A few months ago I was sitting in a parking deck at the Palms in Las Vegas, watching the Strip light up while the rest of my life fell apart in my head. I’d just found out I didn’t have a job anymore. I remember thinking about all the survival math. Mortgage, health insurance, four kids, a house that needed work. Sitting up there was where I went to hide. A place where the casino noise couldn’t follow me. When the floor got too loud, and the lights, slots, manufactured excitement were too much, I’d slip away and head up the ramp. Up there, it was quiet, and I could think.
That trip is the reason I wrote Closing Time. My oldest had just graduated from SFX makeup school, and my other three were months away from graduating high school when I wrote it. If you read that post, you know how that chapter ended. If you didn’t, the short version is I lost my job, life got real, music took a back seat not because the music didn’t matter, but because survival math got loud. I spent a couple of months on what came next, and eventually I landed somewhere I didn’t expect.
That somewhere turned out to be a resistor manufacturer for aerospace, and a job that puts me back on the road for the first time since Vegas.
Visiting cities that aren’t mine.
Last week I was back on a plane, heading to Nashville. I picked up a car there and drove down to Huntsville, Alabama, for a show, my first with the new company. Small, unglamorous, absolutely essential parts that go into systems where failure isn’t an option. Resistors. The least sexy item on a build sheet.
I’m not in SaaS anymore. I’m not even close to it on paper. But it’s still tech, just tech you can hold in your hand. And it’s still a people business. You still win by being the person someone trusts to call when something matters, whether that something is a checkout button or a part number that has to work every single time, no exceptions, no do-overs.
After my last lap of the show floor, I had a few hours before my flight home, and I drove back up to Nashville. I just had time to kill and a rental car, and Nashville has more guitar shops per block than anywhere I’ve ever been. Gruhn Guitars. Carter Vintage. The Gibson Garage. I walked into each one and just stood there for a minute, taking it in. Wall after wall of guitars, I’ll probably never own but sure loved looking at.
Business trip in, guitar tour out. I’ll take that trade every time.
Listening to My Morning Jacket in Tennessee just hits different.
Jamming to My Morning Jacket somewhere on the highway between Huntsville and Nashville, it hit me. This was the same road, just a different direction. Months ago, I was sitting in a parking deck in Vegas trying to figure out how I was going to keep the lights on. Now I’m wandering through vintage guitar shops in Music City on a work trip for a company that makes parts for spacecraft. Same guy, same guitar habit, same instinct to notice the story in front of me instead of just getting through the day. Different industry, different city, a completely different feeling in my chest as I walk through an airport.
11 Days
And in the middle of all that, 11 Days comes out on Spotify and Apple Music on August 18. A record that took three years to make because life kept getting in the way, the same way it always does. I wrote most of it at the end of 2023, and what was supposed to be an 11 Day project took three years to complete. The exact stretch of years when everything felt certain until uncertainty reared its head. Losing a job, starting over, rebuilding, and somehow still finding time to finish songs I’d started writing decades ago seemed impossible just a few months ago. Life got real, fast, and nothing else mattered except keeping the light on. Final mixes for the album and the job search were happening at the same time. It just worked out that way, the way things tend to when you keep showing up.
Get Back On The Road
I don’t know if there’s a lesson in any of this beyond the obvious one. Keep going. The road doesn’t care what you’re selling or what happened to you the last time you were on it. You just get back on, and eventually you end up somewhere better than a parking deck in Vegas. Sometimes it’s a guitar shop in Nashville. Sometimes it’s an album finally seeing daylight after twenty years. Either way, you find out the road was still there the whole time, waiting for you to get back on it, and back at home there are people you love waiting for you.