Musical Family Tree

A Musical Family Reunion

I resolved this New Years to write one long(ish)-form essay here on Substack each week. So far, it’s been pretty easy. Topics have come easily, and I have a nice list to work from if I get stuck. I just sit down for as long as it takes, usually on Sunday afternoon, and I write something to publish later in the week. Maybe I’d run out of topics after a while, but it won’t be before the year is up.

I’m settling into themes, and naturally the themes are the things I really care about. I’m avoiding controversy, avoiding pitfalls such as politics, faith, and personal junk. I’m not here to stir up controversy or to overshare. I’m slowly leaning into writing about making and selling art, human connection, and - especially - community. I try to remain in a constant state of reinvention, but my core values and beliefs haven’t changed much in 30 years. My professional life, when it’s going well, is largely about creating connections and building community through music. I can write about my work without writing about my work. That’s what I’m striving for.

My life in music has been a thread that has connected many communities that have meant a lot to me. Some of those communities have held, others are long forgotten. But the scene that gave me my values in the first place is my hometown scene in Indiana. I had two runs as a musician there, first my high school punk scene, and later in the early 90s, when I really leaned in to the regional scene for several years. That scene hasn’t really produced any superstars (unless you count John Mellencamp, and maybe you should); but it’s produced many great acts, great recordings, and legacies that have endured - at least within certain musical families.

About 20 years ago my friend Jeb Banner, a musician, producer,A technologist, and entrepreneur, approached me and others from our scene with an idea to document the history of the Indiana scene and create an archive. Remember 2004? I was in a reset period where music wasn’t much on my mind. Either I was trying to finish law school, trying to pass the bar exam, starting work as a baby lawyer, or experiencing the magic of the birth of our second child and beginning to feel outnumbered. In the industry, between file sharing and the slow growth of iTunes, everything seemed uncertain and disorienting. But I always have time for my old music scene friends, so I listened to his pitch.

Jeb wanted to create a free, grassroots digital archive of underground music from the Indiana music scene, focusing primarily on the 90s and early 2000s, but going back as far as necessary. He called the project Musical Family Tree (MFT). He planned to crowdsource building out the archive and then hopefully expand the MFT brand into other markets, eventually creating an interconnected index of digital files of underground music throughout the world. For this ambitious plan he would build the Indiana music archive as a blueprint first, then he’d provide a template to empower people from other communities to archive their own local scene or community. I loved the idea and I chipped in all the music I could. I loaded up my iPod with fresh tracks with great excitement - remember those days? I’ve long admired Jeb’s forward thinking and follow-through in his successful career building technology platforms - I believed he was potentially on to something important, maybe even transformative. This is the time I started making an effort to live in the future regarding music technology.

Around the time Jeb reached out to me about MFT, I became involved with a music policy nonprofit called the Future of Music Coalition. The FMC (which remains very active and effective in artist advocacy) used to have an annual Music Policy Summit in Washington, D.C., which I began attending as a law student. The Policy Summit brought many of the most forward-thinking, brilliant music business professionals, largely to discuss imminent changes. These music policy conversations lit up my brain and got me thinking in a much more focused way about how to be an effective artist advocate, and how to think through issues to reach my own opinions.

By 2004-05 I became convinced that the future of music “consumption” would consist mostly of on-demand streaming; however, our infrastructure wasn’t ready. Anyone paying attention could see that we’d soon be living in a mobile access world with nearly ubiquitous high-speed high-speed service. Nevertheless, it wasn’t at all clear how or when that would happen, though it was long in the works and ready to explode. The website listen.com - which built a large online music directory - launched the Rhapsody streaming platform in 2001 with a $9.99 per month subscription model. It wasn’t particularly successful, however, because so few people had powerful enough Internet access to stream at decent quality. As we waited for the wave to carry streaming access to the masses, it seemed that indexing and organizing digital files representing a music community for free access by fans could prove visionary.

Antenna, 1993. L-R Me, Freda Love, Jake Smith

In 2005, once the archive began to take shape, Jeb moved the focus to launching an MFT festival. We did a 2005 festival across two venues, The Patio in Indianapolis and Second Story in Bloomington. We did an Antenna reuinion for that one. Then in 2006, we did a scaled back festival at Radio Radio in Indianapolis, where I revived my other well-known Bloomington project, Velo Deluxe. I wasn’t playing much in those days, so it was a nice opportunity to revisit the high water mark of a decade earlier. It’s really wild to think it’s been thirty years now, hard to process. Those were fun, reasonably successful events, but for whatever reason it didn’t continue into 2007.¹

Then several years into the project, as MySpace and Facebook grew in popularity, MFT launched a social platform where users could create a profile and interact. Jeb used the still-active Ning platform that facilitates creating niche social networks. It became a digital clubhouse of sorts. At least in terms of certain Indiana music communities, this is when the platform began to take off. Most people were on MySpace at the time, but that platform wasn’t good for the sort of niche interest interaction. For a short time, MFT became my main social media habit. It was so fun to read all the wild threads about the history of the scene, about the players, the bands, the hi jinx, and the shows and recordings that defined those times of our lives. Now that we’re all connected like we are, this probably sounds unremarkable. But at the time, with so many friends, collaborators and heroes sharing their stories, it felt pretty magical.

This period of 2007-2008 was a time of change for me. I’d been working at a law firm for a few years, and then the financial markets crashed, taking out much of the commercial work I relied on to be profitable. Everyone needed to look after themselves, and for me that meant leaning into building a music law practice. As I moved closer to the music world generally, I felt called to take a deep dive into my experiences as a full-time musician. I decided to write a memoir of sorts telling the story of my time in music, beginning with my earliest musical inspirations through the time I finally called it quits. I approached the project very much how I’m approaching this Substack: I wrote one chapter per week for nearly half a year, and my audience and level of interaction grew week after week. Not by much, because it was a closed community. But the people on the platform actively discussed my chapters, even working out disagreements on the facts. By the end I had a manuscript that would be a 300-page book in published in hardback.

That is, I still have it. I won’t share it - not in the state it’s in, the state I left it in 2008. Some of it is good but some is far too niche to matter to many people - I was writing at times for the audience. I wrote about personal matters with too much personal detail, threatening the privacy of others. I don’t think I hurt anyone’s feelings or ruined any friendships, but on reflection I felt uneasy about some of the things I shared. The point was to see if I could write a book, to see if I had enough material, to see if there’s an audience. I wanted to document everything so that I’d have it for reference. And guess what? I have started to forget things. I’m known among my friends for having a very sharp narrative memory. I’ve had three friends fact-check their own memoirs against my recollections. It’s all still there somewhere, but as I get older I lose some sense of narrative. I feel so lucky to have the manuscript to rework in the future, but for now it’s staying under wraps.

The mental re-framing of my story for the MFT piece helped me to see the value in the decade I spent actively pursuing music. When I left music to go to law school, I felt like a failure. I’ve written about this, but it’s so important for anyone in music to understand. I had a goal of being a full-time creative musician for my entire life, for it to be successful enough to make a life. Anything short of that would be failure. But as I began to redefine myself as a person who serves artists, I realized that not only did I have a total blast and do all the things I used to dream of doing, but that it gave me the perspective to be an advocate. If only I’d known to enjoy it more - but that seems to be the one mistake every musician makes when things are going well. They’re so freaked out about losing it that they forget to enjoy the ride. When I finally do publish a book, I think I’ll have a more interesting - and more valuable - story to tell.

My own writings got others going as well. My buddy since high school Kevin “Burd” Burdeshaw has written two books on his experiences in the 1980s Bloomington punk scene that he says were inspired by my MFT memoir project. I guess he thought if Strohm can do it, he can do it. That’s great. That’s community. Anything that inspired and empowers us to share our stories is a good thing - especially when it’s about music.

The community proved short-lived. Soon everybody migrated to Facebook. And by everybody, I mean literally everybody. People who are 40 or older shared that experience of diving head first into this massive pool and finding old friends, making new ones with shared interests, and finding out how our high school crushes turned out. It was great until it wasn’t. It’s wild to think about how the early versions of social networks at least seemed for a time to bring us closer together. These days, on our ever more isolating private scroll, it’s very obvious that it does the opposite.

Although that moment came and went, MFT has continued and continued to grow the archive. Even if it didn’t end with a more connected world, MFT helped to galvanize and connect a community that’s meant a lot to a lot of us. The Website is active and you can search over 100,000 files of archival Indiana music. There’s some of my music you can’t hear anywhere else. For example, I made a 4-track solo album in 1995 that predated my first real solo album, Caledonia, in 2006. There’s a version of Train, as song I wrote and recorded with Blake Babies for our album Sunburn. It’s a guitar/piano duet with my best friend/collaborator Ed Ackerson, who left this world in 2019. The solo album is OK, all of the better songs have been recorded on later albums. But that version is precious to me, to hear our voices together so honest and vulnerable. It almost makes me cry when I hear it. And MFT is the only place it exists.

MFT has become a nonprofit organization that assists musicians in the region, under Jeb’s leadership with a Board of Directors. On October 11th and 12th (see above flyer), many of the musicians who helped define the 1990s Bloomington and Indianapolis scene chronicled and archived on MFT will perform in a 20th Anniversary celebration of the community. The poster is above - do you recognize any of those bands? If you know one (besides me), you probably know most of them. Lon Paul is a beloved musician from a beloved band called Sardina who passed away during the peak of the MFT social network. We mourned his passing together, as we will do next fall.

I’m close with my family, but I haven’t attended a family reunion since childhood. I keep up with some of my classmates, but I haven’t been to a high school reunion in recent years. A music scene is another kind of family, another formative time to celebrate in our lives. I don’t play music in public as often as I’d like, but when I do I try to make it a magical experience. Being in those rooms, with those people, celebrating something we did together will be magical indeed. For those of us who experienced that time, it’ll feel like no time has passed. That’s the magic of the intersection of music and community. That’s the musical family, with roots that run deep.

1. 2007 is the year I released my third solo album, Everyday Life. It’s something I’m glad I did, but it wasn’t successful. It was really just sweeping up what I was working on before law school to close a chapter in my life. I had a deeply held fantasy that people would love it so much that it would give me a path back to music being central to my life, but that wasn’t realistic. If you revisit the album, the ones that I consider my best writing efforts are Another Losing Season, Waiting for the World to End, and Anna - which I wrote around the time our oldest daughter was born, looking ahead to how I hoped my life would change as a father. Turns out it was pretty accurate - right down to the heartbreak of sending her out on her own now that she’s in her 20s. None of these songs has more than 1,000 streams on Spotify. The biggest song on my latest album has over 50K.