I still had an imaginary friend in College, his name is Fazaar. He is a six-foot-tall osprey that drinks too much and is a cynical bastard.

Imaginary friends are kind of a misnomer, actually, they’re real. Everything is real- ghosts, leprechauns, Narnia, sparkly vampire teens… all of it exists. Descartes once theorized cogito ergo sum, which was really weird since he’s French and that’s Latin. I would go even weirder and say cogito ergo est. I think, therefore it is. Every fiction you envision brings to life a new Alternate Reality.

Have you ever daydreamed about a world of talking animals? Spaceships and robots? Hell, how about your own life as a lottery-winning, power-lifting, world-traveling sexual conquistador? Congratulations, you’ve given birth to a fully-functioning reality. Here’s your cigar.

Details, Details

I actually got this idea from Fazaar. When you’ve had an invisible friend long enough that he’s still with you during high school philosophy classes, you’re bound to start asking for a bit of biographical data. A child’s mind has neither the storage nor the desire for concrete details (like seriously, how does Dora fit all that shit into her backpack anyway?), but the adult mind requires more. It’s like we grownups are hard-wired to test a reality and either accept it or reject it based on its similarity to our own.

Case in point: You needed the Mr. DNA explanation to follow Jurassic Park, but all your kid gave a shit about was an island full of dinosaurs.

Every Color

Assume for the moment that anything you create in your mind you create in reality, just not this reality.

This bird, Fazaar, came from a world very real despite its genesis inside my head; I created his reality and everything in it. No, I’m not God- I wouldn’t want His job, WAAAAY too much responsibility, but the job is very similar. Just like a JPEG loses detail if you compress it again and again, my worlds are far less elaborate than God’s. If Fazaar has any imaginary friends, I’d wager that their world is even simpler than the bird’s.

What you get are subsidiary realities that can be infinitely deep, limited only by the set of details funneling downward from the top. If this world is the Crayola factory, then my job as a creator is to pass as many crayons down the line as I can to make Fazaar’s world more colorful. A few more links down the chain and reality becomes the 6-crayon sampler you get with the kiddie menu at Applebee’s.

Of course, this means that God’s probably got colors I’ve never seen before. What happens if a creation looks upward into the reality of the Creator and sees something that simply doesn’t exist down the chain? Madness. Genius. Inspiration. Weird colors that have to be explained using only the crayons that are native to this reality. Do you honestly think the book of Revelation is really talking about guys on horses and angels with bowls? This is shit we just can’t comprehend, explained through the filter of our native reality.

And, for the record, don’t ask me if there’s a reality above God. That’s one of those “unless He tells us, there’s no way to find out” kind of things.

The Responsibilities of Creation

So now I’ve got an English-speaking, ale-guzzling bird to look after. Hell, I can barely keep up with my cat. Do I need to daydream constantly in order to feed him, employ him, and make his life interesting? What happens when I stop thinking about him for a while? If I forget about him, does he die?

Deep breath. Calm down, it’s not like having children. The responsibilities of this reality don’t always apply downstream. Ethics are a tricky subject when you’re the one writing the rule book, so I won’t elaborate beyond this: how you treat your realities speaks volumes about your own psychology. No pressure.

In all seriousness, though, I believe that our creations live happy and/or miserable lives with or without our direct intervention. If you want to pretend you’re God for a moment, then answer this: Are you the fatalist who believes our Creator chooses your breakfast cereal and which panties you pull out of the dresser in the morning, or are you the nihilist who looks at our Creator like a deadbeat dad who gave us life and was never heard from again? Or are you somewhere in between?

Have you ever started a project, abandoned it, then came back months or years later with a brilliant idea to make it better? Managing your realities is kinda the same way- inspiration, incubation, intervention. Your creations can live easily enough in your subconscious and, with enough time, may just surprise you when you come back to them. Maybe you left them as a lonely steampunk outpost and came back to find a multi-national airship-powered federation.

Or maybe they’ve just been on pause. Remember: this is your reality, you control time.

So rest easy, create frequently, and don’t be afraid to talk to your creations and expand the level of detail that comprises their world. Next time I’ll cover a much more fun topic: Inviting Others Into Your Reality.

Images by Megan Giles and 52 Kitchen Adventures

This January, with your help, I will be realizing a dream that I’ve had for the past five years.

Did I mention that my album Goodbye Planet Earth was released five years ago already? You may have heard it, you may have even liked it. What you may not know, though, is that the entire album synchronizes with the 2005 movie The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Unlike Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, this was purely intentional.

As I sat for three months recording the album, visions of a big stage in front of a giant movie screen played out in my head. Granted, at the time I was barely playing in bars and coffee houses, but dreams don’t care where you are: they indicate where you’re likely to go. Now after five years, five more albums, and a hell of a lot of big stage shows, I’ve finally been given the opportunity to make this dream happen in 2013.

The fine folks at San Jose’s Further Confusion have licensed the rights to the film and are ready to make this show happen. My awesome drummer, Runtt, and I have already begun rehearsing and preparing for what is definitely the most complicated show we’ve ever put on. Every day between now and January 19 I get a little more excited and a little bit scared, but that’s how most journeys unfold. This one just happens to end at the doorstep of a dream I had five years ago.

I really, really hope you’ll join me in San Jose this January 19. Get your weekend or day passes at www.furtherconfusion.org, and don’t forget to bring your towels!

One of the hardest things to do in my line of work is figuring out what you want to listen to. The only task harder than that is to stop thinking about what you want to listen to.

As a businessman, I’m encouraged by every publication, mentor, free advice donor, and fortune cookie to “start with what the customer wants and work backwards from there”. It makes sense on paper, of course- find a need and fulfill it. Unfortunately, if you’re an artist, this quickly leads to one of two horrors: Songwriting by committee or, God help us all, songwriting by the label’s marketing department.

Imagine a starship where the captain just asks the crew where they thought they should go next.

Of course, nobody was asking for a tablet computer a few years ago; the models that existed were anything but profitable. A few hospitals saw a use for them and bought some, but only the adventurous nerds took them home from Best Buy or NewEgg. If the market speaks, it was largely muttering “tablets suck” about the time that Apple changed the very face of computing (again).

On the other extreme there’s the typical starving artist, doing whatever fulfills his desires with no regard to acceptance or profitability- like John Cusack at the beginning of “Being John Malkovich”. Cursed is the artist born with no sense of marketing yet an awareness of his own popularity. These are the artists that audiophiles and poets mount on pedestals long after they’ve given up and become medical billing representatives.

Somewhere in the middle, here I am. Trying to figure out what I need to do next- what I need to create -so that those already on board will continue the journey and those we encounter decide to join in. I can’t let the fans write my songs, nor can I just sit in the studio and do what I please. I must lead… somewhere.

This is probably why being first officer is a hell of a lot easier than being captain. Damn you, Prodo-1, you’ve got the easy job.

Robot’s Note: No, captain, cleaning up after you and keeping the ship running is not an easy job.

So the webcomic has now made it into chapter two, where Dexter becomes a wealthy land owner in the new world. When I first started writing The Lives of Dexter Peterson, I wasn’t exactly starting with zero research. As I’ve said before, the entire story was the product of NaNoWriMo in 2005, so I hadn’t outlined or prepared too much in advance… except for this section.

I love pirates.

As far back as 1999 I’ve been fascinated by pirates. You could say I was into pirates before they were ruined by Disney, but let’s just say I was into it before it was cool, man. Actually, it started during my first tour when I started playing churches around the Pacific Northwest. One of the first places I played was a tiny town called Port Townsend, WA, a place so gorgeous I really want to retire there. I found a little book called Under The Black Flag by David Cordingly, initially thinking it was a work of fiction like Wilbur Smith’s Birds of Prey. Nope… it was a thorough exploration of real pirates from the swashbuckling era we’ve all come to know and love.

And, apparently, grossly misunderstand.

So after reading about real pirates for over a decade, you’d think I would’ve written a song about them before now. Oh well, now I’ve got the trifecta: robots, ninjas, and pirates.

Proving That I Can Read

There are a lot of details throughout the book that are really only there to prove I’ve done some research. I don’t expect people to think I’m an historian, but I do want enough credibility to help cement the reality in people’s minds. I initially set Dexter’s property in Port Royal, Jamaica. Again, thank you Disney, I had to change that between the first draft and the recent rewrites.

Another detail that remained was the pirate being hanged… John Teach. The name was used as an homage to the notorious Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard. The first name was chosen for John Fanning, co-founder of formerly-pirate-haven site Napster. Sean Teach and Shawn Teach just didn’t sound as sinister.

Proving That I Hadn’t Read A Damn Thing

And then there was coffee. To be honest, as I was hastily writing this section I didn’t realize just how central a role that coffee would ultimately play. I just loved the stuff and figured Dexter would as well. Unfortunately, I hadn’t done any research about its origins in 2005, so I assumed that coffee came from South America. After all, Juan Valdez and all that, right?

BZZZZZZZZZZT. Wrong, thank you for playing.

It wasn’t until after researching the hidden liner notes for Beer & Coffee that I learned of the bean’s origins in Mesopotamia. Some say Ethiopia, some say the Ottoman Empire, but still… Coffee would not have hit the new world until well after Dexter landed there. Oops! Instead of a blunder, though, I saw this as an opportunity during the next rewrite.

Rather than eliminating that thread or sending Dexter’s men to Africa, I realized that a coffee plantation in South America might be the perfect anachronism. Somewhere out there is a reader who’s seen Good Eats or Modern Marvels episodes about coffee and knows that something is amiss when they find beans in the jungles of Colombia. When Dexter makes it back to the discovery site later, the anachronism hopefully makes more sense.

Shifting Reality Without A Clutch

Along with research issues, I had another challenge for this chapter: Dexter’s first shift. Yeah, he’s been snapping from one reality to the next for seven years, but this is the first time it’s happened for the readers. I had a lot of questions to answer that really didn’t matter back in 2005.

• Would Dexter’s personality change, or would he remain the same kid from New York City?
• Would Dexter change physically? Age? Race? Species?
• What would Dexter remember from one life to the next, and would he inherit new memories from the life he’d jumped into?

Ultimately I decided that Dexter’s personality would largely remain the same; trying to create an entirely new character every chapter would only confuse the readers (and myself). The approach I decided to stick with was something like being a tourist on an extended stay in a foreign land: After a month in Brisbane, you’ll pick up a slight Australian accent without realizing it. Dexter would be Dexter, but gradually the memories and personality of his echo-self would seep into his being.

The other big question I had to answer was what kind of book this would be. After all, in this chapter I’d be killing a man on public display. I could Disney-fy the experience and sanitize it for a sensitive audience, or I could attempt an authenticity that might squick some.

You know I’m perfectly fine squicking the masses, so the decision was made fairly quickly. The initial assault on the senses with the hanging of John Teach would hopefully stand as a beacon of harsh reality to contrast with Dexter’s science-fiction story line. If it took a horrifying scene to really cement that kind of reality, then let there be feces.

The side consequence of this, of course, was that I could showcase Dexter’s indifference to public executions. After all, he mentioned being on both sides of wars throughout history. He’s seen worse. With plans to write the next chapter about World War II, I needed to make sure the audience was aware of his desensitization.

So the body dropped, the smell came with it, and now you get to read about it as the story is slowly released.

If you haven’t read Emily White’s post about how she’s spent her life stealing music or David Lowery’s thoughtful response on his own blog, I’ll give you the tweet-length version: Kids today download music because paying money is inconvenient to them; the thought of purchasing songs doesn’t even cross their minds.  You’re better off reading the posts, though, they’re quite detailed and articulate (or as most of you would say, TL;DR). Shit, even JoCo wrote a fairly brilliant response already.  I have my own.

I spoke at the 140 Characters Conference this week in New York City about Indie Music TODAY.  I led the talk with the statement that I earn my living playing my music- not waiting tables, not in a cover band.  I felt it was important to establish that fact up front because, frankly, everybody seems to think that being paid for your art is impossible these days.  Some people (who clearly are making their living selling books or public speaking, not through their music) have even encouraged artists to give their music away for free.  All of it.

As I said on stage in Manhattan, this business is about connection, not money.  It’s about taking something intangible from inside you and, by sharing it, changing someone else’s life.  That is why we do this thing we do; the airborne panties and room keys are merely a side benefit.

Here, watch the video and you’ll understand where I’m coming from:

Watch on UStream’s site if you can’t see it here.

Touched By A T-Shirt?

As Lowery thoroughly debunked the “artists can earn their keep at live performances” line, I want to hit the other popular misconception that merch sales (shirts, stickers, etc.) can make up the revenue shortfall.  The margins may be better on some items, but no one’s life was changed by a laser-etched bottle-opener key chain.  They don’t fling underwear because the shirts are well designed and they sure as hell don’t break into tears because that bumper sticker will fit perfectly on their Focus.

I guess what I’m saying is this: If you think the concert tickets or t-shirts have value, why the fuck would you think the songs that brought you there don’t have value?

To a certain extent, it’s our own fault. People have been shelling out money for soulless music-esque auto-tuned noises for so long they may have forgotten that music is supposed to communicate with their souls.  If I listened to Bieber all day I probably wouldn’t value music either.  If the music industry is going to survive at all, artists will need to be on their A game with every release.

Then again, piracy is to blame as well… but not just kids like Emily who don’t understand what’s at stake here. The industrial pirate kings like Spotify and Grooveshark are as much at fault as the Free Culture. I have to agree with Lowery on this one: these services have conned the masses into thinking that they’re giving artists a fair cut.  They’re not.  Sure, I’d rather you listen to me than ignore me, but if you’re listening on Spotify you may as well just be stealing the music.

Connection Is Everything

Maybe you like party music. Maybe you’re an emo kid. Maybe, like me, you like good authentic production with lyrics that you have to listen to ten times before you get what the artist is really saying. The point is that somehow this music- the intangible intellectual property -changed you. It connected you to an artist like me or Coulton or, God help you, Nickelback in a way that renders normal communication deficient.

I’m not going to say I just made love to your ears, but that kind of bond can easily be as close as sex. If the love and support is only flowing one way, however, one of us is just getting fucked.

For the record: I’ve never actually lived in New York City. In fact, when I wrote the chapters about Dexter Peterson living in New York City, I lived in Nashville and had only been to the Northeast once or twice. Now that I live in Boston, I almost feel like a traitor for opening the new album with what is effectively a love song for the Big Apple. Sing this song on a Green Line train after a Sox game and you’re likely to get more than just dirty looks.

No, I had good reason to start the story off in the distant, foreign land of NYC, but first I needed to dispel a lot of my own misconceptions. I know I may sacrifice “street cred” by saying this (even more so than putting “street cred” in quotes), but I’m strictly a middle-class suburbanite kid. For the past few decades I’ve awakened to the sounds of birds and lawnmowers, not car stereos and construction crews. To put myself into Dexter’s shoes I had to learn something about the largest city in America.

Don’t Believe Everything You See

I’m probably not the only one who based his impression of New York City on movies and TV shows. If Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Die Hard with a Vengeance, and 100,000 episodes of Law and Order are my guiding documentaries, then New York City is actually a pretty easy place to understand…

• The subways are controlled by roving street gangs who spray paint everything within reach and threaten everyone with guns and knives.
• Homeless people constantly wander around yammering to themselves and harassing people for change.
• Every street is littered with… well, litter. And people sleeping in boxes, used needles, obvious hookers…
• The sewers are infested with ninjas and Ron Perlman.
• Making eye contact with anyone, anywhere, for any reason will get you shot, stabbed, or both.

Big Apple residents, stop me if any of this sounds familiar. Maybe all stereotypes are formed around a grain of truth, but my few experiences actually visiting New York have been nothing like this.

Yeah, it’s crowded. Duh. But the impersonality of a major metropolis doesn’t completely degrade everyone’s sense of humanity. A suburbanite like myself has to get used to things like coffee shops with no bathrooms and traffic that ignores lines and signs, sure. The noise level is much higher and it never stops, but it’s not like Mayor Bloomberg has mandated that at least one jackhammer per square block must be running at all times. It’s just… busy. The subways are dirtier than Boston’s, but at least they run all night.

Where No One Knows Your Name

The important thing I noticed about the people of New York, though, is that they don’t care about you… in the good way. So many people from so many different parts of this planet live in such a small area that nothing really seems out of place. You can see a flaming queer in rubber shorts, an Orthodox Jew, an African in a dashiki, and a Muslim couple complete with long beard and hijab all waiting for the same bus. And nobody’s trying to kill each other (mostly they’re all just noses-down staring at their iPhones anyway).

Dexter could bump into all his former and future lives right there in Manhattan and nothing would seem out of place- WWII uniform, Antarctic parka, 1970′s lab coat, powdered wig… He wouldn’t even need to be near Broadway for people to accept such variety and move on with their lives.

Dexter himself grew up in Suburbia, just like me, but the Big Apple seemed like the best natural camouflage for someone living as thousands of other people. If he ever wakes up at home and can’t quite shake the effects of his previous life, he could still venture outside with little chance of anyone calling the police. I doubt he’d be able to do the same in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota.

Writing About What You Know

There’s no way I could claim to know what it’s like living in NYC, even if I grilled Ariel Hyatt for info. Then again, there’s no way Gene Rodenberry knew what space travel was like or Anne Rice knew what living through multiple centuries with no sunlight would do to a person.

I do, however, know what it’s like to feel lost. I know what it’s like to miss my home and my routine. I know what it’s like to be afraid of commitment and what it’s like to be self-centered. I know what it’s like to open up to someone for the first time and share secrets you wouldn’t even admit to your cat.

I know what it’s like to fall in love when you least expect it.

Like all science fiction and most adventure stories, The Lives of Dexter Peterson isn’t an autobiography. While “living in New York City” is a perfectly attainable feat, in my case it’s merely a backdrop to what’s really happening: A young man is lost in his own search for identity and no one- not one of the millions of people he calls neighbors -can help him figure out who the hell he really is.

So my latest album (and novella, and graphic novel) is called The Lives of Dexter Peterson, in case you haven’t heard me raving about it lately. Sure, it’s a new batch of musics and quite possibly the best-sounding record I’ve ever made, but I don’t think I’ve ever really gone into detail about who the hell this Dexter Peterson is and why I’m writing about him.

Those that know my inspirations and tastes might think that the album title’s some kind of homage to Ben Folds’ The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. Sure, that album kicks many flavors of ass and I’d love to think that Dexter and Reinhold might be friends somewhere in the charts, but other than the lengthy title they really have nothing in common besides a lot of piano.

No, Dexter’s origins are a bit more meta than that.

Strategically Planned Chaos

Back in 2005 (you know, when Facebook was where you found your old college buddies) I took part in something called NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to start with a blank page on November 1st and write 50,000 words by December. That’s over 1,600 words per day, or about five and a half standard paperback pages. Every single day. This kind of pace guarantees two things:

1. Whatever you write is probably going to be crap.
2. Any story you’ve got in mind will either be rock-solid or totally disintegrate, either of which can lead to a good novel.

It’s the second point that led me to create Dexter. I figured that if I was going to survive an effort like this, I’d better be working with a story that could move with the kind of random attention span I’d likely be suffering. Hence, Dexter was born not out of something truly compelling that I needed to say, his Genesis was more a utility to prevent writer’s block from killing my daily word count. His ordeal of finding his entire world shifted like the Mad Hatter’s tea party made for a convenient way to push the word count higher without devoting any excess time to a dying plot line.

Since Dexter’s reality jumps from one life to the next at any given moment, I had the freedom to abandon a thread as soon as I started running out of ideas. It’s the dream of every twenty-something male who’s afraid of commitment.

From Chaos, Meaning

About halfway into my NaNoWriMo ordeal, I actually began to formulate a direction for Dexter. If anything, his story is a story about finding focus. Are you the kind of person who has never held a job for more than a few years? A serial dater? Have you changed addresses more than you’ve changed hairstyles? You can probably relate to Dexter, even if you’re not a time-traveler. Dexter’s story is the same as every post-college American kid currently wandering Europe with a giant backpack and a 2-terabyte iPhoto library.

And yet he finds something in his existential ADD that brings consistency: Alexandria. When I started the outline process in late October 2005, she wasn’t in there at all. For all I’d blocked out beforehand (yes, that’s allowed in the NaNo rules), I never planned on Dexter meeting a girl that would change him. I suppose none of us really plan on meeting someone like that, but if we’re lucky we do. I’d like to think I’m that lucky.

So for thirty days Dexter lived in my tortured sense of direction (poor guy), but as the month wore on I found it easier to coalesce a coherent world for him. Ideas recapitulated in surprising places. An endgame began to present itself with each new idea. Sure, Dexter’s story began as an etude or an exercise, but it became something strangely autobiographical.

From the chaos of my imagination, a nascent sense focus emerged. This was also the year I released Beer & Coffee.

Life By Life, Track By Track

In the coming weeks I’ll try to post some more detailed explanations about each of Dexter’s lives as they’re detailed in the novella. Each of the album’s tracks will be explained a bit better as well. Hopefully I can impart a better understanding of who Dexter Peterson is and, with any luck, I’ll come to a better understanding myself. Penning the story and creating the album aren’t the final steps in this creative process, they’re really just milestones.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. They not only help make Dexter more real to you, they make him more real for me as well.