No Stage, Just a Chair

I am terrible at impressions. Can't do the accent, can't do the voice, never could. My son can. Not because he's more talented, because he's got the confidence to try and the sense to find the one true thing about the person he's doing. The line doesn't have to be perfect. It has to be true. A song that only needs a voice and a guitar. A dish so simple there's nowhere l...

I used to tell clients to look for the guy in the red shirt. A friend pointed out I could just tell them I'd be the tallest person in the room. I'd been standing that close to myself for years and still couldn't see the most obvious thing. I come loaded with opinions. Always have. For a long time I thought that was what I was bringing into the room. The thing of value. Turns out the op...

In 2003 I was on the subway in New York City and everyone around me had white headphones in. Little cords running down into their pockets. The city was full and it felt utterly lonely. That wasn't about New York. It showed up again at a birthday dinner in Tampa. At the barber shop. In the emergency room with my son. We keep finding new ways to be unreachable in rooms full of people. And somewh...

I used to believe the lie that we have to be strong enough before we start. We tell ourselves that once we have it all figured out, the career, the relationships, the internal chaos, then we'll finally be prepared to take the leap. We wait for a feeling of certainty that we are big enough, smart enough, or put-together enough to handle the weight. But that is a perfect recipe for never startin...

We imagine it perfect before we ever begin. The plan. The launch. The first episode of a podcast recorded alone in a quiet office. The version where everything goes exactly the way we pictured it. And then something slips. A door opens at the wrong time. A voice falters in the middle of a song. A text gets sent that wasn't part of the plan. And that's the moment the real thing shows up. I&...

I didn't used to think about who was at the bottom of the hill. I just knew I was frustrated. I knew the day had gone wrong. I knew what I needed and who was standing between me and it. Then I watched someone go completely still across a counter from me. Not because of anything I'd done yet. Because of everything everyone else had done before I got there. She was already in the part where...

I know what it looks like when the beautiful thing you're holding starts to feel like a eulogy. The appreciation is real. The warmth is real. But underneath it, something shifts so quietly you don't catch it. Gratitude tips into grief in advance. Savoring becomes silent surrender. I sat across from a friend recently. Mid-thirties. Real success happening in real time. He looked at me and as...

I know what it feels like to win an argument and walk away smaller. Not because I was wrong. Because of what I traded to be "right." We've built a whole culture around that trade. The hot take that lands. The half-truth shaped just right. The position held past the point where honesty lives. All of it pointed at the same destination: I'm right and you're an idiot. It feels li...

I know what tornadoes smell like. I know what the sky looks like right before it happens. I grew up in a town where the elementary school was underground, and when the sirens went off, we walked down the ramp and sat in our classrooms and waited. My dad stayed up top to watch. By my tenth storm, I was up there with him. There's something that happens when you stop being afraid of something and...

I'll try most anything twice. That sounds strange until you've watched enough people wait for assurance before they move. Thinking things through until the risk disappears. Making faces before anything touches the fork. Ordering chicken alfredo in every city in the world. There's a kind of careful that becomes a kind of small. So we had a rule at the market. One fruit you've never...

Have you ever felt something coming before you could name it? Not a bad day. Not a crisis. Just a song on, traffic moving, and then a line catches you somewhere in the chest and you know immediately you are not making it home like this. And then your first instinct is to call it a malfunction. We've built an entire reflex around not letting that moment happen. The skip button. The phone call....

My sixteen-year-old sat across from me last night and started saying things about himself I recognized immediately. I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know why they won't hire me. This should be easy. He's been applying for jobs for almost a year. I've been working on fear for almost forty. Neither of us got it right last night. That's the part I keep coming bac...

I was 15 years old, sitting in a coffee shop with my dad. Dr. Pepper. A cherry Danish. The exact order I always got. His friend Steve came in and they started talking about someone going through a divorce, someone who had cheated on his wife. And Steve said he could never do that. He could never be that person. My dad stopped him. Said: "You could. And it is possible." I checked out the...

He pulled me aside after class. Just a sociology professor, I thought. What does he want? "You seem worn out," he said. Then: "Do you need an education or do you need a degree?" I didn't have an answer. I wasn't even sure I understood the question. He sent me to five men with gray hair who actually cared about me. My dad. My pastor. A few others. I asked all of them the...

I didn't know I was being built. That's the part nobody tells you about. You're doing the boring thing, the repeated thing, the thing that doesn't feel like it's going anywhere, and somewhere underneath it something is forming that you can't see yet. I spent years at a piano watching a kitchen timer. Scales and cadences first, then the song. I didn't understand why the scales mattered. I did them...

The tire was shredded. No spare. Cars doing seventy three feet away. My 19-year-old's eyes were enormous. His younger brother, still loose from laughing gas at the dentist, wanted tacos. I wasn't scared. That's the part that gave me pause. I've spent most of my working life in chaos. Live music, live events, rooms with 50,000 people and a deadline that moved every hour. And somewhe...

Creatives have always known how to connect the dots. The problem is the room spent decades pretending we were there to decorate it. So you learned the disguise. You translated yourself into language they could accept, because the alternative was getting walked out before the idea had a chance. "Dad, in school we read about what you do for a living." No context. No preamble. Just: you wal...

Simon said it looking right at Matthew McConaughey: you have a remarkable relationship with discomfort. I heard that and I couldn't let it go. Not because I recognized it. Because I didn't. I played music for fifteen years. Made records for other people. Showed up as the session player, the support system, the one who kept everyone else's vision moving. The songwriters would have told...

Ann walked through our house and started subtracting. Photos down. Repaint the kitchen. Simplify the shelves. We had put years into that place. Every detail was intentional. And she was standing in the middle of it telling us there was too much of us in it. In order for people to see themselves in it, they have to see less of you in it. Here's the thing about staging. You only do it because yo...

The parking lot lights were humming. Eighty thousand people had just emptied out of the stadium when my eight year old stepped off the bus and announced he would lead us back to the car. He walked fast. Shoulders back. Every few steps he looked over his shoulder to see if I was still there. He thought leading meant being in front. I let him try. The whole time I knew where the car was. I was watch...

When I left for summer break, I was 5'7". When I came back three months later, I was 6'4". It sounds impressive when you say it like that. It wasn’t. Everything hurt. I walked onto the basketball court in a body that didn’t feel like mine yet, more like a baby giraffe on rollerskates. I literally did not know where my body ended anymore. There was a coach who saw size and expecte...

In college, the dean of student life told me something I’ve never forgotten. We keep teaching people what to think. When we should be teaching them how to think. It sounded simple. It didn’t feel simple. It still doesn’t. Because the longer I do this work, the more I notice a problem in myself. Helping feels responsible. Helping feels like care. And sometimes there’s a little part of it that feels...

Standing in line during the pandemic, six feet apart, mask on, strange small talk in the air, I told my friend Jeff something I meant. I hope you make a million dollars. Not because money is the point. Because when you give good people resources, they do good things. And their good work makes the world around them better. This episode lives in a tension I keep bumping into. Profit is not the probl...

When we’re scared, we start living with a closed hand. We call it wisdom. We call it boundaries. But half the time, it’s fear in a nicer outfit. This episode lives in the tension between two postures: an open hand or a clenched fist. A bridge or a barricade. Building or protecting. I share a few moments from my life when I realized how easily fear disguises itself as caution, and how quickly scarc...

The world pressed us into isolation for a season. For many of us, personal circumstances reinforced it. And then one day, some of us woke up and realized how lonely we had become. Not dramatically. Just quietly. And how the habits that once helped no longer fit the life we want to live. This episode lives in that space many of us recognize but rarely name. I talk about what it feels like when conn...