The Thing That Happened
Making sense of the Before Times
***NOTE TO READERS: I wrote the first draft of this post on Election Eve last November. I revised to remove all the stuff about the election, I was really doing whatever I could at the time to distract myself. I wanted to write about collective amnesia, but I got stuck and abandoned the piece. Then I started thinking about it again last week, with all the disruption. In conversation with a stranger whose narrative turned on the phrase “then the Pandemic happened” - it brought me back to this essay. Now that we’re experiencing the next national trauma and - for some - massive disruption with the LA wildfires, I decided to revisit. Reading about so many friends and acquaintances losing everything has been particularly upsetting.
Note that I don’t mean to suggest that the things that happened to me during The Thing That Happened are in any way unusual or that my suffering is unique or special. Each of us has our own story, and we all have the shared experience. This is a personal blog, and this is my own story.
Remember March 2020? If you’re reading this, of course you remember. The Thing that Happened in March 2020 happened to each of us. The Pandemic was an event that forced us to change and adapt to unsettling and profoundly inconvenient circumstances and challenges. That “new normal” everyone talked about has never felt quite like normal, has it? Things have just gotten stranger even as we’ve emerged from isolation.
I had an incredible first week of March that year.1 All week I felt on top of thw world. On Saturday, Leap Day (remember, we had February 29, 2020), I gathered with a bunch of friends at a famous Nashville breakfast spot to celebrate our annual community half-marathon. Then I went to a father-daughter dance with our youngest, Sophie (then 12). Wednesday night I checked off a major bucket list item when I took part in a songwriter round to a packed house with some heavy-hitters at The Bluebird Cafe.
Thursday 3/6 was one of those incredible nights that can only happen in Nashville. First I went to Grimey’s record store in East Nashville to catch a great in-store from my friend Sadler Vaden, a producer and guitarist who is a member of Jason Isbell’s 400 Unit. Then I hurried to the Ryman Auditorium to catch Ruston Kelly’s sold-out performance.
Ruston is a good friend I represented from the time he was a promising young Music Row songwriter in his early 20s who aspired to be an artist. He told me when I first met him that his dream was to play the Ryman. He would headline the Ryman, and he’d sell it out singing his own songs. I signed him to Rounder Records and we put out his debut album, Dying Star, an achingly gorgeous, unflinching account of an addict hitting rock bottom and finding his way back from oblivion. It was such a powerful performance, incredible to be with a friend experiencing the fulfillment of a life goal.
We all gathered backstage with Ruston and his family, exchanged lots of hugs, and didn’t think about Covid at all. At least I didn’t, except during the hugs, with that nagging voice in the back of my mind wondering if this is really prudent. I loved and deeply appreciated and admired the people I worked with every day. It felt amazing to share this dream-come-true moment we all helped make come true.
When I joined Concord to be President of Rounder Records in late 2017, I framed all the goals around 2020, which was the 50th anniversary of the label’s founding in 1970. 2020 was gonna be our year! We’d spend the next couple years grinding, building a roster, figuring it all out, putting it all together so that everything would really hit in 2020. During those couple years we hit the ground running and signed Ruston, Sierra Ferrell, Billy Strings, Katie Pruitt, Sarah Jarosz, Logan Ledger, The War and Treaty…it was all primed and ready. It was all happening exactly as planned - What could possibly go wrong?
The day after the Ryman debut I went in to the office as usual. Katie Pruitt’s album had been out for a week, Logan Ledger’s T-Bone Burnett-produced debut was out in a month. So much to do! So much to look forward to…
Our head of HR called me just after lunch and told me anyone who attended Ruston’s show had to go home and quarantine for two weeks. Somebody at the show, a media person, had attended a different show where somebody was confirmed to have been infected with Covid 19. Everyone on the team attended the show. We all went home and never returned to that office. Within a week school was cancelled and Heather’s job sent her home as well. Within a week we were all washing our groceries and moving everything to Zoom.
It’s a story I don’t need do tell - everyone suffered alike. Everyone’s anxiety went off the charts, everyone suffered negative consequences of isolation, whether or not we talked about it at the time. It’s a collective experience - Covid happened. Everything changed.
We have these gauzy collective memories of happiness, health, and prosperity before March of 2020. Everything was great! We seem to have collectively idealized those times, the before times, when problems didn’t exist, when the economy was humming and everything was smooth sailing. Remember when gas was 2 bucks a gallon? Wasn’t that in the before times? No, gas dipped to an average price near $2 a gallon when nobody had anywhere to go. We’ve lost track of the narrative. It’s sort of like the sepia tone mythology of the easy life we had before all the trouble in the 1960s. You know, the “great” America of yore that underpins the MAGA dream? We are seeking to return to perceived ‘better times’ that only really exist in myth and imagination.
Maybe it’s because I’m a glass-half-full person, but to me everything seems to look better in the rearview. When I think of earlier times in my life, I tend to forget all the trauma, the anxiety the numbing boredom of my youth and young adulthood. I remember the adventure, the thrill of discovery, the moments of transcendent joy. Is everyone like that? Is that why we can look back at the very messy and uneasy first three years of Trump’s first term and see an idyllic time of universal prosperity? Did Covid times suck that badly?
Actually, yes. Yes, it did. For many of us, those couple years were so terrible, of course we long for the fabled Before Times. Nostalgia for the recent past? Selective memory? Collective amnesia? All of the above. We’d rather not remember, but still we talk about it all the time.
Naturally, our 2020 plans for Rounder went completely to shit. Most releases underperformed that year. Artist development depends on touring and nobody could tour. Tik Tok exploded, and everyone scrambled to figure out how to use it effectively. A few thrived; others flatlined. Lots of people more or less gave up. For a handful of acts 2020 was a breakout year - Billy Strings, Phoebe Bridgers. Viral moments seemed to resonate more than ever. For other acts, it was a huge disappointment - how do you manufacture virality? We all had a crash course on “content creation” and took our shots. The 50th Anniversary landed with a dull thud.
I lost my way in all this, my work that I’d loved so much became a joyless source of constant anxiety and worry. We downsized, consolidated, changed things up. I spent all day every day on Zoom calls with people on my own team I’d never met in person. In the early years I’d hop a plane or get in the car and go whenever I needed to go to sign an act. I’d spend time with them where they live, go to their gigs, develop a relationship. Then it became hour-long Zoom calls that always seemed to start late and end early, always with too many people and too much distraction. I’d mark the end of my work day with a big glass of wine, and often another. I’d tell myself I’d earned it. Maybe I needed it. Something had to break.
In early 2022, just as things finally returned to some version of normal, I left my job at Concord. I essentially started over. I’ve reinvented myself many times already - from hardcore punk drummer to indie pop guitarist, from 30-something returning college student to editor of the law review, from big firm corporate lawyer to artist advocate. I've covered a lot of ground in my various self-reinventions, but I sincerely believed I’d arrived exactly where I belong. For a sweet couple of years I felt mission-driven and aligned. Then, back to square one. Sometimes life is a game of Chutes & Ladders. Sometimes you spin a 2 when you needed 4, and you slide back to the bottom. You spin again, hoping for a steady climb. Kids in college and the price of eggs, you spin and spin. That’s what I do anyway, that’s what I’ve always one.
I’m so grateful to have gone through it, to have this perspective, because these days I’m just grateful. I’m grateful for the experience, the education, and the chance at transformation. I’m almost three years into my next self-reinvention. It hasn’t been easy, but it’s starting to feel good about the direction. I haven’t yet accomplished my latest set of goals, but I’m on my way. I have a new freedom.
Even if my job didn’t always perfectly align with my values, it’s helped me develop skills that I didn’t have before. It gave me a skillset and mindset I’d never have developed simply practicing law. For certain clients, the kind of clients I most want to work with, it’s made me much better at what I do. People recognize this, which has makes it easier to rebuild from scratch. As I’ll further explain in future posts, I’m so excited for what’s next. With the right attitude, with the right resources, the right work ethic, it’s a thrilling time to work in music - especially outside the conventional record label model. There’s a feeling that we can make it up as we go. That’s new since the Pandemic.
The industry changed so profoundly since 2020, I believe it would be very difficult to do what we did at Rounder in signing all those great artists to label deals. I know this as well as anyone because I’m on the other side of those deals now. I’m advising artists, many of which I’d have tried to sign to Rounder if I could, and I know what opportunities they have that would have been unimaginable in 2017. The artists who have a big audience have all the power now in dealmaking, while the major labels have all the power at the institutional level. Majors are aggressively moving in on the independent territory to the point it isn’t clear where the line between “major” and “indie” will be. It isn’t clear that this distinction will even matter. I hope Rounder and other quality, well-resourced, music and genre-focused labels survive because I believe at their best they do important work. I’m grateful it isn’t my job to sign acts to a conventional label because it’s getting harder all the time and the competitive field continues to grow and evolve.
When it comes to label deals, I’m often one of the people the labels need to convince that signing with them is right for the artist. If I’m convinced, I’ll do the work of convincing the artist. To be clear, I’m becoming more and more skeptical, but I do really want to be convinced. Artists will continue need investment and resources, and good partners. It’s chaos out there, but there are many potential paths to success. If the label model fails, the things that labels have always provided will still need to be checked off the list. One-stop solutions are awesome, but they have to be fair.
If my work takes me back to the label side again, it will look different. That’s something I’m figuring out. The question has become how do labels serve both their investors and their artists in a way that’s balanced? That’s pretty much the antithesis of the model we’ve had for a century. That’s the Artist Business.
The LA fires remind us that things can go very wrong at any time, and we’ll probably have more disruptive events in the future. In a sense, everything is being disrupted all the time. Maybe disruption is becoming the new normal. Maybe we’re on the precipice of our decline into the abyss. Or maybe everything will be just fine, we’ll all get rich, and we’ll merge our real lives with virtual lives to the point we never have to die.
It’s been a journey to get here, but I’m very proud of Rounder’s success. Sierra was signed from a YouTube video and had zero monthly listeners, now she’s a flagship act with four Grammy nominations and millions of fans. I’ll be in the room and rooting for her to win every one of those Grammys. That was the dream back in 2017, the Thing that was Supposed to Happen in 2020, the tangible, transcendent moment that comes after thousands and thousands of hours of effort by dozens of people. I’m not part of it anymore, I wasn’t around for the heaviest lifting to get it to that point, and that’s fine. I’m connected to it (or at least I like to feel like I am), I envisioned the outcome, and it’s a source of pride. It’s that sound, what I’ve been chasing my whole life. To quote my former bandmate Juliana Hatfield in her finest tune, “I love it so much, it makes me want to go and fuck shit up.” And to complete the thought with the utmost sincerity, “I’m so glad I’m not dead.” I’m glad most of us made it through, and I’ll do my best to remain glass-half-full til it’s done.
In January 2020 I got a bad flu at the Grammys, and I felt sick for most of February. Then I had a lot of health issues that spring, issues with my heart. I asked in mid-2020 if I might have had Covid and my doctor said no, impossible. I reminded my doctor of this last year and I asked him again, describing my symptoms, and he said yeah, you almost certainly had Covid. The Ruston week was extra special because it smelled like spring and I finally felt healthy. One of those amazing weeks when everything feels connected, anything seems possible.
Inspiring. Thanks for sharing, John.
Hi John, great story. You may want to fix the band name Sadler Vaden is in, it’s the 400 Unit. I’m sure just a typo