Freebird Unfixed

The Wisdom in Leaping Before You Look

Oct 19, 2024

Happy Friday friends!

With my first book finally released out into the wild, it’s high time for something wholly different. So today’s post, at its heart, isn’t really a post at all. It’s a song. Both the story of a song — what my writing yearns to be — and a literal song, of a father and daughter, reaching out to one another across time through music and verse.1

Back in May I shared a personal tale from my wedding some seventeen years ago, complete with vintage late night footage of an incredibly brash attempt to play Free Bird the first time I’d ever played guitar in public. It could’ve gone horribly wrong. In fact, a good bit of it did — but in the end, after all my quiet little nightmares finished playing out in the mind loops of before and after, I am grateful to have taken the chance.

And just like my book which asked so much more of me than I ever anticipated, I somehow thought it would be a great idea at the start. Freebird? Wedding? The perfect ~~American cliché~~ combination! O what could possibly be better?

Once I said yes to that Free Bird moment, reality set in. Crippling doubt. Imminent failure. Underpinning all of it — a paralyzing terror of embarrassment, of failing my family and my friends and my newlywed wife in public. The attempt to write a book all these years later has been a crucible inviting a new dance with those same demons, stretching over an extended, much more pervasive timeline.

In the process of its creation, my life and identity have gone into total flux, I walked away from the corporate world, started a website and this media platform, and played over a hundred live music gigs. Which sounds nice on paper, but without traditional employment and my wife now feeling trapped in her own draining career role, I find myself not knowing how in the hell we’re going to make it all work.2

In the bluntest of terms, I need to just get a fucking job. But I’ve walked the corporate path for two decades, and the right doors aren’t opening — partly because I don’t yet know where to knock, and partly because I can’t knock half-heartedly. Not anymore.

But even greater than my fear of catastrophic failure — which, by pretty much all counts of my 21, 28, and 35-year-old selves, is exactly what I’m going through in terms of career and providership right now — is the fear of looking back on my life, not having tried at all. Of looking on from some future timeline, a future when where Coincidence Speaks remains unwritten, and my guitar is unplayed, and my life is unsung. And I know there is an E.T. Allen some few years hence, not too many actually, looking at these current events with compassion and gentle humor, if not a little pride. I know because I am the one seeing that poor ignorant arrogant sod in A Free Bird Wedding the exact same way.

To write of the past is to breathe it to life, to recalibrate it with the present, and while I was writing about my Free Bird fiasco, another blast from the past came on my playlist: the song Fix You by Coldplay. It had been a good while since I’d heard it, and I just freaking LOVE the epic atmospheric finale in the second part of the song. Something in it speaks — sings — directly to my soul.

And it was such a jarring and profound juxtaposition to Free Bird, with its own epic definitive jam-out guitar solo in its second half finale. You know the one…

A curious thought hit me while I wrote: What if I combined the two?

All at once I could hear the entire Free Bird guitar solo within the epic Fix You instrumental finale. And I heard all the lyrics and verses of Free Bird within the music of Fix You. Clear as a bell.

There was a rising tension between the soundwaves and overlapping lyrics of each piece that became so palpable in my mind… so haunting and somehow so fitting… one about leaving, one about staying, yet both yearning for change... Opening the space for each to exist at the same time brought an indescribable reconciliation. A feeling of both nostalgia and acceptance, staying and going. Freedom no longer felt like an escape, and nothing needed fixing anymore.

Of course, this level of metathought wasn’t going on at the time, only the feeling of it, and the actual thought that emerged was:

“Wouldn’t it be super cool, or at least unique, to do a mashup of freakin’ Freebird and Fix You?”

There was one rather significant problem with this. I know absolutely nothing about music recording, or sound engineering, or music production.

But it was uncanny — somehow the whole thing was already written in my head. I could hear every instrument and note and nuance. Even the name arrived along with it: Freebird Unfixed.

All I had to do was transcribe it.

My 13-year-old daughter — I’ll call her L — is, among many many things, a die-hard Swiftie. She is also a singing songwriting soul who not only embraces but thrives in the spotlight, her purity of purpose and of voice transfixing and transforming the audience every time she gets on stage with me at my live shows.

We got her a laptop for Christmas last year, along with a Scarlett 2i2 recording studio with demo software, so she could sing and write songs to her heart’s content. She never does this, however. Unlike her father, she prefers the live stage not just for its spontaneity, but for the attention. She is wired this way, a songbird from birth and beyond, with an earnest innocence destined to inspire.

In any case, I was in the kids’ playroom mucking about when I saw her laptop sitting there and the realization landed — I could use that Swiftie laptop and its 8 track demo recording software to lay down Freebird Unfixed. And then I looked around the rest of that playroom, astounded by what I saw:

Electric guitar: check. Electronic drums I’d gotten my nine-year-old son for Christmas that he never plays: check. Bass guitar I got my dad for Christmas that he never played so gave back to me: check. Keyboard from the late 90’s with sticky broken keys: check. Acoustic guitar that I actually do play: check. Microphone: check.

An entire full-piece band unfolded like an epiphany before my eyes. From there I just jumped right in.

**Exhibit B: Highly sophisticated recording studio. Background featuring Swift’s** **Evermore** **album.**

I figured I’d work out the basics of the Ableton recording software as I went, and just lay it down instrument by instrument, track by track. It couldn’t be all that hard, because I already knew exactly what each one needed to sound like.

The plan was simple:

1) plug in instrument, 2) play it, 3) move on to the next one, 4) repeat until finished.

But first I had to transpose both songs to a new key, which happened to be the one and ONLY key that would accommodate the necessary vocal range and allow the guitar parts to be played like I heard them in my head. When this was accomplished on day one, I thought I was a genius. <pats self on back>

From there I chipped and labored away at it for a few more days, then a week, then another — tweaking this pitch, that tone, this reverb, this volume, that harmony, that compression, that instrumentation, recording and re-recording and re-re-recording over and over and over ad nauseum. It was like writing a book, but with sound, on an accelerated timeline.

At least my book unfolded organically as I wrote. For much of it I had no idea what I was really going to write until it hit the page. This was not that. This was like having an entire book with every syllable organized and accounted for in my head, but having to learn to type first.

And the more sentences I tried to “type” with the recording software, the more tangled and convoluted my personal Gordian knot of songwriting became. I worked and worked and worked… banging my head against the wall over and over, trial and error, all trial, all effort, only to achieve a draft version with sound quality that made me want to throw the whole damn Taylor Swift-laden thing out the upstairs window.

So one day I finally surrendered my futile attempts at perfectionism and gave up, accepting that the makeshift “studio” I’d cobbled together just wasn’t going to allow anywhere near the quality I’d hoped for. A for effort, D for outcome.

That night I played the draft version for my wife, some sixteen and a half years after our Free Bird Wedding, who probably couldn’t help but wonder at how much time I had been spending on our daughter’s laptop agonizing over a stupid song when I could be updating and sending out my resume.

“It’d better be good,” her eyes said.

She teared up when she heard it. A good sign.

After composing herself a bit, she said, “You know what would be awesome? What if L sings it with you?”

L, bless her heart, didn’t want to intrude.

“It’s your song, Daddy.”

“It’s OK, I want you to.”

“I don’t want to sing it just because Mommy says.”

“I want to hear you sing it.”

"You already sound amazing hitting the high parts and I don’t even know the Coldplay song like you do...”

“It’ll be super easy — we’ll just record over my vocal parts, and let’s hear what we sound like together. For fun!” (I knew, in fact, that it would not be super easy, and it would be walking on a razor blade tightrope of early teen angst and perfectionism.)

It was freaking cute and mature and childlike and an enormous pain in the butt and endearing and stunningly beautiful all at once. Which pretty well describes the daughter I love so much.

We recorded her vocals in just under an hour. Neither of us completely satisfied, but it was enough. We had a working Final Draft - a Daddy Daughter Duet of Freebird Unfixed.

Now what?

I thought about making a father/daughter music video with her, with us playing all the different instruments, putting it up on YouTube, maybe sharing on this platform…

…but life got busy, as it does. And I already had a recording with my little girl that my family would treasure forever. So I decided to keep it private.

The strange thing was that I kept getting these powerful little nudges to share the song with

Kimberly Warner

, the founder and director of Unfixed, a multi-media company that explores how adversity can broaden the definition of what it means to live a “good life.” I didn’t know her all that well and assumed it was probably because of the Unfixed in my song name — while unintentional and unrelated, I didn’t want to overstep any boundaries with the name of her media platform.

But life stayed busy, and I’d decided to keep it private anyway, so I never reached out. Plus I was a little self-conscious about it in general.

And after a while I forgot about the whole thing, and the song sat dormant for months in a folder in the cloud somewhere — I imagine the same place all songs live until they are channelled into incarnation.

Until.

I stumbled my way into the epilogue of Kimberly’s memoir last month.

Her epic, flooringly beautiful memoir. A true story of a daughter and her father reaching out to one another, transcending time through the medium of music and verse. It felt as if I’d been struck by a bolt of lightning. The entire song came rushing into my awareness, becoming something so much more in this new context. And I suddenly knew that was why I’d been getting all those nudges to send it to her — it was meant for her all along.

The words of her memoir about knocked me over:

Inscribed on page or strummed through fingers or witnessed with gentle attention, your written, spoken and sung truth didn’t roll into a ditch but instead landed in me; a lasting song that reminded and awakened my own.
Now, we sing it together.

So I shared it with her, with a little context, and her being Kimberly Warner, she immediately encouraged me to put it out in public. That the people in our community would be understanding and forgive any lack of tech knowledge/sound quality.

Blech.

I still had doubts about posting it, because it’s extra personal and vulnerable and I don’t like how I sing the Ronnie Van Zant Free Biirrrrrd vocal parts all southern and twangy and the audio freaking sucks and a whole litany of reasons—

Then the next day my brother in law sent me a podcast clip out of the blue, about a man who left a corporate career making a good salary that comfortably paid for his family. The man framed it as “Dangerous vs Scary” — that it was really scary to leave his job, but it would be dangerous if he stayed. The danger was that one day, he’d get out of bed, and he’d be much older, and he’d regret not having tried something different. Something he could call his own.

That man took another American cliché — that of piss poor awful beer — and turned it on its head, founding Sam Adams and revolutionizing the craft beer movement in the United States and beyond.

That was coincidence speaking loud enough for me, so here we are. Leaping before looking, trying out something different, something I can call my own.

I hope you feel it.

Most people are familiar with Free Bird, but Fix You is a little less known. If you’re not familiar with Fix You please listen to some of it above; it gives context to my song. The epic part starts around 2:22.

This one goes out to you, L — ever my inspiration 🩵

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