Fame and stuff like that is all very cool, but at the end of the day, we’re all human beings. Although what I do is incredibly surreal and fun and amazing and I’m really grateful for it, I don’t believe my own press release, do you know what I mean?

– Tom Hardy

I’m just getting settled as a responsible man – but if you split the elephant into little mouthfuls it will be fine.

– also Tom Hardy

Last night, I watched I’m Tim, a Netflix doc about Tim Bergling, aka Avicii, the unfortunately late EDM superstar. I didn’t know much about him, only that he was globally known and that he’d committed suicide a few years ago. The story is achingly typical: a sensitive, high-anxiety kid who found himself through making music. Fame struck. Tim turned to drugs and booze to maintain. At some point, he’d had enough and stepped away. Also achingly typical is that, while to all around him, he was in a better place, he took his life while on a solo vacation to Oman. A bright-eyed kid, destroyed by fame. In the doc, there are voiceovers by Tim while he was alive. He says “Making music was much better before I was famous…”

With the vapour trails of that floating through my head, I woke this morning and checked out a piece about the bluesman Skip James. In the 1930s, Paramount Records paid him $40 to record a body of his work. The Depression hit and Skip disappeared into obscurity. During the blues resurrection in the 1960s, a young John Fahey (one of my guitar influences) and two pals scoured Mississippi in search of Skip. They found him, with terminal cancer, and brought him back into the limelight. Before the disease finally got him in 1969, he gigged for three years, appreciated, beloved and respected for his talent, songwriting and what he brought to the blues. Who knows what might have happened in the thirty odd years between the recordings and resurrection? Maybe three years was enough to not have the life sucked out of him by fame.

I’m no stranger to craving fame. My younger desires firmly embedded that craving when I first started down the musical road. Along the way, I unconsciously wove the need for fame into the validation that we all seek, on both human and artistic levels. It’s something I’m not as haunted by now. I’m more comfortable in my own skin. I still find myself moaning internally (sometimes externally) about working a day gig and not being able to make music full time. This, too, has become better with time. I’ve engineered my life to maximize my creative time, and time with family, while working a day gig that brings in a suitable income, with people I care about. With all this in mind, a friend a few days ago sent me a clip about Philip Glass, the American minimalist composer. Even after achieving success, he kept his day gig as a plumber and a cabbie. The clip goes on to say that, if you’ve got a day gig, congrats, you can finance your music and stay independent. It was a reminder of what an amazing place I’m in.

The kid was away at camp last week and I missed her a lot. I took advantage of the time and worked in the studio on guitar parts for the new recordings. It took a lot out of me. I started a week ago Sunday and worked every day through to tonight (Monday, Feb 2). I was a bit spent as this past weekend dawned, but found the chutzpah to keep on keepin’ on. Apart from the creative juice expended, my feet went weird. We live in a sub basement. The floors are very cold in the winter and the studio nook, at the front of ours, is the coldest part of the unit. I have to kill the HVAC when I’m recording anything with live mics. It was dreadfully cold. I ended up with chilblains across my left toes. If you haven’t heard of them, they’re a nasty business. Abrasions on the skin due to prolonged exposure to cold. This while wearing thick socks and slides. I felt most of the time like I was recording in a walk in cooler. That is, when I thought about how cold it was. Mostly I was just there, digging the wood and wire and the toasty sounds coming out of my amp.

The recordings are going smashingly well. This time round feels different than all the rest. A close pal, who often gets to hear the dailies of the new tracks, said there’s a levity to these songs that wasn’t there before. I feel that. Life is still not without its struggles. It never will be, but the music is good right now. That means a lot. It’s my meditation and place of stillness while we navigate these barbarically insane times.

I hope, when the new record comes out next year, that it reaches far and wide and, at the same time, that I remain mostly anonymous. It seems like the worst time in history to be a famous person. Here’s to success under the radar. Maybe I’ll start looking into getting my plumber’s certification…

K. xo