Here’s a story I was really, really excited about when my editor at MTV Hive decided to take a chance on it. A lot of the more significant times of my life over the past decade came at shows that people (including me sometimes, but not always) played in living rooms. Some of the people I would see in living rooms went on to get Indie Rock Famous, and play Bonnarroo or on Letterman or wherever. A lot of them didn’t.
The ones who got famous — like Sharon Van Etten, or John McCauley, who leads the band Deer Tick — always made me really happy. The ones who haven’t — like Brendon Massei, who appears in the story and plays music under the name Viking Moses, or like Tony Presley, who plays as Real Live Tigers (and, yeah, is a good friend of mine) — have been an inspiration to me for a long time, because I’ve always valued doing things for rewards that don’t appear obvious.
It still amazes me sometimes that some of the people I knew from playing in houses didn’t get successful with their music the way that Sharon and John McCauley did. I can find myself astonished that Annie Palmer or Dustin and the Furniture or Kelli Shay Hicks or David Israel aren’t at least kinda famous now. It all feels very random in some ways, which takes nothing away from how hard Sharon and John worked or how talented they are — there just isn’t room for everyone who works hard and is talented to get there.
Which is one of the points I wanted to make with the article, though I’m not sure it quite comes through. Jeffrey Lewis, who is somewhere between Viking Moses and Deer Tick, in terms of how successful he is, once described to me the feeling of watching people succeed like this: If it takes a million monkeys on a million typewriters to produce the complete works of Shakespeare, then it doesn’t really matter which monkey typed what — what matters is that, at the end of the process, that work exists, and it’s been created. It’s a nice way of thinking about it, and when I talked to Brendon Massei for the story, he agreed. The success that Deer Tick has, or the success that Sharon has, is really something that everyone who came up playing the same shows that they did can take pride in — it’s a validation of an entire community of artists who wanted to find a way to play music for people without having to follow rules for how to break in.
Anyway, this story means a lot to me, and I’m glad that it got to run today. Do me a favor and read it, will you?
