Jake Newton's blog

I'm a Musician. I make songs.
“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.”
- Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 3 This is perhaps my favorite part of the book. The narrator finds himself somewhere he’s never been, with the cadence of a night owl just waking as the rest of the world is beginning to rest. Many spiritual practices from various cultures teach a form of escaping one’s self as a tool toward divinity, that to lose the head is to gain the soul.  I’m not sure about other musicians and artists, but I feel the reason I keep playing shows and dealing with promoters, early flights, bad truck stop food, icy perilous roads, sound techs that qualify for the mentally handicapped, and plain old just not being in my own bed every night, is because I’m chasing that feeling. The feeling when your head gets feverish and your nervous adrenaline switches to hot fire. It’s a hot fire that counterintuitively makes you as smooth as the surface of a calm lake when you want to be, tyrannical as a forest fire, dangerous as the broken lip of a wine glass. Nature’s fury in a 3 1/2 minute song. You lose yourself. I think God gave us music for these kind of moments.  Sure it’s entertainment, I get that. But there’s something about a room full of people hushed and waiting for what’s going to happen in verse 2 of a silly song you wrote one night in your bedroom. You honor each other’s humanity in that moment. That’s God. That’s magic. 

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.”
- Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 3

This is perhaps my favorite part of the book. The narrator finds himself somewhere he’s never been, with the cadence of a night owl just waking as the rest of the world is beginning to rest. Many spiritual practices from various cultures teach a form of escaping one’s self as a tool toward divinity, that to lose the head is to gain the soul. 

I’m not sure about other musicians and artists, but I feel the reason I keep playing shows and dealing with promoters, early flights, bad truck stop food, icy perilous roads, sound techs that qualify for the mentally handicapped, and plain old just not being in my own bed every night, is because I’m chasing that feeling. The feeling when your head gets feverish and your nervous adrenaline switches to hot fire. It’s a hot fire that counterintuitively makes you as smooth as the surface of a calm lake when you want to be, tyrannical as a forest fire, dangerous as the broken lip of a wine glass. Nature’s fury in a 3 1/2 minute song. You lose yourself. I think God gave us music for these kind of moments. 

Sure it’s entertainment, I get that. But there’s something about a room full of people hushed and waiting for what’s going to happen in verse 2 of a silly song you wrote one night in your bedroom. You honor each other’s humanity in that moment. That’s God. That’s magic.