Wanzology

Old Friends

  Well, well, well, what's going on people? How you doing? I hope you are well and you and yours are, I hope you're all thriving, I hope life isn't ‘lifin’ too damn hard because Lord knows, we don't need that kind of stress. I am your host, The Wanz and this is another episode of WANZOLOGY, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Today, well, first of all, let's take care of some housekeeping. So, um, a while ago I said something about, um, putting a blog together. Yeah, that's still percolating still working on it. I just had time management is Not one of my fortes. I'm sorry. I apologize. But there will be at some point a wands ology blog that I will make sure to spread to you, the loyal listener and I would actually encourage you to like and subscribe Give me a review. I'm trying to start searching for a sponsor. Which, in your case, would mean advertising, but in my case, I'd get paid. I know that you love me, and you don't want to see me poor. Well, at least I hope you don't. The blog is, it's an interaction tool. I've been on the drawing board, and now there's sticky notes on it, and I just have to take a couple hours and actually research what I'm doing, and then do it.

Isn't that always the thing, just doing something? You think about doing something and then you're thinking about doing what you're doing and then you're thinking more and before you know it you forgot what you were going to do in the first place. That happens to me a lot, but every once in a while I get to do something cool.

Like, uh, this last weekend, I took a road trip over across the mountains from Seattle to visit one of my dear friends who, by the way, is, is like, he's the one who is responsible for WANZOLOGY in the first place. He does podcasting and hosting for a living and he told me that I could probably do it all by myself and lo and behold he was right. But, uh, he and I were best friends in college and then there were two other guys, all four of us were like thick as thieves for a long, long time.

You know, I was listening to them talk about some of the things that they remember from school and things that have happened in their life as they're, all three of them are married and have been for a while and I'm, I'm the single guy and I'm looking at them and I'm going, Jesus, you know what, this is another reminder that I have old friends.

I never thought I was going to have old friends. Ever. I remember when I was a kid, my dad would talk about old friends that he knew from the army, and if we'd go on vacation, we were always going somewhere that an old friend of his lived. And I thought that was kind of cool, but I'd never understood the process of actually having an old friend. And by the time I got to college and started building, building my friendships there, I couldn't think a year past my face. So I never really anticipated not being there, until I couldn't be in college anymore, and moved to Seattle. I had friends from college, I had friends from high school, but that wasn't that long ago. And then I started meeting more people here in Seattle in the music biz, and hanging out, and, you know, 10 years later, it's like I'm friends with those people and all the people that I went to school with and high school, but it never occurred to me that I would have old friends. I don't think it was until probably 2012.

I think by the time Thrift Shop happened, when I was posting in the early part of the touring days, I was posting on my Facebook page, and all these people were coming out of the woodwork, happy for me, and encouraging me, and always knew it would happen, and all this other stuff. You know, and by the time the, the first year of Thrift Shop was over, I would go back over my memories, and look at the people who commented, and it hit me that I'd known some of them for 25, 30 years. And that was mind blowing for me. I really had old friends. I just never really considered it before. Even though when I perform, there's a song that I wrote called “I Will”. I remember writing that song for a Facebook acquaintance who was thinking about offing themselves. They were going to kill themselves. She was bent out and twisted because she didn't feel like she had any friends. The people she thought were her friends had left her out to dry, she was lonely and alone, which is a dangerous combination. You can be one or the other, but when you're both, it kind of sucks, you know? No ‘kinda’ of about it. But I was trying to figure out why she was going to check out. And she told me the sad story of how people that she had counted on and leftust left her out to dry and she felt alone. And I said, “You know what? As long as I'm drawing breath, you'll always have somebody standing with you. I will be there. You turn and look around for somebody. I'll be standing right there.”

We talked more after that, but just the whole story, I wrote it out on a song called “I Will”, and it's on my Wander EP, which you can find at thewanz.com. The, the hook is:

“f you need someone to stand beside you when the world has let you down, I will.
When you need a direction to follow, I will.”

I never let her down. I was always around, you know, we'd check on each other and pretty soon she kind of disappeared. And, uh, let's see, probably about 12 years ago, no, more like eight years ago, caught up with her on Facebook. She was married, had three kids, two of them were in college, one was just about ready to graduate, but she had been happy long after our little encounter. And I was like, “Huh! Well, what do you know? Look what happened. You didn't take yourself out and all these other things happened. Huh!”, but I was always around, I was always ready, I was always around. In that song, at the end, when I perform it live, I say something that my mom reminded me of for the longest time:
“In order to have good friends, first, you have to be a good friend and that's real.”

There's no shortcut. If you want to have good friends first, you have to be a good friend. I still had to relearn that lesson over 2015, 2016, 2017 when I was nursing a broken heart, I'd given so much of myself into a relationship, I didn't have anything left, so I had to rebuild myself from scratch. Once I did that, it was still, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't have any confidence. Everything I had tried to maximize my exposure due to Thrift Shop and to keep it going, none of it ever worked. None of it ever gained any traction. And when you have something that a lot of people don't have, namely awards that most performers and musicians never ever come close to, it’s not like you're putting out your own stuff and then going and touring the world, I mean, not like Macklemore. I, I have my own abilities, but nothing ever seemed to take hold and I really didn't understand why, and no one could really explain it to me.

So, here I am, in 2016, 2017, marinating in all these juices in between my ears, not being able to figure out anything. It was, it was hard. It was really, really hard. But there were people around me, who would say something as simple as, “Well, that's okay. You'll be alright. Yeah, if you write something, send it to me, I want to hear it.”, and it took me forever for—eh---ver to take him up on it. Lo and behold, you know, I figured out that maybe I wasn't supposed to make my own way in this music business that I had been exposed to thanks to an opportunity that I didn't miss. Maybe this was how life was supposed to be. I went back to where I was.

In 2010 and 2011, I was just really happy that I had a cool job, worked with great people. I was writing my own songs and putting them out on Facebook for my friends and I had other opportunities and financially getting myself on my, I was having a good life. And then I answered a phone call one night and went and sang for a guy and that changed everything. And then two and a half years later, I'm digging in scratch and trying not to end up in that same place that I came from when I got the opportunity. It took me like four years to figure out, “Dude!! You didn't have it that bad, remember? Remember? You were just getting out of debt. You went and bought a new car, you'd never done that before. You had friends, Romans, countrymen. You had places to go, things to do, people to see. What, what are you bitching about?”

Sometimes it's really easy to forget what's important, so don't.

By the time 2018, 2019 came along, I was better and I was okay and I was back to just trying to do my own thing. Of course, I still, to this day, play that nice little game in my head, looking at one of those bloody awards and going, “How the hell did that happen?”, oh, well, that’s my evidence that I, that it did happen, cause not everybody gets those bloody awards. And if I weren't any good, why would I have gotten one?
Either of them? A Grammy and a diamond award. Why would I have gotten any of that? If I weren't somewhat talented and that's where I always have to leave the discussion in my head.

Anyway, back to my guys that I went over to visit. So for about an hour and a half, we sat in a circle, wives and husbands talking about the old days. One of my friends, it was an amazing little discovery, he didn't know how to make bacon. And he was fascinated one morning as I was cooking breakfast and we're all hung over, “What are you doing?”, “Um, making bacon.”, “Really?”. I went, “Yeah! Haven't you ever made bacon?”, he went, like, “No!”

I thought, I thought he was a mutant.

Oh my gosh. Then there was one of the other guys was like really connected with the athletic department and he had the physique to prove it. He had all the ins and outs with a lot of players on teams and stuff. Another guy who was a local, he was a local cat. He just kind of seemed like the odd man out, but he was amazingly compassionate and understanding and supportive, and I don't know how it all happened. I don't know how the chemistry went, but us four dudes hung out a lot! And here we were 40 years later, at one of the houses (‘cause everybody has a house now), we're looking at each other and I'm going, “Huh!! Look at that! We have all these memories, all these experiences that we shared. We've stayed in touch, supported each other when we could, been there for each other as much as possible, and here we were!!”, I was like, “Wow, old friends! Who knew?”

I didn't know.

Do you have old friends? Bet you do, one or two, at least. You, uh, you keep in touch with people you went to high school, middle school, junior high, elementary school? How about people that you knew 10 years ago, wherever you worked? You ever keep up with those folks? If you don't, why not? Because if you go back to pick an age, any age, 19, 20, 23, 28, 30, there were people in your life. Well, where are they? Where are they? Why haven't you found them, or why haven't they found you? You have a past, just like everybody else. I wonder what it would feel like when you discover someone that you haven't thought of in forever, and all of a sudden, you're getting a little back-channel messenger note from them on Facebook. Or you thought they lost your number and being that you're an old person like me you haven't changed your cell phone number in God knows how long and all of a sudden you get a text from a number you don't recognize, “Oh this is so and so. Remember we used to live in blah blah blah dorm at college?”

How are you going to feel then? Are you going to like get together with them and go to their house and find out what they've been doing for the time that you guys have been apart? Why not? Why not?

My mom was right, “If you want to have good friends, first, you have to be a good friend.”, which means you're going to have to make moves. You're going to have to look for these people and remind them what you have in common. They're out there. And if you're not going to go find them, what you think they're, they're just going to magically come and find you? You haven't got any control over that. As my dad would say, “You need to get to steppin!!”, ha, ha, ha, ha! Why not?

In the time space continuum, we haven't got that long. Time is the most important thing we have, because you can't replace it and nobody knows how much they have. Why not go out and search for people you wonder about? Find out what they're doing. What's the worst that could happen?

I don't know. All I know is that I wanted to share that experience with you and hopefully it'll inspire you to go and find old friends of your own. Or if you have them, cherish them. Cherish them. Because there is nothing like having old friends. And boy, nobody told me that when I was 19, 20 years old.

Thanks for hanging out today. I am your host, The Wanz and this has been another episode of WANZOLOGY. Tell people about the podcast, please like subscribe, If you like. I'm trying to catch all these analytics and figure out who you are and where you are. People who listen to this and how many of you I want as many people as possible to be listening to WANZOLOGY, so analytics is kind of a thing that I need to learn. But until we actually run into each other personally, I really, really wish you all of the best. And like it says at the end of the program, “Do something good for yourself, then, go do it for someone else.”

Nice!! See you later.