Sounds from the land of the living

Following the muse, or maybe it follows me?

Back with voiceover this week.

After a solid 2 1/2 weeks of illness and recovery, I’m finally back in the land of the living.

I’ve been going to acupuncture for some chronic back and neck pain (it’s helping!). After sick leave I was back on the table last Friday, supporting my recovery with cupping and needles in places my body had felt the most distressed: head, legs, lower back. It felt good to visualize moving stuck energy, old blood, pinpointing attention with a prick and then a subtle swell, maintaining the slowed-down pace of the weeks prior.

Face down, head in a table cradle, I immediately started hearing a song. It had a deep low rocking bass, a pulsing beat and a vocal clear as day:

slowing down
you’re in my arms now

An entire verse + melody spilled out, and I repeated it over and over, trying to land on the best rhyme and commit it to memory. But ultimately I had no way to capture it. Phone was across the room, back was full of needles, practitioner across the hall. I had a button in my hand but I considered it for Emergencies Only. A mistake bound to repeat until the lesson is finally learned, I told myself this song is good, it’s catchy — I’ll remember it. As any musician in the room can confirm: chances are high I will not remember it. Despite its fully-formed composition, by the time the lights come back on and the door slides open, the song was gone.

I held that clicker in my hand the entire time. I could’ve asked for my phone, with a completely justifiable reason — not to check my texts, but to not lose that song. Kind a cool reason, actually. But the risk of losing the song was apparently lower than the risk of inconveniencing someone, or feeling potential shame and embarrassment of suddenly NEEDING my phone. So I let it play out, tried to convince myself this time would be different, and lost the song. Later I thought, wouldn’t it have been no big deal to just… ask?

How often do we accept our realities as they are, floating on the river of life, and how often do we pick up a paddle and steer? How do we know what’s required of any moment?

I accepted the loss, imprinted the lesson that creative ideas can be fleeting and are never guaranteed to stay, and promised myself I’d write it down next time. The crazy thing about making music, or my way of making music, is that sometimes I hear the entire sound in my head before ever picking up an instrument. I’ll hear it like it’s playing on the radio, and if I’m near a laptop or piano, then begins the frantic but… playful? journey to reconstruct it in the real world. Which, Rick Rubin and many others will say, is never going to match how it sounds in your imagination. At some point you have to compromise, adjust expectations, and decide it’s as good as it’s going to get. Sometimes happy accidents take a song or a sound in a new direction, a keyboard glitch that fills the space perfectly or a lyric that sounds like something else and works even better. So, it’s not that the process of making music is always unsatisfactory, it’s just indirect.

In the studio with Formerly Alien and engineer/producer Sean O’Brien, LA 2019

Formerly Alien is at an interesting crossroads. In some ways, the post-apocalyptic world of our concept band has never been more relevant; look at the world around us! Jokes about societal collapse, despot rulers, needing to find a new home never hit so easy. In other ways, parts of the show feel tired to us and in need of refresh — it came together more than 7 years ago, that apocalypse feels like another lifetime! We’ve got fresh horrors that need a fresh response.

In January, Andy and I sat down with our band over deep-dish pizza and made the bold proclamation that it was time to write some new music. We’d done the show four times in 2024, and I will contradict my previous statement by saying we really did achieve the show we envisioned when we set out in 2017: by the end of last year, we had found just about as close to that version in our minds eye as we could hope to embody: with interstitial video bits, audience interaction, music dialed in, a rockin’ Tears for Fears cover at the end, and an ease with our transitions and lines that for non-actors wanting the characters to land somewhere in between our real and show selves, was a new level, unlocked.

Formerly Alien at the CCC, October 2024 - watch here.

After that October show (which you can watch on YouTube here ), we knew it was time for either a change or a break. Andy was back out on the road with America, which meant his weeks include two full days of travel and multiple show days, not to mention our work projects which require hours in front of the computer, zoom calls and emails, an then the blessing of going outdoors which comes with the maintenance of 50 fruit trees, 6 vegetable beds a dozen rose bushes and whatever else is going on out there. We are renovating my family’s barn so we can one day have a dedicated space to make music — which some days feels like exactly what needs to happen, and other days we question whether it’s a distraction from just sitting down and doing the thing, in whatever space is available. Floating in the river vs picking up a paddle.

Musically, it is not an exaggeration to say the two of us have performed these songs thousands of times in the past 7 years, in a myriad of arrangements and tempos and instrumentations. Andy wrote most of the tunes from a very specific place in 2016, as a single man in a studio apartment channeling the political and emotional tenor of the moment: DT taking office and the world shifting in new ways, Andy was also on the road with America the first time around and witnessed the power of rock and roll time travel to transport audiences and give them brief moments of unity and belonging, and a nostalgia that seemed to transform their bodies into teenagers again. Andy birthed a set of songs that captured a revolutionary and healing energy that felt exactly right. When we play our songs now, we can access that emotional space, but it’s not where we are living from: we have evolved as people, the world has evolved (in some ways, into an even more extreme and high-stakes place), and it’s not that that the old music feels irrelevant as much as we feel like at this point, we wonder if there’s something more to say.

So, we announced to the band that we would be attempting to write new music, and we hoped to expand or change the show later in the year. See earlier story about creative endeavors, this was easier said than done. The Formerly Alien music has a very specific sound, lots of clustery 4ths and 5ths and 9ths circling around certain chord progressions, it’s washy yet precise — these things are not rules but they are recognizable patterns and they form a boundary. It’s a world of sound and lyric and aesthetic, a self-contained palette that’s actually quite challenging to plug new songs in and out of. It’s more like an opera, or a song set, than your typical band.

In the story of Formerly Alien, we are the house band on a cruise ship turned refugee vessel searching for a new home, and we have been literally playing the same songs for our passengers every week, for all the years we’ve been adrift in space. That’s the joke — it’s the same music, over and over again, and passengers revisit the lounge for this familiar and comforting and inspiring soundtrack of home and what’s next. Every week, every month more disheveled, more disconnected from what was — and yet perhaps more clear on what we want and where we hope to head next? The music serves as a a canvas for softening and imagination.

So, while it’s theoretically exciting to write a new set of songs for the band, it’s also daunting. Paralyzing, even. Weeks passed, months of 2025 went by, and we hadn’t made a dent. Life is full, it is asking a lot of all of us every day. Andy is traveling constantly with his touring gig. Web work is busy and high-stakes in ways I can’t even write about here, which takes up a lot of mental space. Thing is, the music came to Andy the first time around in a space of wide-open possibility: he was living alone, working sporadically with a lot of free time, and his recording setup was 15 feet from his bed. The month he remembers “downloading” a lot of these songs from whoever it is music comes from, he was also incredibly sick, on heavy cold medication and experimenting with smoking weed at low temperatures. When we got together I was in the process of closing my travel startup, I had minimal work and we lived together in his 300sf studio. It was comically small and intense but also simple, and allowed us to live in the world of the band, all the time. These are not the conditions of our partnered life today.

Recently we started to entertain a different question: what if new music is not meant to be written for and contained within the format of the old band? This question is scary but necessary. Don’t fresh creative ideas require freedom, unbounded by expectation or limitation? Wouldn’t it make sense to sit down and write from that wide-open place?

You sure can’t force art. But you can decide to be disciplined — War of Art style, sitting down at your desk every day and making time and space for it — Andy wrote about this extensively in his blog when he gave himself songwriting accountability deadlines during the pandemic. You create the environment, make time for it, make sure you’re spiritually grounded and creatively fed when you start. But you can’t force the muse, the timeline or the product of what comes next. This is what leads so many artists to worry that every great piece of art might be their last great idea. How do you trust the source of inspiration, if you don’t technically know what it is? This is what faith is all about, right?

As I wrote here early on, in some ways this strange chapter of history feels like it requires artists maybe even more than it requires scientists, analysts, organizational leaders: before we can rebuild our reality, we need to be able to reimagine what it could look like, feel like, and be like. We need to process our past more, get back in touch with what matters to us, and practice operating from our heart sometimes instead of only our heads. What better way to free ourselves from our immediate realities and play in these alternate versions of the future than through songwriting, a format that can hold many truths and communicate through poetry and emotive sound? Again, theoretically perfect.

My recent musical ideas have flowed most easily in a new duo project, a synth pop band called Technicolor Mastodon that I started with old friend and world-class jazz pianist Jon Dryden. I have some other song ideas in motion, a few are big and anthemic and a few are tender and sweet. None of them sounds like Formerly Alien.

I love the band so much it makes my heart ache to think about it — the beautiful tragic concept of floating in space and starting over, the futuristic costumes, the way it is part of Andy and my love story, the fact that I get to touch so many parts of myself: musician, designer, facilitator, camp counselor, through my character A. My songwriting contributions to the band did not come in that same furious download, but they ended up fitting in because they were not disharmonious, and because they reflected some part of me.

This strange chapter. Everything in the news feels like part of a giant domino run that’s already set in motion, covering the surfaces of all of the rooms of the house with tiles that have either fallen or are precariously in line to fall, and every time you think you know where the run is headed, another new arm gets ticked into motion from another room. Like the “big beautiful bill’ that the House just passed and is now moving to the Senate, called the most destructive legislation in US history if it passes. Or the runaway plastics problem, with 10% of our recycling actually handled and “donated” clothing is piling up on the previously picturesque shores of countries like Ghana (I watched Buy Now last night, recommend but be prepared for that queasy exhaustion of really wrapping your head around a runaway human problem). People getting disappeared from their universities, shaken down on the streets for their paperwork.

What to even comment on, where to begin? Andy would say to focus on the universal feelings, those ever-present ones: music doesn’t have to be thematically descriptive or topical, it works better when you zoom out and touch the most elemental human themes, ones that do seep in to all of these intensifying layers of politics and society. It’s all the same stuff, it comes back to pain and loss and beauty and otherness and conflict and belonging and hope and sometimes holding a few of these things at the same time. Old themes, new world.

But how will I know if anything I make matters? How will we know if working on music is a better use of our time than direct activism, prepping for post-apocalyptic outcomes, something else? We won’t. But if music comes, and if our hearts and minds are open and the sound arrives on that inexplicable radio-frequency, our job is to hit record on the boom box and start the cassette tape rolling, as fast as possible (who remembers doing this in the ‘90s?). Even if the opening line feels like it doesn’t means anything deep:

slowing down
you’re in my arms now

…the opportunity is to follow the thread, to sit at the desk long enough to turn that into a complete thought — not a perfect one. I say this all out loud, to recommit to myself and to you. Starting with picking up my phone and making a voice note of the idea, even if it’s not an appropriate time to pull out a phone. Will I do it anyway?

Backing/music track: a reconstruction of “Different” by Formerly Alien, the chords I consider quintessential to the sound of this band, followed by a version of “Different” from our 2021 album, Somewhere.