There are a lot of valid questions in the world, and a lot of worlds in the world as well. For example, in the tennis world, someone might meaningfully ask, “is it 30-love, or 40-love?” This question would make no sense outside of tennis.
In the Speechwriters LLC world, someone, you perhaps, may have recently asked the question, “where is Misha?” This is not a question that makes much sense outside of the LLC domain, because of course I have been working to build a better democracy, spending the last eight months on an epic adventure with a truly great American, Jim Webb, an adventure that recently culminated in a Democratic takeover of the Senate. I’m extremely proud of the work I did, the time I gave, etc..
This doesn’t really answer your question. Your question comes from the Speechwriters LLC world, and now I’ve come by and said hello. But the spirit of your question is really, “didn’t you used to eat and sleep in this world? Wasn’t it your home? When will you be back for good?” And that, friend, is a hard question to answer.
Over the past five years, making Speechwriters LLC a livable space has been my passion. During college, I worked as hard on the band as I did on schoolwork, and the result was that by the time I graduated, the LLC was a functioning place. Dave and I spent the next two years inhabiting it full-time, sometimes floating the dream on the credit of a Hollywood agent or the largesse of an old record exec, always finding ways to make it work. We measured our progress by simple metrics (Boca burgers and space heaters vs. cheese steaks and booze).
Ultimately, though, the equation was this: for Speechwriters LLC to be a world that we could inhabit all of the time, we needed some X number of people to inhabit it some of the time. Super-fans (defined as anyone who is reading this post) always pulled more than their share of the weight, driving multiple hours to shows, buying merchandise for their friends when they already owned it all themselves, constantly reminding us by their actions that we had the best job in the world.
Should art (even if the art is just four-chord love songs) and commerce mix? They had to if we wanted to live in our LLC world full time. The irony, of course, was in the compromise: the more time we spent on making the band work economically, the less time we spent on making it work artistically.
The best songs I’ve written were always for me. I’m glad you enjoyed them, but it’s not like TV in that way, where content is created for the audience. I wrote songs mostly because someone broke my heart, or, occasionally, I broke someone else’s heart, or some variation on that theme. I crashed a car; you rubbernecked at the wreckage (in a good way :)
When I’ve tried to write songs for you, ultimately so that I can spend another week on the road getting free drinks and promiscuous gazes, the songs are flat and nights are predictable.
So I’ve gone back out into the larger world, I’m going to let some life happen to me, and then, because it is my instinct, I’m going to write about it over a pleasing chord progression. I started writing songs to get girls, and now I’ve got one (and we’re not in the mood for heartbreaking at the moment), but I’ve got plenty of other concerns these days and I’m sure they’ll work themselves into a catchy set of tunes. And when they are done, I’ll come back to the LLC world and share them with you.
In the meantime, I have a feeling that Dave will keep you all entertained.
Life. Love. Cheers.
Misha
