Where Did All The Music Go?

I grew up dreaming of being in a band. As AI and digital recording has advanced, there seems to be a loss of authenticity in what we hear.

I can’t remember the first time I picked up a guitar, but I can vividly remember the first time I played a song in front of people. I was in 9th grade, and I sang U2’s 40 at a Young Life Camp. I was transfixed by the experience, and from that moment on, all I wanted to do was be in a band someday. I loved the rush of playing in front of people and writing songs to see how they might respond. It made me feel uniquely alive. No other art is as real-time in its response as music. You write the song, or play a guitar line in front of a crowd, and you instantly know if people like it or not. I can remember many times finishing a song and playing it that night at a concert to see what people thought. There was nothing like that feeling. I came of age in the 90s. I was surrounded by amazing music everywhere I turned. I loved Pearl Jam and the Beastie Boys. The Beatles and Dan Fogelberg all found their ways into my listening rolodex, and I became singularly focused on writing great music. My old girlfriend bought me tickets to the Eagles’ Hell Freezes Over tour for my birthday, and I knew that I was going to pursue playing music for as long as I could.

I was mesmerized by the Eagles' harmonies. The guitar playing was second to none, and the songwriting told stories that made me want to sing along. I owned a 12-string Washburn guitar that I had purchased with my high school graduation money, and I soon formed a band. Parachute Adams was going to be the next great band. My cousin Grant was the lead guitarist, and we had, as I saw it, the full recipe for a new sound and band that was going to be my ticket to music fame. The truth was, we weren’t all that great, but it didn’t matter to me. I was so thrilled that we were being asked to play at places. Talent shows and youth camps filled our concert lineups, but we could pack a place, and we always had fun.

We recorded 14 songs on our album. 16 tracks at a time on a reel-to-reel at a basement studio in Greeley. Fred’s Mom’s Basement, as my best friend laughingly called it. But I loved it. Tracking sounds and the silence of the studio was amazing. We were never good enough to get a record deal. Not that I even tried. But I learned how to do it all in the independent veins available. I did the photography for the CD. Learned how to typeset for a printer. Figured out who made CD’s and how I could get our band’s tape to the format. All of it was built on summer jobs and spending all the free time I had, and some I didn’t, on learning how to be in the music business. I was cordially uninvited back to the University of Northern Colorado after my grades took a tremendous turn for the worse. There was an inverse relationship between the hours I spent playing guitar and learning the music business and my macroeconomic grades. At the end of the semester, I decided to move to Canada to go to a small Bible School. It was a bit hairbrained, but in one of the only deals I ever made with God, I realized He had come through on a number of things I had asked for, and Canada was the answer I had promised I would fulfill for his blessings.

When I arrived, I met a friend who would change my life. Jonathan Gay was funny. He loved rock climbing, and so did I. He also happened to be the finest singer I had ever encountered. His voice lapped my own. We soon started playing guitar in a band we called the Lunar Absolutists. We played our first song together in a garage at the college. Parallel Lives by Chris and Johnny was how I learned to sing harmony. Making the monitors buzz with a chord of my voice and Jon’s was like a drug. I loved practicing and trying to make the songs we were writing work. He was better at it than I was. He was a better player, a better singer, and a better songwriter. But somehow my friendship with him allowed me to play in his orbit.

The bible school was only a year long, but I was not going back to Colorado when it was over. I loved Calgary. It was an incredible place where I felt alive. I was my own man, a young one to be certain, but I found the autonomy from my old hometown in Colorado liberating. I found another Christian college and honed my musical skills there. I played in every setting I could. I played coffee shops, worship chapels, clubs, living rooms, wherever anyone would have me play, I would be there. And I wrote music like crazy. A friend of my father was a songwriter in Los Angeles. He wrote me an email on my Compuserve account, and I will never forget his advice. He said, “The music business is the most selfish business there is. It is all-consuming. You have to have time to write, and you have to write every time you get the urge. And you have to write even when you don’t feel like it. Write a song every day. Even if it’s garbage, force yourself to do it. You never know what might come from a session. Maybe it's a chorus for another song, or a bridge, or maybe it’s a hit, but you keep writing every chance you get.”

Jon called me that spring and asked if we ever wanted to do more with the music stuff. I said I did, and by that summer, we were back at our old bible school rehearsing for recording an album. We hired a drummer and our old professor from school to play bass. Hired is probably a stretch. I think I traded out a fly rod for the bass tracks, and I can’t remember what I paid the drummer. Maybe a few six packs of his favorite beer. Regardless, we spent the four weeks working through ten songs. Five of mine, and five of Jon’s. His were all better than mine. It was incredible how he could write. I still believe he wrote the best Christian song of all time, even though very few have ever heard it. My Lot was a lament that I would only come to understand years later when Jon took his own life, but his wrestling match with God was real and as honest as any songwriter I had ever heard speak about.

We played that summer at a huge church festival called CHIC in Fort Collins. People loved the music. I could sense that something else was coming for us. I had one more year of “school” for my bachelor’s, and I decided to spend it back in Calgary as a student of a new program called the Worship Centre. (A little Canadian Lingo for you who reside south of the border.)

When I arrived on campus for the program, I walked in on a long-haired guy in a tie-dyed Allman Brothers shirt ripping away on a Strat. I had met him earlier, and he annoyed me. He had already linked up with a girl before the whole program had even started, so I doubted his Christian piety. I, of course, was always motivated by the right reasons, and never by the cuteness of a bible college girl. (Eye roll)

But as time went on, I started to interact with Dan more often. By Christmas, we were the rhythm section for the Christmas spectacular that the college put on for the town. I was playing bass, and he was playing guitar. We were not great at reading music, and we hadn’t learned how to help one another turn the pages of music, so we found an old scrap of drywall and taped our music to it, spread across three or four music stands. We looked like an IBM typewriter as we walked back and forth reading the music on our 8’ long music holding contraption. But we could laugh. More jokes than anyone ever thought possible came from his observations of the quirky people in the music world. Diamond Dave the sound guy, and Big Blues the worship director. Laugh after laugh came as we learned to write and play music together. We formed a band called Cardboard Village, and we wrote songs about breakups and living in basement apartments. We traveled on behalf of the school and played music in British Columbia on a “tour.” He got caught fishing in a closed river after our drummer decided to light a fire and smoke signal the game warden he was down in the canyon, and I backed my car into the youth pastor’s Datsun, crushing his hood and bumper. I think it was fine, though, because I left a note.

Scene of the illegal fishing crime and a crushed Datsun

After the semester ended, Jon called and asked if we wanted to try playing music on the road together. I knew nothing about what kind of money or effort it would take, but I was excited to figure it out. I called Dan and asked if he could help me arrange a tour in Batavia, IL, his hometown. Soon enough, we had enough shows to fill a month. Kiss the Sky Record store, Covenant Cafe and Coffee, and North Park College were all willing to host our band. We drove around the Chicagoland area for weeks. I fell in love with it. Jon did not. By three weeks into the tour, he announced he was going to go home at the end of it and wasn’t going to come back. Meanwhile, I had booked another month in Minneapolis with other friends there.

A friend from Canada joined me to play bass for that tour, and for the next four years, I was consistently putting an iteration of the band out on tours. It was always called Maskil, no matter who was in it or what lineup we brought to the venue. By the summer of 2000, I had written ten songs that I thought were worthy of recording. So Dan and Ben (the aforementioned bass player) and his brother Andrew (drums) came to Colorado, where we recorded what turned out to be a relative masterpiece for us. Alta Products was released in the summer of 2000 after spending nearly two months recording, mixing, flying back and forth to Chicago, and bringing engineers to Colorado. It was filled with our best playing. Dan found his inner Duane Alman, and Ben and Andrew made the grooves of the songs come to life. They were both Dave Matthews Band fans, and so their sounds had an eerie similarity to Carter Beauford and Stefan Lessard. They crafted their parts behind my songwriting, and we made an album better than anything I had ever done before. It became the soundtrack for so many of my friends and many of our fans for the next season of life.

Back then, you had Caselogic CD cases in your car. If you were lucky, you had a built-in CD player, but if you were like many of us, you had a Discman and a funny tape you inserted into the cassette player to make the CDs play in your car. It was an analog world then. My sound equipment was loaded in a specific order in my minivan. Heavy black boxes and cables in old imitation leather suitcases were packed perfectly in the back so that four of us could ride to the gig with all of our gear. Night after night, we would arrive at the venue and unpack it all. Set it all up, play a show, sell some CDs and T-shirts, and load it all up when it was over. I liked to schedule shows every other day so that we had time to get from town to town, or if we were in a city, we could take a day off and rest. Being on the road was a lot of fun, but it was an almost immeasurable amount of work. Calling and booking the next tour while I was on the road, managing the money from my blue accordion folder I kept under the seat, and making sure all of us had enough to eat and a place to sleep was hard, but indescribably invigorating.

Town after town we went. Brookings, South Dakota, Eau Clair, Wisconsin, Salina, Kansas, St. Charles, Illinois, every place a new memory, every place a chance to show off our music. I was living what I had hoped would come from music. I loved it. I learned so much about people and business. I learned how to handle long stretches of empty highways and lonely feelings of missing family. I learned I was comfortable with who I was, and that was the best gift of all.

In the summer of 2000, I met a keyboardist. She was on staff at the camp where we ended that summer's tour. We had been to Kansas and Tennessee, and looped all the way back to a Christian camp on a lake outside of Edmonton, Alberta. I would never be able to add all the miles I've driven up. It might be millions by now. But after one of those long drives from Tennessee to Edmonton, I met a woman who would change my life. She had the most amazing voice and could play piano beautifully. Ben, the bass player, said one night, before I had heard her sing and play, that we should have her join us for the worship sets. I was opposed to the idea. The summer before, we had a drummer join, and he was a wreck. Every song we played came off the rails, and I had made a vow never to allow unknown players into the band. But the next night, I walked into the chapel to get my guitar and heard her at the piano singing. Within a few measures, I asked her if she wanted to join us. When Ben heard about my flip-flop, he made sure I recalled my dogmatism about “new band” members. The grief I got from him was worth it. She was better than all of us at music. Her voice was a beautiful combination of Sarah McLachlan and Chantal Kreviazuk.

By the end of camp, I knew that I not only wanted her in the band, but I thought she and I might make a good pair for life. She liked the band. She wasn’t quite sold yet on me. But in 2001, after a year of dating long-distance, we all relocated to Colorado to make a run at being in a band full-time. She lived with my parents, and I lived in a run-down farmhouse with Ben and Andrew. She had a nice room and heat. We had mice and a wood-burning stove, that we had not procured any wood for it in the fall. It was a long winter. But we started to make even better music than we had before. Her voice was a game-changer for us. We had changed our sound a bit too. She did most of her work from a Hammond Organ and Fender Rhodes, and I moved more into electric. We were listening to The Samples and Sarah Harmer most of the time in the van, and we were starting to sound like a very cohesive group. The grooves were deeper, the lyrics more interesting, and the sound was evolving.

But the money never followed our changes. By that time, we were caught right in the middle of the digital transition. Things were going online to Napster and Apple Music, and making any money on the road or even at local venues was hard to do. We played plenty of free shows and coffee shops for a cup of coffee for the road home. Our most hilarious payout was a battle of the bands at an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet, where we each were allotted one slice and beer to split amongst the four of us. But even though it was changing, I wasn’t about to give up. We recorded another album and found ourselves playing at a few bigger venues after the release.

But with no money, the end came rather quickly. The bass player and drummer were Canadian citizens here on a performance visa, so working anywhere to help support the dream was impossible. The lady behind the keyboard and I were engaged and ready to start a new chapter, too. When Ben took me for a drink and told me they were moving home, I wept. They had become irreplaceable. Not for their talents alone, but for their friendship. We had built something almost mystical out there under the hum of the asphalt and the hypnotic white dashes. We were an organism that breathed art. It was beautiful, and when it came to an end, I was heartbroken.

Anna, my wife, and I tried a few times to replace Ben and Andrew, but nothing ever took. We could find players who could play the parts, but nobody filled their shoes. Within a few months of their departure, my wife and I put our instruments in their cases and put them in the music room downstairs. We rarely ventured down there. It was too hard to remember what was and try to make something new from the remnants.

Life got in the way of it all, too. We had our own bills to pay and desires to start a family. We bought a house and started having kids. The music was a fading memory. On the odd night when the babies weren’t crying, we would play together, but it never lasted long, and it was less painful for me not to try to recreate the magic of the past. So we would play for church, or the odd gig here and there with cover songs, but the era of Maskil was over. We still loved music. We would find a new artist we liked and listen to their music for months at a time, like we always had before, but it never translated to writing something new. We had a brief moment after the kids were old enough to sustain themselves for more than 30 minutes, where we wrote a few songs again and recorded them, but we had no time to take them out into the world and play before an audience.

The music business didn’t wait for us either. Everything had changed. It was all driven now by social media and Spotify playlists. I had never heard of Spotify when we released our Collectables project in 2017. So the idea of ever playing music again was pretty far-fetched. Music itself had changed, too. Digital recording made everything perfect. There were never any “live” albums released, or in the odd case there was, it was autotuned to perfection. No mistakes, no honest moments in a concert, no imperfections that made it real. The professionals were like everything else in America: manufactured into the perfect, most consumable form possible. The music of Pearl Jam and The Samples was cast aside in favor of pop-laden bubble gum. Brittany Spears and Taylor Swift were the new icons. The number of artists like Mark Knopfler or Tom Petty was diminishing. And if they were out there, they were the old rockers who had made their careers in the golden age of rock music. Precious few new bands made it to the consciousness of the American music scene. All of that contributed to my belief that surely our music was never coming back.

But this past summer, I decided to try it all again. I don’t know what brought me to that place, but something inside said I needed to try one more time. Audaciously, I rented a theater I knew I couldn’t fill and got my favorite local players together to remake the old music. When we signed the rental agreement, they asked about stage props and LED walls, and I rejected all of them. I wanted to host an old-fashioned 90s-style concert, complete with a T-shirt booth and CDs for sale. No fancy video imagery to distance the audience from the music. I was going to try to bring back something that had long ago died in the industry: a connection with an audience purely based on the music that we performed and our invitation to the crowd to join us. We recorded the show and captured it on video. (I’m so old, I know it’s not called that, but it conveys the point.) I wanted people to remember what it was like to just enjoy music for its own sake. In our world of hyper-attention-grabbing devices and entertainment choices, I thought the best thing I could do for the audience was to remind them of what we used to have. Don’t get me wrong, a Dead and Co show at the Sphere is probably mind-blowing, but the spectacle has always come from the noise being made by the instruments and the voices on the stage.

I love music. I love a great concert. I love how music brings people together by their commonality surrounding the band or the songs. Complete strangers set aside politics, and religons, and class status to enjoy the creativity of sound. What happened that night at the theater was like traveling back in time. I was 25 years younger again, and the music, which had been placed in a strange sort of time capsule, shook off the dust and brought people together around the experience.

I thought I would share a few of the songs from that night. I hope you enjoy them. We are starting to play again because of what happened there in that theater. It was magical and amazing, and it was music that did it.

On the night of the concert, I was stunned by all that happened. As I stood there and saw a crowd of people whom I felt humbled to be in front of, I was reminded of the good life I have lived. There, next to me, was my wife of 24 years. My son was playing guitar and bass on a few songs with me, and throughout the room were old friends from a hundred circles of my life, since my time in the music world, who had come to cheer us all on. In a profound moment, I realized that music had shaped my entire life. Everything I had I could attribute to my time with a guitar in my hands. My friends, my family, my beautiful wife and children, and an equal number of memories to the white dashes I had seen night after night in my youth. How should I be so lucky?

Blue

See Me

Child Of The West

Jennifer Smiles

Cold Water

Bighorn Mountains

If you live in Colorado and want to come see us, we are playing a few shows in the coming months.

Rialto Theater - April 10, at 7 pm: Buy Tickets

Jamaland - August 28 Redfeather Music Festival

Thanks for listening. There will be more videos and a live album on Spotify and Apple Music soon. I will send an update when everything comes out.