I met up with a college friend a few days ago for a drink after work. I say the word "friend" here loosely. She was someone I was friendly with and that I always enjoyed running into on campus, but we probably only ever saw each other for two or three minutes every few months. It was a friendship fully at the mercy of chance encounters.
I was back at Notre Dame a few weeks ago for a football game and, just like old times, I happened to run into her while speed-walking across campus to a tailgate. Neither of us really had time to chat, but knowing she had also ended up in the Bay Area after graduation, I told her we should grab a drink sometime when we're both back in California. And she agreed. So we did.
The first hour of the conversation was half me sharing what I had been up to in the four years since we had last actually talked and half listening to her answers and thinking, "Dang, we could have been much better friends if I had just put forward even minimal effort into doing that."The conversation shape shifted from what we're doing for work to why we're doing that for work to what happiness means in your 20s to why everyone in the Bay Area works themselves to depression, and it was absolutely lovely meandering through each other's thoughts on all these.
But the real shocker came in the middle of that conversation about work culture in the Bay when she dropped this on me:
"Actually, this is kinda embarrassing to say, but that idea of always choosing happiness...you wrote about that in one of your songs."
She then quoted for me one of the lyrics in my song "Candidate for Cool," more specifically, "I'll be the only smiling face / in a city of crying bankers."
This screwed with my head for exactly two reasons. First, when you're a musician that can practically count their monthly Spotify listeners on one hand like myself, hearing literally anyone recite your song lyrics back to you and in a context that says, "I listened to these and really related to what you said"...that's really cool.
But the second reason is because I just had no idea she still cared. I had no idea she would have taken the time to sit down and listen to my album. We hadn't talked for like four years. I would have bet my next paycheck that she wouldn't have bothered to give the album a spin. But I would have lost that bet. She did listen.
And that's been true in so many cases when releasing music over the last few years. Yes, I always love when my best friends text me after they listened to something new I put out, but consistently the people who tell me the nicest things about my music or that I hear through the grapevine were most excited to listen to it are people I hardly thought remembered me anymore let alone were genuinely excited to hear 44 minutes of my original music.
And that applies to this blog too. A third of the people on this distribution list are close friends and family that I knew would subscribe, but the other two-thirds are people that I had no idea would ever be interested in reading something like this from me. And it's so fulfilling to be proven wrong on that.
I guess what I'm trying to say is this: I have now learned you never have any freaking idea of everyone who cares about you. You'll always know some of the people, but you'll never know all of the people. And I think for almost all of us, that number of people is way higher than we might think.
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