May 29th, 2023
Like a person, The Next Step isn’t and never was all good or all bad.
And it was never a boy band.
But it made me who I am today. Before I get to how, however, let’s talk about the stuff that never got made (or got made and then buried somewhere deep in the woods).
- What The Hell Are We Doing?: This was going to be the first full-length album, and I thought of the title (and wrote some songs, including a track called Uncomfortable Silence) while I was still in high school. I just wasn’t ready for a project like this yet, and once I was, I had moved on from these ideas.
- From Pins to Packing: I started working on this album which, thematically, would be about journeys; I spent my youth thinking about ways to run away. I had a photo shoot and even designed an album cover (including a single poster for a never-released track, Torn). I wasn’t happy with how the project was going and scrapped the whole thing, torching its body.
- Prism: This album actually almost got done. I was recording songs with my friend Kenny, and it resulted in unreleased tracks like Metamorphosis and Beautiful Mistake; two songs we recorded, however, were repurposed and used on Something Old, Something New: With You, and The Steps.
- Life & Death: This is the big one. The last part of The Streetlight Diaries, an announced trilogy of albums that only got two. I wrote and recorded songs for it, then put it on a shelf as I got disillusioned with music (and myself), and it’s been collecting dust ever since. That will likely remain the case forever.
- My Solar System Is You: Years after I failed to finish The Streetlight Diaries, I started writing songs for a new album, and two of those tracks have actually seen the light of day: So, Hey, a spiritual successor to my first song, the emotionally paranoid Awake; and Wormhole, which found its own sort of popularity through live videos on the internet.
Most recently, I wrote songs after my mom died, but those, for now, are just for me.
I also collaborated with other artists over the years, including a few rap and spoken word tracks where I provided a hook or chorus; those songs have lended absolutely no cred, street or otherwise, to my reputation.
The Next Step taught me a lot about other people, and about my own work ethic. Despite you just having read a list of all the things I never completed, I actually worked really hard and got a lot of work done; the same couldn’t be said of some of the people around me, who often put in the bare minimum amount of effort (and still wanted to be the center of every photo we took).
It soured me on collaboration; to this day, I’ve never even had a mentor, and I think it’s because I eventually decided I could only rely on myself. I hunger to work with others, in any art form, and it just hasn’t happened for me in many significant ways in my life.
I said The Next Step made me who I am today, and by that I mean art did; The Next Step traced a big line in my path as an artist.
The most important thing it did was help me find my voice.
My voice has been a lot of different things over the years. My voice has been mean, stupid, hurtful, willfully ignorant; it’s been gross, funny, and sometimes it just didn’t know better; it’s been desperate, sad, terrified, horrifying; it’s been witty, silly, careful and chaotic, expertly crafted and recklessly thrown; it’s been anxious, curious, grieving, searching; and it’s always been reaching for honesty, simplicity, connection, meaning, kindness, and hope.
I could sometimes be all of that in the span of a three-minute song.
For me, the creation of art is the process of creating a better me.
In my upcoming graphic novel, Brushfire: Wave 2, Bay the squirrel says: “I’m rebuilding myself and trying to leave the bad parts out.”
Over the years, I lost people on the way; I respect those who tapped out for any reason, because I have been an idiot for most of them.
But the reason I commit to getting better is for the people who stuck around.
I feel like they deserve it, even though I rarely feel like I deserve much of anything.
The title of this last part is misleading: I don’t know what the future has in store. I hope music is a part of it.
But the legacy of The Next Step for me is that we all deserve to have a voice; we deserve the chance to find it, and use it, and change it, and to share it with anyone who wants to give it a listen.
All anybody ever wants is just to be heard.
The Den 