Music Making in the Age of the Impossible Good

A few nights ago, I fell in love with my own record. Truth: I was high for the first time in three months. Don’t worry, I didn’t “fall off the wagon.” It was a conscious and planned choice. We’re looking for balance here, not perfection—or some arbitrary definition of perfection, really.

So, I’d broken my weed fast with half of a fancy joint and a McDonald’s cheeseburger (I know, poison). Should I have been driving stoned? Ummm…well, my only defense is that I was on the empty back roads outside Santa Fe without a soul in sight—except for the small herd of deer I bumped into a few miles from my house—and Santa Fe proper is a ghost town after 9 p.m. The air was sharp and cold, the kind that makes the stars sound louder. Through the speakers played the freshly mastered tracks of Prophecies and Promises, my next album, wrapped just last week. Each song shimmered; I forgot my self-loathing and loved all of it. For the first time in months, I wasn’t analyzing; I was just inside the sound.

The truth is, I got lost—both literally and figuratively. I listened to the tracks on full blast, over and over, and never seemed to find my way home. I drove out into the boonies, back into town (strangely finding myself in the city-courthouse parking lot) and back into the sticks again. I stopped by the ranch for snacks and to pick up the dog, then I let myself get lost for another round. All told, it took me almost four hours and half a dozen repeats of the album before I found my way to bed.

And then came sobriety—and guilt.

First, the small kind: breaking my fast, giving in to the burger, surrendering to pleasure. A few promises to myself of practical measures to ensure I didn’t fall back into a long-held habit.

Then the bigger kind—the creative kind. The realization that to share this record I’d have to feed it to the same machine that cheapens everything it touches.

I felt guilty for investing so much money into my own art. It’s a privilege to create something so polished and built out. Guilty for wanting to invest even more in printing it to vinyl—the medium I designed it for. Guilty because every road from here to an audience runs through corporations that turn art into content and artists into data.

That’s what it feels like to make music in the age of the impossible good.

We want to be ethical, conscious, responsible—to do right by the world while still belonging to it. But every choice seems to demand some sort of betrayal.

I’ve made peace—and even grown to love—many compromises over the years: teaching exclusively online and recording remotely. But I struggle more and more with the compromises demanded of me by the modern music industry. As an independent artist who doesn’t tour much anymore, I know the truth: if I don’t put my music on Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon, almost no one will hear it. That’s the new math. The same platforms that once promised freedom now enforce dependence. Opting out doesn’t feel like protest; it feels like vanishing.

And still, every time I look in to where the money goes, I flinch. Spotify’s largest investors profit from defense and surveillance. Amazon’s labor record and carbon footprint are monstrous. Apple’s supply chains are built on extraction. YouTube pays the least of all. Even the cover song I licensed for this record didn’t guarantee payment to the original songwriter for streams—only for downloads, which no one buys anymore. Gross. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg; it only gets darker from there.

The vibe seems to be that’s just how the world works now.
 But that phrase feels like surrender.

Teaching has become harder, too. I still believe music is essential to the human experience—maybe even sacred. But I can’t, in good faith, tell my students that it’s a sound financial investment. They spend thousands on gear and lessons, pour their hearts into recordings that vanish into the digital ether, and measure success in likes instead of lives touched. Sometimes I think what I’m really teaching is endurance—how to keep making art when the system doesn’t want you to.

I knew when I began Prophecies and Promises (last month’s column) that I’d never make the money back that I poured into it. Every musician I know says the same thing. We fund our own records because we can’t not. We call it passion, but maybe it’s closer to devotion—a vow we keep even when no one’s watching or, sadly, listening. Somewhere along the way, the industry decided that albums without profit are “vanity projects.” But what could be less vain than creating something you don’t expect to sell? Maybe the purest art is the kind that exists simply because it must.

Still, the guilt lingers—because even this devotion has become content. I’ll promote the album on Instagram. I’ll post reels, captions, updates. I’ll use the same algorithmic tools that flatten art into advertisement. Every time I upload something, I feel the tug between sincerity and survival. But in the age of AI, I tell myself, being real through media is a gift I offer the world. An excuse to continue? Perhaps.

And that’s the heart of it, isn’t it? We’re all complicit—artists, teachers, listeners alike. We know the system is broken, but we keep feeding it because it’s the only one that exists, and we’re all just trying to figure out how to survive here.

Maybe grace, in this age, is the willingness to keep creating anyway—to name the problem without abandoning the beauty. To admit that purity might be impossible, but love, in all its messy, compromised forms, still counts for something. Is that complicit? Hypocritical? Maybe. Are these the challenges I choose, or do all modern humans have them?

When the noise of it all gets too loud, I pick up my acoustic guitar and disappear into the simplest version of music I know—fingers on strings, air in lungs, no microphones, no plug-ins, no upload buttons. There’s a kind of prehistoric comfort in that, like a cavewoman humming around a fire. Just me, wood, wire, breath, and the wind.

That’s part of why I came to Melody Ranch in the first place. I wanted space, quiet, something slower. A life that didn’t hum with electricity. But even here, the modern world leaks in through the seams—the emails, the feeds, the need to stay “current” or “relevant.” As if relevance isn’t simply existence. Music itself has migrated to another plane—half physical, half digital, almost spiritual, but somehow owned by corporations.

There are days I watch the sun burn down over the hills and think, maybe it would be fine if it all just stopped. If the satellites went dark and the servers burned, and we went back to singing with the birds. I could be happy like that—barefoot, unplugged, strumming into the open air.

But then the Gemini in me stirs. I live off connection. I love the buzz of collaboration, the spark of ideas shared in real time. Prophecies and Promises exists because of that hunger. I recorded it remotely with musicians all over the world—Brazil, Costa Rica, Nashville, New York, London, L.A.—each of us sending sound across invisible wires. That miracle still moves me.

It’s the paradox I can’t escape. I crave the silence of the unplugged world and the pulse of the connected one. Both feed me; both drain me.

If you’d asked me 20 years ago what I’d pay for access to all the music in the world, I would’ve said anything. And now I have it—every song ever written, anytime, anywhere—and the cost feels steeper than I ever imagined. Be careful what you wish for.

Last month I cancelled my Spotify subscription, feeling righteous for about five minutes. It was my small rebellion, my way of saying no to blood money.

And then I opened Apple Music, another subscription I’ve held for nearly a decade. And YouTube Music. And if you’ve ever tried to kill your Amazon accounts, you know how they just keep rebooting themselves somehow. The point is, I never stopped streaming. It was just a different logo, the same system.

Was that blindness? Hypocrisy? Or just survival? I don’t even own a CD player anymore. And while I guess I could get my record collection going again, I’ll be the first to admit—even records aren’t ideal for modern music-making practices.

It’s strange how moral clarity dissolves for the gift of convenience. I told myself it was a symbolic stand—but even the symbols are owned by corporations. The truth is, I didn’t quit streaming; I just switched landlords.

The whole landscape feels engineered to break the conscience of anyone who still believes in decency. We can’t buy groceries, clothes, or technology without supporting some form of harm. I’ve spent the past year boycotting Target because of their DEI backpedaling, only to watch Taylor Swift—the supposed paragon of progressive pop feminism—release her new album exclusively through Target stores.

Taylor is no fool. She’s reclaimed her masters, controlled her narrative, and made billions doing it. But this latest move seemed particularly obtuse. And forget about how it feels like she’s pulling her fans into it all over again—exploiting the very humans who adore her most.

Is she a hypocrite, an opportunist, or simply pragmatic—doing what all of us do in smaller ways every day? Am I any different?

It’s easy to call out hypocrisy when it’s wearing designer sequins. Harder when it’s staring back from your own reflection in a MacBook screen.

Because here I am, criticizing Spotify while typing this essay on an Apple device built from mined minerals, using Wi-Fi powered by fossil fuels, and planning to share my moral outrage on social-media platforms that monetize attention.

No one escapes clean.

Maybe that’s the real exhaustion of modern life—we’ve run out of places to put our goodness. Every decision feels compromised. The very tools we use to connect, learn, and create are designed to extract value from us.

I talk to my students about this constantly. How streaming isn’t free, how exposure doesn’t pay rent, how attention has replaced art as currency. They understand, but they also know that existing outside the system means invisibility. I can’t tell them to delete their accounts; I can only tell them to stay awake while using them. I repeat my mantra: You don’t need twelve million followers; you just need twelve disciples to change the world.

Maybe that’s what Taylor Swift is doing too—playing chess on a rigged board, trying to win enough power to rewrite a few rules before the game resets. Or maybe she’s just cashing in while the lights are still on. I don’t know. I’ve about given up on figuring out billionaires.

But I do know that judgment has become too easy and empathy too rare. It’s simpler to call someone a hypocrite than to admit our own helplessness.

When I cancelled Spotify, I wanted to feel righteous. But that indignation doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny. Still, I can’t unsee what I’ve learned. I can’t unknow that every click contributes to something larger—a web of profit and harm I can’t begin to untangle.

Truthfully, I’ve stopped pretending that purity is possible. Maybe the work of modern goodness isn’t separation but awareness—the ability to live inside contradiction without going numb.

That’s what grace means to me now. Not forgiveness exactly, but participation with consciousness. Trying to stay awake in a world being lulled to sleep a click at a time. The willingness to keep creating, to keep teaching, to keep listening—even when every act feels tainted—and not to ignore it all for simplicity’s sake.

I think about that night again—the empty roads outside Santa Fe, the half joint, a half-eaten cheeseburger sealed up in the wrapper after I thought better of it, and my songs rolling through the speakers. I hadn’t planned to love them quite so much. I’d just wanted to hear them once, to check the masters. But somewhere between the verse and the chorus, I gave in. I let myself feel proud. I let myself pick up a joint, a cheeseburger, and get lost for a while.

And then, of course, came the guilt. The familiar weight of too much awareness: the processed food, the mind-numbing comfort, the corporations, the contradictions. But maybe the point isn’t to stay clean. Maybe it’s to stay human.

There’s enough guilt to go around these days—political, economic, environmental, existential. We don’t need to add joy to the list.

So maybe I’ll let myself get stoned again and go for a drive to listen sometime before I release this thing on Valentine’s Day (note the shameless plug).

I guess the message is: sometimes we just have to let ourselves eat the hamburger and feel something else.

Homework:

1. Before you hit “play” today, take five minutes to research where that stream goes — who profits, who doesn’t, and how your listening actually gets counted. I could write about it for days, but I’ll spare you… for now.
2. Find an independent artist or two to support today. How can you support them? Well, you can always just Venmo most of us a few bucks, but buying merch helps too. The question is, do you need the thank you mug when you make your donations to NPR or not. (Note my sarcasm.)