Column: The Trials & Tribulations of A Label-Owner & Muso, Jan 2002
I was born in Kansas City, Missouri but grew up mostly in the suburbs of California. I can remember back very far into my childhood; so far back that it doesn't seem far at all. I think that my memories of being very young, in school, and involved in my internal dramas, informs all of my lyrics and writings, so it seems like a good place to start.
In writing lyrics, I find that I inadvertently revert to a vocabulary of phrases and situations that populate my youth; I was the only child of a single mother, born when my mother was two months shy of her 18th birthday. My parents were already split up and so my birth-certificate lists a blank where my father's name should be. At the age of four, I lost the chance to know my father when I learned he'd died... I don't really know how or why.
My mother went to a small community college when I was very young and I attended the nursery school/daycare center on campus while she attended classes; when I started kindergarten at 5, I thought it was my second year because I'd somehow convinced myself I had already been there. After completing her degree in horticulture, my mother started her own landscape-design company. It was a good time for us. We were as affluent as we'd ever be, and I trusted my mom completely to take care of me and protect me from whatever the world had in store. I look at the rest of my youth as that trust and protection being worn away: I don't know if that's the nature of growing up and maturing itself, or if there was some exceptional loss I suffered.
Being an only child, I was self-sufficient from an early age. I made my own lunches and got myself to school from five years old and onwards. It was rare that my mother was parental beyond what's minimally expected: home, clothes, food. I wasn't told to brush my teeth or go to bed, do my homework. I wasn't really told to anything, but - somehow - I was always in trouble. I was guilty of being a child my whole childhood and had to fumble and fail alone along the way, trying to live up to what was expected of me, even though I never really knew what that was. I was always being punished for something and basically I felt guilty all the time.
Nothing I've written sounds so harsh or bad; I grew up alone for the most part with a parent that was more involved in her own life than mine and who expected more of me than one normally expects of a child. I know that isn't so horrible: it's like taking a test you don't get to study for. But I don't really know how to share the difficult parts without seeming to affect some kind of martyr pose which I wouldn't want to.
We moved around a lot when I was young, not across the country but from town to town in California. I attended 14 schools by the time I graduated high school by my own count; and my mother, who'd once operated her own business, gradually gave up on her own dreams which resulted in us living on government-welfare money and my mother's small-time drug dealing. My own lifestyle embarrassed me as I entered my teen years. I tried to distance myself from the drug scenes in my living room and pretend I was middle class when I was so far from it. I aspired to be something I wasn't, wished it with all of my heart and desire. But there was no escape, there never is and I didn't have anywhere to escape to. My family offered me no sanctuary; they were exactly the opposite of what I wanted for myself. I couldn't understand how I was related to them, they seemed like strangers to me. And, as my mother became more caught up in drugs, more desperate and ultimately more bitter, the last of my trust in her withered away and I was alone.
On the other end of things, my embarrassment at who I was and my attempt to hide it was a wall between me and any chance at support from my friends. I was afraid of admitting my horrible real self, so I was by myself. I pretended to be something I wasn't - happy, smart, adjusted and normal - while I lived in unhappy poverty and loneliness, desperately hoping to escape. So many simple, normal experiences have a dark edge to them as memories because of what I was holding at bay inside me. Thinking about a girl I liked in third grade somehow affects me more because I remember who I was then and what I was quietly fighting off in my heart. At the same time, the comfort and distraction provided to me by my third-grade crush somehow still soothes me, keeps the harshness away. That's why it feels right to remember.
At 17, I moved out on my own and, in a way, finally escaped from whatever I was hiding from. I found my own prospects and put work into myself to become someone I could believe in, be my own sanctuary. And I found enough confidence in myself to admit what I'd grown up with to my friends, not afraid that it made me bad or unseemly. But who I was is still a large part of who I am and, when I search myself, it's that part of me that cries to be heard because it was stifled for so long. I am glad that I have music, art, my label and writing to finally be able to give myself the voice I was never afforded.