Wade Ellis Wilby presents Hidden Track Storytellers. This is a creative writing workshop for fiction and nonfiction stories inspired by music. This first piece was inspired by Brock Butler’s song The Weather and the Wait.
I didn’t care to look at the broken LCD display on our now defunct stage clock. She’d been to one too many bars one too many times. She was just a souvenir now; A reminder that time was irrelevant. The last notes of tour were ringing out into the depths of my brain (thanks to the tinnitus) and Sarah was a scant 8 hours away from me. Nothing else seemed to matter now and I had no yearning for anything to matter the way it use to. It’s not that my reasons for getting into this whole mess have escaped me. In fact, they’re more real to me than they ever were in the beginning. I just never thought I would look back on my life and realize that the music was the easiest part of the journey.
The dorm room acoustic sessions that evolve to open mic nights that stumble into auditions that ramble into first gigs end up rolling down some hill in the universe somewhere and one day you wake up a musician. The kind of musician and the trail of destroyed relationships tend to differ from minstrel to minstrel, but make no mistake about it, at the bottom of the hill you will have a career and a laundry list of “what could have beens”. It goes with the territory. You spend so much time perfecting your craft you lose track of the world around you and usually, about a decade later, if the universe has taken you under its wing, you come to, and realize you have actual proof of all your hard work. It may be in the form of a discography. It may be in the form of rehab. One way or another your career is born.
Somewhere in that timeline came someone who believed in you and pushed you further down the hill. When that first person makes that first shove it creates a chain reaction of shoves, a domino effect of nudges that come with their own sets of ideas, responsibilities, and consequences. It is this shoving match that moves your mind further and further away from the music, no matter how hard you practice every day. Managers, accountants, publicists…all necessary evils to an end goal, but evils nonetheless. When I picked up my first Ovation in 5th grade (what a piece of shit that guitar was) I never thought I’d spend more time on the phone discussing the importance of playing Boston on a Thursday as opposed to NYC. I wish I never found out what a “major market” was. I wish I never learned a lot of things.
READ ON for more of this installment of Storytellers…
