The Muddy Waters of Failure

Taking my music to the New York open mic scene in 2009

19 years old, playing my first real gig at the Delta of Venus Cafe in Davis, California.

The room at the back of the bar looked like the inside of a circus train; narrow and dark with faded spectacle. A small stage sat at one end, framed by red curtains and circular yellow lights across the front. The rest of the room was lit lowly by antiquish lamps attached to cheap-fancy wallpaper. A sour smell of spilled cocktails mingled with secondhand smoke brought in from the patio on stylish jackets and vintage dresses.

The room was at capacity, with the audience at small rickety tables and the performers stuck along the side of one wall or gathered in clusters at the back. I sipped my drink anxiously with the other acts in the moody glow, waiting for my name to be called from the clipboard I’d written it on when I got there.

I’d played at crusty dives in Bushwick, bright and polished Greenwich cafes, in apartments and the subway, but there was something that struck me about this bar. There was a lived-in quality to it that made it easy to imagine a full lineage of songwriters passing through the place and leaving behind pieces of themselves. I imagined it before the invasion of grandparent hipsters in the 1960s and 70s, pictures I’d seen of smoky rooms where Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters stood moaning their songs to the small crowds who needed them.

A guy I had been having a cigarette with outside was up next. He was skinny and looked barely old enough to buy a drink. He grew up in Flushing and told me about taking his standup comedy from bar to bar all over NYC. He was dorky and nice and easy to talk to. I thought he was brave as fuck for getting up there, trying to make people laugh when the vast majority of the other performers were like me: songwriters from out of state with acoustic guitars.

A pretty, hippie girl sang two songs about the wind and desert before my cigarette buddy was introduced. He walked on stage and picked up the microphone from its stand. I could see his hands shaking from the back of the room as he shifted from one foot to the other in the searing stage lights. The crowd looked intimidating from behind; disjointed rows of still shadow people packed in tight, waiting to see what the kid had to offer. 

He opened with a joke about his name that didn't land. The silence after a dead joke is one of the worst silences in existence. There is a natural and unavoidable cruelty in it, like watching a baby antelope being torn apart by a predator. Nobody wants to see it happen but it’s the natural order of things. There is no sentimentality in the wild, and there certainly isn’t any in places where people expect brilliance. 

My stomach hurt as I watched him stumble through jokes to the sounds of clinking ice and sighs. I forced some laughs out and felt a strange guilt. The honest thing to do would have been not to laugh because he wasn't funny. The silence of the room made me squirm and I had so much admiration for the way he pushed through his set. He deserved compassion and empathy.

He finished his set and walked off to respectful applause – a small mercy. His head was down as he moved through the anxious acts who waited for their names to be called from the clipboard. He passed me on his way to the patio, and I gave him a smile and a pat on the back. He forced a smile of his own and went out for a smoke. The other performers avoided eye contact, not out of meanness or judgment, but awkwardness. We use the term “died on stage” because that’s what it feels like. No one is quite sure how to console someone after a death. Most of us had been there but everyone handles it differently. 

The host croaked my name through shallow reverb and I stepped up onto the small stage. I had a three drink buzz going and my nerves were kept neatly beneath the gin. I’d been playing at least six open mics a week across the city but it was my first time at this painfully cool bar with its equally cool inhabitants. It was exactly the kind of place I'd imagined being before I left my little beach town in Northern California: a dark, atmospheric den of broke, cultured artists who rejected the bullshit escalator of capitalism. They made art because they had to, there was no other option. That’s who I wanted to be and that’s whose approval I wanted. This little circus train car in Manhattan was the peak of what I had been looking for.

It was a good setup for a small place, decent sound and lighting. The nice thing about playing with actual stage lights was that it was difficult to see the audience. It was hard for me to look at people when I played. All my songs were mournful notebook scribblings about girls and isolation, they were quiet and close. I’d played publicly enough to learn how to manage my nerves with alcohol, but the feeling of exposure that came with performing was like peeling a scab. Vulnerability is celebrated when people talk about art, but the nudity I felt on stage never felt good to me.

I hated it, in fact.

In 2009 I was twenty-five, and I had written the best music of my life. I recorded an album of songs in the bedroom of a house in the Santa Cruz Mountains after a bad breakup and hard summer. The sweet spot of a creative peak meeting a mental health valley finally arrived and I had it on my hard drive. My album was lofi but I loved the atmosphere I’d achieved and it was the proudest I’d ever been of something I made. I had written songs and played open mics across the Bay Area since high school but I finally felt like I had something worth sending out into the world. I emailed a friend in Brooklyn who helped me find a temporary spot to rent so I could make a go of it in the city. My plane ticket was one-way.

Over the next few months, I discovered I wasn't built for New York. I grew up surrounded by nature, and I valued my space and privacy. The room I sublet was a converted hallway with a window that opened to a vertical shaft through the center of the building. The view was walls and other people’s windows. I told myself these things were romantic and if I wanted to make it, this was what it took. But I was miserable. I drank two bottles of Charles Shaw a night and I didn’t like any of the new music I was writing. I became insecure about my appearance and my depressing songs. The confidence of other artists was devastating; they were fearless and I was overwhelmed with jealousy. I didn't feel like one of them, but I kept playing open mics because that’s what I was supposed to do. I waited to find joy in it, but it never came.

Feeling unable to connect to performance, a fundamental aspect of my art, made me see myself as a failure. The adage about being able to make it in New York flipped on me; if I couldn’t make it there, I couldn’t make it anywhere. I’d spent my life reading music biographies, buying into the rock star dream, and I didn’t know what to do with the unhappiness I felt lurking around in the belly of the music world. I saw other artists thriving in it. Some of them had been in the open mic scene for years and seemed to get a wonderful sense of fulfillment from it. If I didn’t feel the same way then surely I wasn’t meant to be a musician. 

I felt beat up and sad. I was a fool for thinking I had a shot. 

I didn’t want to be there.

I was in New York for another month or so after the Manhattan bar. I played more open mics but that little stage has stuck out in my memory because I remember thinking I’d found what I was looking for, but it didn’t make me feel the way I’d hoped it would. I wanted to make music and be an artist but I realized I didn’t want to participate in the things you were supposed to when you lived that life. I was young and I saw being an artist as binary. You were good or you weren’t. You succeeded or you failed. I didn’t pass the test because I couldn't meet the requirements. I decided I wasn’t good enough.

I played my two allotted songs that night and received my own respectful applause. I found the standup comedian out on the patio. He'd recovered from bombing and laughed about it, almost bragging about taking his lumps on stage. He was already brainstorming ways to change his act to make it better. I saw a determination in him that I didn’t see in myself. I realize now, all these years later, that my compassion had been misplaced. My standup buddy was fine. He was doing what he knew was necessary for his art and he welcomed it, as painful as it was. 

The person I should have had compassion for was me. I wish I could have consoled that younger, more insecure version of myself and told him that he shouldn’t feel bad for not wanting to live in New York and play his music for people. I was trying to force myself into a role that didn't come naturally. As badly as I wanted to be Buckley or Dylan, or Muddy Waters even, that just wasn't who I was. The disappointment I felt in myself prevented me from pursuing a different path with my music. I locked myself out of art with doubt and shame. I gave up. But choosing not to do those things didn’t mean I’d failed as an artist. I made the music, it exists in the world, and I am grateful for that. I’m still proud of that album. 

What I wanted was to be validated by my peers, but I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older that the validation of others can be complex and unsatisfying – poisonous even, if your self-worth comes to rely on it. I’ve found in other aspects of my life that if I can’t find validation in myself, other people’s approval doesn’t really land anyway.

I’m writing this a few months from my fortieth birthday, sitting in my house, a few blocks from the ocean and a short drive from the redwoods. I have Muddy Waters playing from my speaker, and his slide guitar weeps as he sings about not being satisfied. There’s a cat asleep on my router, the sun is coming through my window, and my coffee is hot. I have food in my cupboards and my son is reading a book on the couch. When I tell people about my time in New York they're impressed by my experiences. I’m the only one who thought I’d failed for all these years. I have found compassion for myself and a new understanding of what art and creativity mean to me.

I picked up a guitar for the first time when I was eleven because I was fascinated by it and because I wanted to be able to express myself with it. I started writing songs as a teenager because my home life was fucked up and I had to do something with the feelings. The pursuit of what I saw as “success” was based on how our culture defines it. I thought I was rejecting the bullshit escalator of capitalism but in reality I was still using its measures to judge myself. I haven't fully escaped that trap but I've made progress.

I never stopped playing or writing completely but for the first time in years I've been swept up by serious creativity again. Old parts of me have woken up, creaking back to life and wobbling around on new shaky legs. I started working on a novel at the end of last year and have been exploring memoir. Learning how to write has been like figuring out a new instrument; different sounds and ideas are coming out, I see how I want to improve and feel desperate to get better. The comparisons and measurements still show up but I'm better equipped to tell them to go fuck themselves and focus on the joy creating brings me. It's very liberating.

I don’t have any expectations whatsoever and that may be the best feeling of all- stretching for the sake of sensation, writing for a readership of one. But I’m also excited to put more things out into the world. I can fold my art into little paper airplanes and launch them from my digital porch out into cyberspace. If they happen to land in the homes of strangers, beautiful. If not, I will still find joy in their creation.

Below is the album I mentioned in this essay, written and recorded by myself in my bedroom in the redwoods of Felton, California.

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Eternally grateful to

Dev

for her editing and feedback.