In this episode, Mike TV says farewell to his audience. It is an episode that spans his 20+ year music career, featuring (mostly) never-before-heard stories and songs that range from 2001 to 2024 compositions. As always, it is honest, heartfelt, and significantly embarrassing at various moments throughout the episode. This episode features brand-new recordings of the songs Break Your Heart, Music Makes Me Wanna Die, Escape From Which Mountain, and Stumble On.
0:00 Episode Intro
1:33 Cold Open
6:27 [song] Break Your Heart
9:36 Main Title
10:12 Music Makes Me Wanna Die Lead-In
15:30 [song] Music Makes Me Wanna Die
20:51 Escape From Which Mountain Lead-In
25:13 [song] Escape From Which Mountain
28:51 Better Than Yesterday Lead-In
30:26 [song] Better Than Yesterday
34:20 Stumble On Lead-In
38:08 [song] Stumble On
41:54 Episode Summation
42:44 END
Hey, I’m Mike TV and this is, sad to say, the final episode of Hesitation Cuts. Well, actually that’s not exactly true. It’s the final episode of this podcast. But I will be putting out Hesitation Cuts-style stories, that will also be called Hesitation Cuts, but they are going to be a) wildly different and b) exclusively available to only my Patreon patrons in the short term and then sold for cold hard cash money much later down the line.
And as such, I’m going to try to tie up these past two seasons in this episode. My goal is to give, with this final episode, a powerful and satisfying denouement. So, over the past two years, I put together twenty stories, 100 brand-new song recordings, and, I like to think, an innovative and, as-of-yet, never-before-replicated hybrid of story and song.
So if you really dig this show, you can still get a version of it. That should continue for as long as I draw breath. And that you can get for a buck a week. Plus, you’ll also get, just this year, four full-length Get Set Go albums, a few instrumental Get Set Go records, as well as a handful of side-project albums. And that’s on my docket just for 2024. Including, quite possibly, the reintroduction of Vermicious K, my early Mr. T’s band, you know, the proto-Get Set Go. I’ve reached out to the old bandmates and they are considering. So, there’s a whole bunch of cool stuff in the offing. In addition to the continuation of Hesitation Cuts in a varied format.
But, I do want to say, if you’re listening to this, right now. If you’ve made it this far, with me, with my story. My gratitude to you can’t be expressed in words. You have allowed me to fall in love with writing prose again. And telling stories that are not just the sorts of things I share between songs when I’m on stage. So, thank you for sharing these moments with me. It’s been a really wonderful ride.
Cold Open:
So, let’s the take the way back machine to the early aughts. September 11th has come and gone. The world is now a very different place. I’ve walked away from film and tv. I don’t have a lot of money. When I was pulling in my most recent decent salary from my time writing on the reality series, Arrest & Trial, I used that money to fix up the house I was renting at the time. Which, in hindsight, was idiotic. I was on a month-to-month lease. I had no business fixing the place up. I just don’t like living in a disgusting, druggie den. Which is what it was when I moved in. It was cheap because it was filthy but the location was amazing.
So, I had the walls professionally painted, I pulled up the linoleum on the floors and exposed the gorgeous hardwood in the dining area and the tiles in the bathrooms. And, what was, at first, a real rathole of a place transformed, over many months, into a gorgeous home. And as soon as my landlord saw what I had done, in her fervent excitement to make more money, she evicted me.
And so I was couch-hopping. Again. With no real revenue. Again.Because, by this time, I had committed myself making a living through my music, to being a professional musician, come hell or high water. Like, either I make a living through my music and my performance of my music, or I die trying. If the Ramones can do it, so can I. And so, I couch hop.
But, at the same time, I’m not in a great headspace. I’m 28-years-old, my once promising film & tv career is no more, my band can’t keep a drummer, and even though the free Tuesdays that I’m promoting at Mr. T’s Bowl are doing really well, I’m not making any money from it.It’s still a free night and I haven’t yet gotten up enough gumption to ask Mr. T, Joe Teresa, to pay me based on the performances of the nights.
And it is through the lens of this despairing, troubled, heavy-hearted perspective, that I start writing many of the songs that make it on our first album, So You’ve Ruined Your Life. You know, it starts with Go to the Mattress.Which I’ve talked about earlier in this show. But I also write Jesus Christ Wore Leather. And Kiss the Girl. And War, which was my anthem about the revenge we were gonna take, for better or worse, on Al Quada, for the September 11th attacks, and on Afghanistan for harboring them.Our big set-closer, One with the Numbers, was written at this time. Which is another anthem about how nothing adds up, nothing makes sense, we’ll never be safe, we’ll never feel comfortable, but that doesn’t mean we have to resign ourselves to being a statistic. Let’s not be casualties. Let’s fight back with song and the fury of our lonely and broken hearts.
And so, in writing these songs, where I allowed myself to be brazenly, openly honest about my darker character attributes and those of my friends, I found the first genuine vestiges of what was going to be my artistic voice. There were so many songs written at this time. I’ve always been pretty prolific, but this was sorta the beginning of me unleashing the flood of music, the endless supply of tunes that, still, to this day, live inside me. But, of all the songs I wrote during this time, many of which didn’t survive, there was something about the songs that did make the cut, that made it on that first record, that shared a sense of nihilistic, furious, but also joyful, bouncing, ebullient, empathy and honesty.
Our song 21, the song that kicks off that first record, the opening line, is “I’ve been 21 since I was fifteen, she said with a smile as she was kissing me.” And as I said in an earlier episode, that line, “I’ve been 21 since I was 15” just grabbed me by the spine and shook me. And so I took that little narrative hook, handed to me by my date, and I turned it into a Nabokovian judo flip. You know, the song starts out suggesting that the protagonist of the song is taking advantage of a much younger girl, and then, bam, turns out he’s the one dancing to her tune.
And if you know anything about my music, you know that relationships are regular fodder for my songs. Music is an emotional medium. And there is very little that gets the emotions roiling like love, and lust, jealousy and heartbreak. And, by the early aughts, I had written scores of songs about girls. Real and imagined. Songs like She Left By Moonlight, Click on Me, Thirteen, +1 Vorpal Sword, What Will Never Be, and so many other songs. But, the vast preponderance of the songs I had written were reflections on and mostly about relationships I had already had, or were currently in. Or, in some instances, they were about interesting relationships of friends of mine. Or, on a couple occasions, an amalgam of the two. I took similarities between girls that I had dated and stories given to me from friends, and I created a Frankenstein girl from the attributes of all of them.
Now, these songs were, often, me simply doing emotional damage control on my psyche after relationships either ended badly or were in the process of falling apart and I could see the damage we were doing even as I participated in the damage dealing. And as my drug addiction and my nihilistic, rock and roll trajectory spiraled ever downwards, my romantic relationships grew less substantive, ended way more quickly, and were often significantly more troubled.
And it was somewhere in this period, that I thought…I wonder if anyone’s written a song that was totally forthright about how messed up they were and how dangerous it was to get into a relationship with them. Wouldn’t that have been a thoughtful red flag that a person could actively wave. Even if that person’s partner said, fuck it, I’m still gonna take the plunge. Wouldn’t it be nice to know what you’re in for?
Like, think about your most chaotic, fraught, damaging relationships. Think about the ones where very little good came out of them other than, perhaps, maybe some good sex or some great laughs. But, that’s it. Otherwise, it’s just arguments, and vitriol, and invective, lies and deceit, hiding and secrets, poison and bile. Because, man, there were a number of years there, where I was just toxic.
Queue Break Your Heart: I was boiling radioactive toilet sludge served in a crumbling lead cup.
So, what if I had said, to every single one of my prospective and future lovers, “Hi…I’m Mike TV and…”
Break Your Heart Insert 1: And in case, you’re not getting it, silly goose, allow me to reiterate…
Break Your Heart Insert 2:So, girlfriend, why are you still here? Why are we even talking? I am trying to warn you.
Break Your Heart Insert 3:I am literally going make you cry.Repeatedly.
Break Your Heart Insert 4: Yes, okay, there is some attraction, but I’m just warning you, I know myself. I know myself.
Break Your Heart Insert 5: Okay, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. But just for good measure, I’m gonna say it twice more.
Main Title: Hey, I’m Mike TV and this is the final full episode of Hesitation Cuts the Podcast. Two years, twenty episodes, 100 songs. A lot of blood, a lot broken teeth, many many fat lips, but ultimately, we made it here and we’re still kicking. Bully for us. On today’s episode, I wish everyone a heartfelt good luck and happy travels.The world as we know will certainly not be here much longer. So let’s make every moment count.
Music Makes Me Wanna Die Lead-In: The remarkable thing about that last song, Break Your Heart, and actually all the songs on our first record, So You’ve Ruined Your Life, is that, the songs we chose, they were the simply the hit Vermicious K songs that became early Get Set Go songs after we signed our first record deal. And how we were able to identify the hits was because the Mr. T’s Bowl community would sing along to them. And jump around. And act like nuts. In fact, that was why the record label signed us. And every single song on that album, except one, had its day in the sun.Every single one had a moment when folks were super-enthusiastic.
So…I always thought, and in fact, if listen to early episodes of this podcast, you’ll hear me say that our first record was just a collection of our early popular songs. But, it turns out, after two years of reflection, that the first record was so much more than that. It was the first real, albeit unbeknownst to me at the time, but it was the first real defining of my artistic voice.
The songs on that album were, without a doubt, the songs that our weekly Mr. T’s audience most enjoyed. Except for our song Wait. As a quick aside: Wait is our most popular song. Hands down. It has millions and millions of plays. It was literally covered by Grey’s Anatomy.A hit television show covered my song!And it is a song that, without our drummer, Amy Wood, it would never have been heard by the world. She was 100% responsible for Wait appearing on our first record. She literally demanded that song go on the album. Which, to me, was absurd. It was a pop punk record. And we end it with a little acoustic three-quarter waltz as a hidden track.That’s crazy.
And, then, years later, how perfectly did Wait set up Ordinary World. Think about it. Right?We put out this blistering, full-tilt, hard-rocking pop-punk record with lyrics so vitriolic and in-your-face that “normies”, for lack of a better word, would often be like, what the hell are we listening to? It was not designed to be easy listening. And then, at the very end, we include this little hidden track, this little three-quarter waltz gem, because Amy demands it, and this little acoustic track is about taking risks so that you don’t miss out on living. If you wait, he will be gone. If you wait, she will be gone. If you wait, your dream will be gone. Time moves on. All things disappear.
And it’s this little acoustic song that foreshadows what the next record was gonna be. Even though, at the time we made that first record, I had no idea that Ordinary World was gonna ever exist, much less, that it was gonna be an acoustic punk rock record.
And so how fitting it is that this collection of songs, comprised of mostly just the songs that folks at Mr. T’s got the most excited about, how fitting it is that all of these songs were also many of my most lyrically distinct songs. The songs that shared the most with the music of our future albums. They were the songs about broken people, and fighting on in the face of adversity, about trying to find love in impossible situations, about revenge, and jealousy, and escaping into sex, and drugs, and other pause buttons. The entire records is pitched at 11. It’s hyperbolic and kinetic. But, there’s also just a little soupcon of humor and humanity. For example, When I grow up, I want to be a firetruck. Or, Baby won’t you kill be ‘cause you know that’s what you do. Or, go West young son and grow up with the country. The weather fine and the streets are lined with palm trees. Or, he doesn’t want a girl. She doesn’t want a beau. They talk for an hour and she says she has too go. And then the two protagonists fall asleep on his couch, the promise of unlooked for connection hanging in the air.
And this album, when you look at all of its attributes, it’s basically the UR Get Set Go record. The proto-album. All of these themes, all of these perspectives keep showing up in my songs, album after album, decade after decade.
But, because it wasn’t by design, because it was a collective effort involving all the bandmates and our Los Angeles fans, it always felt a little too haphazard to me, a little too unintentional. A little too much like, it was an album of happenstance. And in many ways it was. But, it’s just crazy to me, after reflecting on my professional music career of now 20 plus years, how many threads have been pulled from the cloth that is our first record, that I have then used to weave into the songs of my newest albums.
But, there’s one major theme, something that repeats repeatedly throughout the decades, in my albums, that doesn’t really show up in So You’ve Ruined Your Life. And that’s the struggle to make a buck and be seen doing what you love.And the reason why that doesn’t show up in the first album is because I hadn’t yet really begun to struggle. I mean, yes, I had regular periods of couch-hopping, or living in disgusting druggie dens, or even when I was in nice places, I was often there because I had roommates that were very gracious about my rock n’ roll behaviors and the unexpected consequences of living with an aspirant indie-rocker. In fact, I remember there was a time when I was living in a three-bedroom place with three female roommates, and I couldn’t afford a cell-phone, and I hadn’t yet considered a pager, and so all of my Mr. T’s Booking happened through our house phone.And I got, easily, 20 calls a day. Like hundreds of calls each month.
They should have booted me after month one.And they didn’t. I was there for a couple years, I think. And I will owe them forever for that, for their graciousness as I was figuring out my life.
But, in 2005, after So You’ve Ruined Your Life came out, and it was not a commercial success, yet, and the record label wasn’t really interested in putting out another album, and of course, I talked extensively about this in past episodes, but even though I had experienced a small handful of music licenses by this point in time, Jack & Bobby, the first couple Grey’s Anatomy licenses, but I wasn’t really making that much money. And I looked out at the years stretching ahead of me, and I realized that this might be all there is. Maybe I’ve already peaked. Maybe I’m destined to just become some small, indie-rock promoter of local indie-rockers in LA and that’s it. I didn’t even have a band at the time. It was just me. I still wasn’t certain what to do without Pat. Without Dr. Modo, my longtime music-making compatriot.
And, so, feeling the weight of this significant doubt, I sat down with my guitar and I just started playing a simple chord progression.
MMWTD Insert 1: And I was feeling so melancholy. Or, maybe not even that. Maybe it was just sadness. And so, I tried capturing that sadness.
MMWTD Insert 2: And the more I sang, the deeper the melody resonated with me. The more I felt the song becoming a…song.
MMWTD Insert 3: It was sad and haunting and beautiful, all at the same time.
MMWTD Insert 4: And then the words just spilled out of me.
MMWTD Insert 5: And there’s something about this ooh section, you know, where the notes are barely holding on, just barely in key, barely, barely, it felt like a perfect representation of what I was going through. Just barely holding on. Trying to be and sound beautiful.
Like, the only thing I was really getting out of all of my effort, all of my songwriting, all of my promoting and helping other bands was, well, good times, certainly, but the only thing lasting was the music. Just the songs. My songs.My friends songs. All the songs.
MMWTD Insert 6: And, as I was writing this song, I remember wondering, if this is all I get, just the music, just this song and all the others.... Would that enough? Could it be enough?
MMWTD Insert 7: And I do think that if my mind is an 8-track mind, there’s always one track that is going, quietly in the background, I’m sick of trying. I’m sick of trying. Just stop, Mike. Just lay down and never get back up again.
MMWTD Insert 8: That’s the problem, though. There’s always another song. You know, I pick up the guitar and tinker for 10 minutes and bam, a new song pops out. My little baby. A little reflection of my head and my heart.
And it needs taking care of. It needs to live its life. Otherwise, I’m a shitty creator of beautiful things.
ETWM Lead-In:
I know that what I’m doing with these stories doesn’t fit neatly into what most podcasting listeners listen to podcasts for.I’m not giving you great advice or information on things you want to know more about, it’s not a-laugh-every-ten seconds comedy gold, I don’t give you easy onramps to connecting with what I’m saying, you know, where you go, oh, I see myself in what Mike’s saying.I’m certain there are moments where you do. It is as honest and forthright a reflection of my human experience that I can possibly offer. But, my actual life experience is completely bizarre and that’s why I’m sharing. As a cautionary tale sometimes but also, maybe, as a treasure map. Because, I have discovered so much that glitters and gleams. Treasure and experiences that very few others have.
So, I think about the things in my life that I care about. The things in my life that fill me with purpose and a desire to keep on keeping on.On one hand, it’s my love. My love for my family, my partner, my friends, my puppies, my plants of twenty years. But also, my songs. Each song is like a neurotransmitter. Each of us is a synapse. And the songs travel between us, like dopamine and serotonin, connecting the few receptors open to receiving them and creating new sensations.
And the more music I write and the more songs I create and record and re-record, each little element builds a bigger and more expansive network of possible connections.
You know, I think I mentioned this in a previous episode, but it bears repeating. I feel like, when my soul was launched into the multiverse, my temperament, my outlook, my personal me-ness was intended for a different universe. A different Earth. One that wasn’t so cruel. And didn’t celebrate bullies and wealth while, all the while pretending at kindness and charity and magnanimity. Where profit wasn’t pursued so blindly as to steamroll basic human decency. Where we celebrated our differences as much as our sameness. But, instead, I ended up here. Where my messages and my art and my perspectives struggle. And there’s nowhere I can move to, where I can plant my flag in the sand, and live free of the bullies, and the constant demand for money, and the tribalism, and the cruelty, and the lies and the prevarications and the scams and on and on an on.
You know, I’ve been trying for so long for the connections to other people that I create through my music to feel…easy.I guess. Like, what would it be like to have tens of thousands of ardent supporters of what I do anxiously awaiting my newest release? To know, in my heart of hearts, that my fans are gonna be there. I can’t even imagine that. My life has always been transactional relationships. I do this for you and you do that for me. Always.
And certainly, there is growth. I have more musical equipment. And I can pay my rent each month. But, I never thought that 20 years into my music career, I’d still be struggling to pay my bills. That I would getting slowly crushed under the weight of debt.That I would still be struggling to remind my fans that I have new music and that it’s worth listening to. And that’s a pretty big kick in the nuts.
It certainly lends itself to me just wanting to push the pause button. Booze, video games, sex, audiobooks, even my healthy distractions, the healthy pause buttons, like me walking 10 miles a day, even that is just a way to distract me from the fact that I constantly feel like I’m not long for this earth.And that my music will benefit from me disappearing because we, as humans, mostly value that which is scarce.That of which there is a finite supply.Right. Gems, gold, oil, Kurt Kobain’s music, Earnest Hemingway’s stories, Mozart’s compositions, there’s only so much of them on this earth, and thus, their value can be measured. And scarcity increases that value.
Meanwhile, I’m putting out more music than I know what to with.
And every new record, and every new song just divides the attention of the tiny swath of folks that pay attention to what I do. Often, to the point that they stop paying attention because they just can’t keep up.I am super-saturating the world with my music.
Which is so crazy. Because, we’ve been enculturated to think about music one album at a time. Our favorite artists often put out an album a year. Or an album every couple years. 10 songs. And then they tour extensively on those ten songs. And t hat, to me, is a life made of nightmares. I have scores and scores and scores of songs in me each year. Because, I love writing songs. I love making music.
And it’s crazy, because, if an author puts out four books a year, and you really love that author, that’s just a huge benefit. And often, a book takes 24 hours or more to read. So that’s days and days of reading. Same thing with film directors. They’ll often put out 2 or 3 movies a year. And actors are in multiple movies.And playwrights will often do multiple plays. So, why is it that a musician putting out multiple releases in a year is something unheard of, for the most part.
And so, I find myself in this crazy, bizarre quandry. I don’t want my life to be promotion. I don’t want my life to be advertising something I did 9 months ago. I want to make music. But it’s been getting harder and harder to keep my foot on the gas.I’m starting to burn out. And a big part of me just wants to just get the fuck out of Dodge.
Escape to Which Mountain
ETWM Insert 1: Did you see what I just did there? The song started off as a song about me. And then I put you in the passenger seat. So now we’re in this together. And your only egress is to turn the music off. Ha! God, I love music. I love story. But combined? It’s so much better. It’s just so much better.
Better than Yesterday Lead-In:
So, in the later months of 2023, from, like, October to the end of the year, I was really struggling with my music career.I wasn’t do Twitch much anymore.My engagement was down. My streaming numbers were all over the map.My album sales, release after release, just kept diminishing. And I just wasn’t enjoying the business of making music.
In fact, I was really wondering if I enjoyed making music at all. I had these big plans to create a little community of my most engaged, hard-core friend and fans, and I would call them the Steering Committee, and they would help me avoid mistakes like spending two to three thousand hours over the course of two years on a podcast that brought in little to no revenue.
They would help me avoid prematurely launching a streaming service without properly promoting it. They would help me identify what people liked about my music and my performances, so I could focus on monetizing that. And, you know, the things that people want from me. And my plan, in late 2023, was to create this community and then at very start of 2024, I would start figuring out my gameplan to pivot my entire business model.
But, by the time January rolled around, I wasn’t even sure I still wanted to make music. Like, maybe 20 years and 24 studio albums was enough. I had no idea what else I would do, but maybe it was time to mount my guitars on the wall and…you know, leave them there.
But before I made that sorta of decision, I decided to just write some music for me. To simply write some songs that were filled with all the sorts of sounds that I like to listen to. To write some songs that capitalize on all the new music making skills I’ve developed over the past half-decade. The bass playing, my new and improved understanding of the guitar neck, the keys, the modes, chord substitutions, jazz chords, the whole shebang. And so, in that first week of January, after writing a couple other new instrumental tracks, I got up one morning and I wrote this chord progression.
Queue: Better Than Yesterday
Now, to me, this chord progression feels pretty sunny, pretty upbeat. And normally, I would balance the cheerfulness with dark lyrics. To create an interesting emotional mélange. But, I was like, let me just lean into the jaunty exuberance. Let’s...let’s just add some drums.
(At this point I grow tired of all the notation. Sorry.)
There we go…
And kick in some bass, like this.
And now a sunny, cheerful melody.
Great, right?
And then to kick it up a notch, let’s do this…
Big church bells.
And add some strings
And back to a sunny guitar melody
Now, a little touch of darkness
Feels good, right?
Now listen for the other little changes. Like flute in the background.
Now for a bridge. Let’s the change the character. A little manic, a little troubled. And then, let’s throw in a little support.
Stumble On Lead-In:
Now, after this song had been recorded, I got up super-early the next day to put together a rough mix and my partner mentioned, via What’s App, that she really liked it, even though the mix was still super rough, and that she had been all tucked up, cozy in bed, listening to the song develop. And so, when I first introduced the song to my Steering Committee, I called the song Cozy in Bed, as a working title.
But, the more time I listened to all of the instrumentals, and there were 10 written in January, the more they began to feel like a cohesive whole. And together, as a collection, they, all of them, captured different tenors and flavors of what I was feeling at the time I was working on this collection.
Which is why, to me, singles are great but they’ll never hold a candle to an album, properly sequenced, that was written, recorded, designed, and arranged to work together as a longer narrative. Not everyone works like that. Sometimes albums develop just as individual songs written over years. But, not me.I’m always writing in big groups of songs. I’m always taking one idea and surrounding it by three or four songs, until I capture that idea to the best of my ability. And then, when I have 70 to 100 new songs, I go through and I figure out what would make for the best collection to tell the best story of me, now. Because, as I said, I am writing an autobiography in song.
So, I decided to collect all 10 instrumentals into a record. Thus, after the songs were completed, I went back and fine-tuned the song titles so that they worked better as a collection. All of my instrumental titles going back to the very beginning days of my first band, had a little dash of darkness in them. Buck Up, Kiddo. Painkiller.Jet Packs. Each title evokes an emotional resonance but also hints at a little touch of danger.And I wanted to keep that. So, Biking Down Mountains became Tumbling Down Mountains. Fallibilism became Witchcraft. Stomping on Roachs became Thunder Under Stars. And then, to create a little more cohesion, to add a little connective tissue between the songs, I made some changes to the arrangements that I felt made the collection feel more like they belonged to the same record.
So, by end of January, I had ten completely brand-new, never-before-heard instrumentals. Which I collected together as an album called Forgetting Things Done. But, the title is not “for getting” but rather, forgetting, as in, I forgot something. Forgetting the things that I have done in my past. Which can be, if you’re a person like me, filled with regret and haunted by days past, but also afraid to peek into the future, forgetting, even for a brief moment, can be a balm, a salve on a weary and weathered heart.
So, it took a full month of making music to really drive home the point, and it turns out, I love making music. Surprise, surprise. I love writing songs. If you can believe it. I love coming up with interesting and fun arrangements. I love starting with one chord, a common, everyday chord and ending up with a brand new song spun from the threads of my imagination and all the feelings roiling inside me.
Oh, and should you want to hear this record, I’m giving it away for free. My gift to you. Of course, I am. Right?But if you want it, you can just go on Get Set Go’s bandcamp and you’ll find, amongst my enormous catalog, the album Forgetting Things Done. Just plug in the price you want to pay as zero dollars and zero cents, and you will own the record forever and always.
And yes, Forgetting Things Done was also written to do work to. To clean to.To jog to. To bike to. For long drives. And cleaning the rain gutters. Or whatever other busy work that needs doing. The things that, when complete, we forget about until the next time they need doing. Right?
Forgetting things done?
So, yeah, lots of meaning, double-meaning, and triple meaning in the album title. Because, you know, Get Set Go album titles require nuance.
So, I realized, yeah. I love making music. I’m a musician. It’s what I’m gonna do til the end of days. And fuck it. I hope folks, you folks, actually, are interested in coming along for the ride.But, if not, that’s okay. I’ve fallen down so many times. I’ve manufactured my own obstacles, I’ve chosen very difficult paths, I’ve hoisted myself on many of my own petards, but, that’s living, right? And certainly, I don’t see any rockstars turning up to help show me the way. So, I have to figure out the path by myself.And then I have to walk it, by myself.Well, no. No, not really. If you want to come along for the ride, I don’t know exactly where we’re going but I can promise it’s gonna be an adventure.
(But, then, by this time, the notation bug returns. Go figure.)
Stumble On Insert:
I know that we, as a human species, prefer to celebrate artists that everyone else celebrates. It’s just easier. You know, we’re busy. Our attention is supremely valuable. And the major players in the business of music know this. And they exploit it. And they take up most of the oxygen in the room. And that’s okay. They’ve got the money. They’ve got the power. And I can’t anything about it but write songs.
But, man, I would put my songs up against the songs of any other songwriter in the world, and I think they’d compare pretty favorably. And I know that 23-year-old Mike TV would be blown away by that. So, fuck the destination. I’m not climbing a ladder. I’m not running a race. I’m on a walkabout. In my estimation, the only purpose for a destination is to mark where folks can find my grave.
Episode Summation: So, that’s the episode. That’s the series. That’s the show.Two years of my life, two to three thousand hours of work. And, for me, a transformative experience.
I hope someday you consider coming back and listening to these stories again. I hope they’re worthy of being relistened to.
I hope that if you encounter someone that needs these stories and songs, you’ll have the presence of mind to share them.
But, most of all, I hope your days are filled with love, laughter, and purpose. Because, with those three things, anything can be endured, overcome, and made a joyful experience. Even if you don’t get what you want.
Especially if you don’t get what you want.
I love you all!
Be well.Eat your veggies. Live forever.