane person question if I was perhaps on drugs, or living in a different version of reality. But no problem was too big for me to solve. I never liked the idea of being a quitter. I have just always been that stubborn.

As a musician I think I’ve been wired for these sort of lopsided relationships. Part of survival as an artist is convincing ourselves that things can (or must) always get better, that the pain is temporary, and that we may be just one more shitty experience away from getting a big break. Our success is a result of our willingness to evolve and roll with the punches and hope that we eventually land in orbit in the correct solar system, sustained by the gravity of planets that are in true alignment with us.

Somehow though, in the constant chase for better days I have started to feel that I’ve lost sight of what it is I’m actually chasing anymore. In looking back, some of the most authentic moments of pure joy and happiness in my life have actually been momentary flickers from my childhood, jumping off my dad’s shoulders in the pool, living in what would be considered a very average and unglamorous American house. It was sitting in my bedroom before high speed internet cutting up pieces of paper music to create mashups before digital editing. It was dreaming of the music I would learn out of joy and curiosity with no expectations attached to it. It was sitting in youth orchestra before the prospect of actually having commercial success in music mattered, learning Elgar’s Enigma Variations for the first time. Now here I am, years later, living in a fancy downtown Miami condo, being reminded daily how cool my life is, how amazing it must be to do what I do, yet I am asking myself…is it?

Behind the curtain I’m jumping between cities constantly, watching my calendar build itself like an ongoing game of Tetris, and when I’m not in one of those places I’m likely on tour, living on a bus, where I am usually part of a project that is someone else’s creation. I struggle to maintain friendships because I’m never in one place long enough. Work is personal and personal is work. There is no longer any separation.

What’s possibly scarier is how good I have gotten at acting like everything is constantly great. I have smiled and whipped my hair at shows moments after someone close to me was hospitalized with a near death illness. I have performed in the wake of extreme loss and devastation in my personal life. I have showed up to a gig in a car that was just totaled in an accident because I was worried if I missed it, it would set me back in my career. Perhaps this is part of the job though, to constantly be ready to uplift, entertain, and be the escape for those who don’t do what we do for a living. After all, no one wants to show up after a full day of work to a pouting performer. The joy of witnessing a performance can be quickly destroyed by the sight of all the things that are going on behind the curtain to make it happen. It’s sort of like wanting to know how the magician does the magic trick. The second you see how it works, the magic is gone.

Maybe this is the musician’s version of a mid-life crisis. It doesn’t look like impulsively buying a corvette or getting a divorce. Most of us haven’t even bought our first house yet. Many of my friends remain unmarried and with no kids (often by choice, I might add). Perhaps it is finally being faced with the fact that it is possible to have embarked on a career doing what we love, only to realize we are often just orbiting on the edge of a world we loved as a kid, doing the thing, but not always the way we want to be doing it.

Whenever I have a new friend come to my apartment, they always react in awe and tell me how great it is, how cool it must be to live here! Yet all I can see is the concrete. I feel compelled to convince them that it’s actually not so cool, that it used to be so much better, if only they could have seen it. It’s hard to unsee how things were better before. It makes me think of the summer I lived in New York. In the moment it was a deeply miserable experience yet I look back on it with nostalgia and romanticism. The suffering has been distanced and therefore is experienced now with the charm and amusement of a romantic comedy. I guess this is the curse of adulthood, the inevitable accepting of the lines that have been drawn, of the buildings that can no longer be un-built, and the coming to terms with the fact that that the future is constantly being shaped by the series of small moments that are happening today.