i think i listen to music for all the wrong reasons.

sure, i love voices, and chords, and progressions and the story lines that string along my favorite albums. but when i get lost in music--truly hypnotized--is when i imagine. it is in these moments that i allow my mind to capture fantasy in highly-contrasted black and white snapshots. i daydream in future, but more often than not in a future where i can reminisce on a past that mirrors that of the musicians that i so intently idolize. george clinton talking shit to the audience during parliament's earth tour. outkast recording aquemini in the dungeon. tripping out as a member of the beatles at the brink of abbey road. moments that i'm sure have been bronzed and romanticized and mythed-up far beyond the humanness of these particular stories, wiped clean of the monotony that probably filled the empty moments, but even still. to be a real musician/performer/artist is a forum of existence that i continue to envy, no matter how many times i've been called one, or even how many times i call myself one.

these musicians that i see in magazines and hear on the radio and line up to buy tickets to see, they live in a world different from where i see myself. i don't quite know how to articulate it, because it's not necessarily about validating their work over mine, or about grappling a certain amount of fame or fanbase. instead, it's my way of recognizing the gap that i always felt between the distant music that i grew up buying and listening to and loving (but something that derived outside of myself nonetheless), and the poetry that has always been a part of me. no matter how much i might like a song or album that i record one day, i don't know if i'll ever be able to separate from myself enough to spark one and vibe to it the way i do to a coltrane joint.

right now as ill-literacy we are amidst our first real tour...and it's taken a considerable amount of effort to make it real in my head. the 4-show runs we've been doing, those i've found excuses to view as amateur, coincidental shows that happen to take place in close enough time proximities to keep me away from home for a week or two. this time, we're actually on a 12-show tour. and even after the inklings to downplay what it is...to argue that, say, kanye's glow in the dark tour brings them to philly stadiums while we're in a doylestown student union...or them to nyc while we're in binghamton...or them in los angeles while we're in riverside...i am starting to realize that my inability to consider myself in the universe of all these other musicians is more of an insistence. for what, i surely don't know, because in my heart there is not much more that i want than to create for myself such a legacy.

in the next year i want to do things that musicians do. i want to play at south by southwest, and hit grammy parties, and play european festivals, and see my shit in stores. and it's shallow as hell. because some of the most talented, inspirational musicians i know have not even dabbed into any of those. many of the people in these scenes may be doing music and art for all the wrong reasons, and i must admit that during my most starry-eyed moments i question if i might be in that boat too. but these things that i want aren't a part of a business plan or marketing strategy...they're things that i want to do because i'd love those experiences in my life. i feel like we could change the way people think and listen to things. and i think it would all be pretty fun.

in this spectrum of purists and sellouts, pop and underground, those who do it for the love and those who do it for the money, i don't see things as black and white as i did when i was a snotty-nosed backpacker in high school and content with nothing more than recording a half a track on my trial download of acid pro. today the face of independent music and art looks incredibly different, and so does my longing to be a part of it. i guess the more real it gets, the more difficult it is to accept it when it comes. all this, testified in how i brush off each magazine article about us as a fluke, as a mere anomaly.

i'm waiting for something to happen to break that facade, and to finally allow myself to claim a space in the community of creators. in the end, the most effective thing i can do is to take care of what needs to occur inside my belief in myself.

this is gonna be an interesting month.