The Comfort of Moving On (When to Quit)

A few years ago, I heard former professional gambler and author Annie Duke on the marvelous podcast, “People I (Mostly) Admire,” hosted by economist Steve Levitt of the Freakonomics franchise. In Duke’s book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, she discusses the art of quitting, and how many of us wait too long to walk away. After all, if there’s one thing a good gambler knows how to do, it’s “when to fold ‘em,” as the song goes. It’s important not to stick with a poker hand when the odds are telling you to quit.

Similarly, it’s important in life not to stick with a job, a pursuit, or a partner when every fiber of your being is telling you to get out. Steve Levitt summarizes Annie Duke’s book this way: “People stick with bad things almost always for too long, and we’d be better off if we quit things sooner.” Waiting too long causes us to stop progressing, to stop gaining ground toward our goals.

How often have you waited to quit an unfulfilling job out of fear and uncertainty, only to find that after doing so, you wound up telling yourself, “I should have done this years ago”?

Getting yourself to quit on time can be tricky. There’s an emotional pull in our society that makes quitting sound weak. We hear accolades for people’s “stick-to-itiveness.” We hear aphorisms like “quitters never win, winners never quit.” But what we might not hear is that a successful person who you admire might have quit three other goals before finding the one that worked, that an entrepreneur had two failed businesses before finding the one that succeeded, that a person left three romantic relationships before finding the one that clicked.

In order to grow, we have to allow ourselves to quit aspects of our lives that aren’t working.

Over the last year, I quit my two main music activities: I stopped playing at a church where I’d worked almost every Sunday for twelve years, and then last week I played my last concert with a local yacht rock band that I’d performed with for three years. In both cases I was playing with good musicians who were nice people. There was nothing awful happening in either scenario. Both allowed me to do what I do fairly well: play the keyboards. Both paid me a little cash that gave me a sense of contributing to my family (albeit, minimally). There were reasons to stay.

But neither musical act was fulfilling. I wasn’t inspired. I wasn’t stretching myself as a player. I was showing up, playing, collecting a check, and going home. That’s not what I want out of music. I think of drummer Bill Bruford quitting Yes, Gregg Rollie leaving Journey, or Sting pulling out of The Police, each at a point when those bands were at their creative peaks. There were all sorts of reasons to stay, but they each decided it was time to walk away.

Now, leaving a church gig and local yacht rock band pales in comparison to the above examples, but despite a multitude of reasons to stay, I quit both of them, and if I’m honest with myself, later than I should have. You know you’ve made the right decision when after quitting you feel a little lighter, a little freer, and that’s how I feel now.

Now it’s up to me to put that new energy into action, and to proudly carry the mantel and say, “Yeah, I’m a quitter.”

Sports Hats Invite Conversation

Spontaneous conversations seem to be a lost art. It’s so easy to avoid eye contact and conversation by peering at the latest headlines on your phone, that chance encounters are less likely than they were a few decades ago. Unfortunately, this lack of small talk can feed on itself until people lose the skill altogether. Each morning, I pass by dog-walkers who not only don’t shoot the breeze with me – a fellow dog-walker – but can’t even garner the energy to say hello, as if they’ve lost the ability to utter the two-word syllable. More likely, they’ve lost all confidence to interact with strangers. Or maybe they’re just douchebags. Hard to tell.

One way to occasionally overcome this trend while traveling is by wearing a sport hat. On a recent trip to the Los Angeles area, I had two delightful conversations with complete strangers, all because of the hat I was wearing. Usually, it’s the Green Bay Packers hat that attracts the most attention, but on this trip I donned the cap of my first-place Milwaukee Brewers. Neither of my conversations came from Brewers fans, but the recognition was enough to start them chatting.

My wife, daughter and I were hanging out at a wine bar in Santa Barbara (it sounds kind of bougie, I know), and one of the guys at a table next to us notice my hat: “That is the greatest sports logo ever, the Milwaukee Brewers.” He proceeded to point out to his colleague that the Brewers emblem is no ordinary baseball glove, but a glove comprised of the letters M and B for the name of the sports team. It is a great sports logo! But it was cool for someone else to notice. For the next few minutes, we talked about my Brewers and his Dodgers, and how the playoffs have watered down the importance of the regular season, etc. Good stuff!

A day later my daughter and I were on the shuttle bus taking us from the Sara Bareilles concert at the Hollywood Bowl back to the Zoo. There were only two seats left, separated by five or six rows, so we each took one, but soon after another group of people came onto the bus for standing room only. I gave up my seat for the first woman who walked on (who said chivalry is dead?) and after saying thank you, she noticed my hat and said, “I was born in St. Louis. Don’t hate me.”  Well, it’s true that the Cardinals have been a thorn in the Brewers’ side since the 1982 World Series, and after she introduced herself as “Ann from Ann Arbor” (she having attended the University of Michigan), we chatted for a bit about baseball before moving on to other things. Ann was a talker, and while it’s true that I wouldn’t have wanted to spend an entire day with her, for a 20-minute bus ride she was a pure delight. She told me about her job in video work, her apartment near USC, her Christmas caroling adventures, and about writing a musical and playing the French horn. When we got off the bus she wanted to meet my daughter and ended up giving both of us a hug.

Yeah, I know. For a lot of people these types of stories only solidify why they never want to leave their homes. Like ever. Conversations with strangers? Eww!

But I’m telling you, for me it was a nice cap to an already terrific day.

You want to spontaneously talk with strangers? Wear a hat. If not, wear the most anonymous clothing you can find.

The Challenges of Staying in Shape

I see them, people not so much older than I, struggling to get in and out of their cars, or to walk from their car to the front door of a Kohl’s or Target. I see motorized wheelchairs, oxygen masks, and walkers. I see labored breathing after a flight of stairs. And I know that not only do none of us get out of here alive, but most of us are going to have significant physical limitations before our bodies finally call it a day.

Still, I’d like to take steps to at least give my body a chance to avoid the worst of it, to recover after an accident or an illness or a surgery. When my wife had an accident last winter and broke six (or was it seven?) ribs, it was a wake-up call to both of us. Neither of us was in as good of shape as we should have been, and it was painfully clear that events are inevitably going to happen to our bodies that require recovery. The better shape we’re in now, the better chance we’ll have to recover quickly and successfully. Something as simple as getting out of a chair can be a terrible burden after an accident, but even more if your muscles aren’t in good working order. Physical fitness matters. For years, I’ve watched guys in workout facilities pump iron like their lives depended on it, and I’ve finally started to realize…they’re lives might depend on it!

And so my wife and I started seeing a personal trainer twice a week. My plan was to see him for three or four months, get a good routine established, and continue the workouts at home. I worked diligently last winter and spring, expanding my repertoire, purchasing mat flooring, a workout bench, some bands and dumbbells, and after a few months, I felt stronger: my movements had become more fluid, I had increased my confidence in exercises like hinges and squats and lunges, and my left knee – for decades the source of on-again, off-again piercing pain – finally got over its persnicketiness. All it took was one additional step up onto a 20-inch plyo box – one that had me groan audibly in pain – and as if my magic, all the knee pain that had plagued me since I was in my 20s disappeared. I can now step up onto 20-inch box without a thought.

Yay for the human body!

I was going along just fine, feeling rather smug about how much by body was improving, continuing my workouts at home plus an occasional check-in with my trainer, when suddenly my neck – also a source of on-again, off-again piercing pain for the past several decades – cried uncle, immobilizing my head to the point where it could barely turn.

Back to the drawing board. I began a three-month period of virtually no working out; that is, not unless you include the dozens of physical therapy sessions I attended at a well-run local clinic. I worked as diligently on my assigned “necksercises” as I had on my normal workout routine, and after months of pain and frustration, my neck began to relax, allowing me to increase my head movement significantly. It’ll probably never be “normal,” but it is much better. It’s at a point where if I can maintain my level of mobility for the rest of my life, I’ll be a happy man.

Yay for the human body!

But then I returned to the gym. It was as if I’d never started working out to begin with. After my first session, I could barely walk for the next two days.

So the journey begins again, trying to establish a functioning human body that has a fighting chance to recover after a fall or a car accident or a surgery. I’m trying. But now I’m proceeding with more caution than last winter. I’m lifting, but not as much. I’m allowed to do overhead pulls, but no longer overhead presses. I have to recognize that as much as I want to get stronger and achieve more fluidity, I also want to be able to move my head. It’s a balancing act, a variation of which I suspect all of us will be navigating for the remainder of our lives.

“Just keep moving,” is my motto these days.  And try to avoid the types of events that will test how fit (or unfit) you really are.

Lyrics that Stress the Wrong Syl-LA-ble

There’s a Dan Fogelberg song that was a hit back in 1975 called “Part of the Plan.” It’s a good tune that I’d forgotten all about until recently, when a friend of mine gave me a copy of the album Souvenirs. I listened to the opening track and scratched my head a bit, because while I remembered the tune, I still didn’t know what the heck Fogelberg was saying during the chorus. Was he mentioning an exotic city somewhere? A bar? A dance I’m unfamiliar with?

No, he was saying “One day we’ll all un-DER-stand,” stressing the wrong syl-LA-ble. It sounded weird when I was six. It sounds weird today at age 56.

And it brought to mind additional cases where songwriters have taken huge liberties with their lyrics, asking the audience to basically shrug off what is clearly artistic license gone awry.

On my podcast recently (episode 74), we featured a song called “Mirage Zone” by Hot Mama Silver. In preparation for the recording, I listened to the song multiple times, not knowing what it was called, and I didn’t figure the title out until I read it. The singer sings, “MEER-age Zone,” instead of “Mir-AGE Zone,” and it’s the most important part of the tune! The title! Hot Mama Silver did themselves no favors with this one.

I thought of some other tunes that stress wrong syllables for the sake of the melody, and some of them are hits - fantastic songs in every other way.

Stevie Wonder takes all sorts of liberties with the syllables on his amazing song, “I Wish,” the most egregious being in the chorus: “Why did those days e-VER have to go.”

The first line of Alanis Morissette’s breakout hit, “You Oughta Know,” stresses the wrong syllable:

“I want you to know, I’m hap-PY for you,” and she goes on to sing the words eloquent-LY and ba-BY. But hey, there’s no denying the song’s greatness. I still remember hearing it for the first time en route from Detroit to Muskegon, Michigan, and I was floored. Now, you could make the argument that the odd stresses in this song mirror the singer’s seething anger, a case when what one says doesn’t come out calm or controlled or correct.

You could argue that, but Morissette is a repeat offender, as a contributor to this link highlights. It was pointed out that she outdid her mis-syllabic self on the song “Uninvited,” (another song I like):

“I am fla-TERED by…”
“I have sim-PLY”
“An un-for-TUN-ate slight.”

Ugh. Yeah, I like the tune, but that’s pretty bad.

Another hit song with a misplaced stress is Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” when they sing, “When the rain wa-SHES you clean you’ll know.”

The above-referenced link of syllabic stresses has a lot more examples, including several I hadn’t thought of:

Eric Clapton, “Won’t you be my FOR-ever woman.”

Stevie Wonder again, from “You Are the Sunshine of My Life, when he sings, “Because you came to my res-CUE.”

The Beatles “Old Brown Shoe” with the line, “My love is something you can’t RE-ject.”

The list could go on and on. But what are we do make of it, especially if you’re a songwriter? Should lyrics always be sung the way we speak? Probably not, but I would say most of the time, yes. If you’re purposely stressing a wrong syllable to be clever or for comedic effect – a sort of “wink” to the audience – then I think it can be not only justified, but downright genius. One contributor to the above thread wrote about Ira Gershwin employing stresses for comedic effect in the song “It Ain’t Necessrily So”:

“He made his home in
that fish’s ab-DO-men.”

That’s great! And I imagine that showtunes are full of these types of examples. Hip hop and rap, too.

But many of the above examples seem to simply be laziness. When a word didn’t fit the meter, the songwriter just stuck with it even if it sounded odd. That certainly isn’t the ideal. No one is denying (or at least I’m not) the merits of each and every song I mentioned above, but I’m confident that they would all have benefited if the offending lyrics had been replaced by words that fit the stresses naturally.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!

But now I’m wondering how many misplaced stresses I’ve written in my repertoire. There are probably a few!

Randy Newman’s Bad Love at 25 Years

Everything I write all sounds the same
Each record that I'm making
Is like a record that I've made
Just not as good

In 1999, this line from Randy Newman’s “I’m Dead (And I Don’t Know It),” the third track from his album, Bad Love, could have been interpreted as a funny, self-aware lyric from the mid-50s composer who recognized that his best stuff was behind him, but I tend to think that Newman may have viewed the lyric with a degree of irony, because he probably realized that he was recording some of the best songs of his career. Other Newman records get more love – Good Old Boys, Sail Away, Little Criminals and Trouble in Paradise, but for me, this is his masterpiece, the culmination of everything he’d perfected over the years: witty lyrics, intricate orchestration, deft observations of history and society, and shifting moods, the latter gift likely developed over the previous two decades of writing for film. I’ve read some comments on-line about how he missed the boat on this release, but I think those listeners should sit down one more time with a drink in one hand, the lyric sheet in the other, and savor the brilliance of Bad Love.

Produced by Mitch Froom (whom he’s continued to work with on two subsequent albums), Bad Love is twenty-five years old now, and I am now a year older than Newman was when he recorded it. I’d like to think that means that my best work may still be ahead of me, but dang – that Newman was able to record an album this good at age 55 is amazing. Then again, it may have been exactly the age necessary to address the song topics with such directness and deftness: this isn’t an album that he could have made in his 20s.

Newman is known for writing songs in character – often disreputable ones, at that – but in Bad Love he inserts more of his own life into the lyrics than previous albums (save for the first several tracks from the autobiographical Land of Dreams). In the opening song, ”My Country,” Newman observes the culture of watching TV in US society, but then in the final verse, he discusses his own relief when his house empties and he’s able to switch on the tube and tune out:

Now your children are your children,
even when they're grown.
When they speak to you,
you got to listen to what they have to say.
But they all live alone now,
they have TVs of their own
but they keep on coming over anyway.
And much as I love them,
I'm always kind of glad when they go away.

I sent this lyric to a friend of mine a few years ago, and she hated it, like it was a personal affront to parents everywhere. Me, I think it’s hilarious.

More personal is the heartbreaking “I Miss You,” a song he’s introduced live with this terrific setup: “This is a love song that I wrote for my first wife while I was married to my second…scared ‘em both!” An ode to a relationship that failed, but with lingering feelings of love and regret, it’s a killer tune, and I marvel that as much as Newman has made a career out of singing in character, the most interesting character may be himself.

Even in the masterwork, “The World Isn’t Fair,” in which Newman first summarizes Karl Marx’s political philosophy before having an imaginary conversation with the man himself, Newman inserts a comedic story about his own life to illustrate just how unfair the world has remained despite the hopes that communism may have initially generated:

Karl, I recently stumbled
Into a new family
With two little children in school
Where all little children should be
I went to the orientation
All the young mommies were there
Karl, you never have seen such a glorious sight
As these beautiful women arrayed for the night
Just like countesses, empresses, movie stars, and queens
They'd come there with men much like me
Froggish men, unpleasant to see

Despite the insertion of himself into some of his lyrics, there’s plenty of Newman’s trademark in-character songs, the most successful being the second track on the album, “Shame,” in which Newman plays a jealous, aging lover of a younger woman. He banters with his conscience, portrayed by background singers who interrupt his ramblings with the reprise: “Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame…”  He responds,

Could be right, I sunk pretty low this time

Ultimately, he tells the singers in his head to shut-up and offers a line that cracks me up each time I hear it:

You know, I have a Lexus now,
and I don't get out much
You know what I'm saying
Come on home

In “The Great Nations of Europe,” Newman gives us a somewhat comedic but also mournful history lesson on colonialism and its affect on The Guanche, a people who inhabited The Canary Islands until the 1600s:

Now they're gone, they're gone, they're really gone
You've never seen anyone so gone
They're a picture in a museum
Some lines written in a book
But you won't find a live one no matter where you look

Musically, Newman succeeds at many genres, from mournful ballads, an orchestral-backed march (“The Great Nations of Europe”), country-tinged rock (“Big Hat No Cattle”), American roots (“I Want Everyone To Like Me”), Latin-leaning ballad (“Better off Dead”), but somehow it’s all held together by Froom’s generally spartan production, with Newman’s vocals far out in front of the mix, few audible effects applied.

If there’s one modest miss on the album, it’s the penultimate track, “Going Home,” but at 2:06, it’s really just a brief interlude before the final song, “I Want Everyone To Like Me,” a funny number with a tinge of truth to it, and it’s fitting that Newman concludes his album on a personal note.

I want everyone to like me
That's one thing I know for sure
I want everyone to like me
'Cause I'm a little insecure

If I had to pick one Newman album to take with me to a desert island, Bad Love is the one. Some of Newman’s contemporaries continued to put out solid efforts late in their careers, (Jackson Browne’s Standing in the Breach" James Taylor’s Before This World, Paul Simon’s So Beautiful, So What), but Bad Love may be the best among them.