Why can’t you be free?

Mar 24, 2025

In the perpetual quest for truth or to find what’s real about it all. I find myself staring at a song title on my notes app entitled “why can’t you be free?” It was written with a famous or rather a once famous songwriter I admired, in mind. He seems to struggle with addiction and mental health issues, and like so many of us, succumbs to his darkness again and again. We live in a society that claims support by tweeting a hashtag of #letstalk on mental health days but balk at the actual helping of someone in distress.

We watch it play out on stage like some sort Shakespearean tragedy that continues for the main character well after the curtain closes.

Worse yet, most of us don’t even watch it play out on stage but on the front pages of Reddit or Facebook. But I digress. I realize this song title is as much for me as it is for him.

Thankfully I’m reading again. Right now Edward Abbey and Thoreau, Abbey to see the absurdity in the hyper developed hellscape that is playing out in the media and on social media. Thoreau to challenge my ideas of what I actually need to live happily. Both writers bring me right back to the universal truth of all truths which is that I cannot truly be free until I find my connection with nature. The highest law of the land, this land at least. For now.

I’d rather be tilling a garden than strategizing an album release campaign. I’d rather be standing in a river, frustrated that I keep losing flys to the pesky willow tree that haunts my back cast than thinking about Spotify streams.

I do love the work for the most part, writing songs and hauling it all on stage to conjur the ghosts and magic and connection, to learn a bit about you and myself. I do love that mostly.

Disrupt the mainstream, and remember Jesus was a refugee.

Hayduke Lives!

PS I’m working on new music, recording to an 8 track tape machine, we made our first song with it all last week and will be getting a mix of it today to decide if this is the process we want to take to make the record. I think it is. The analog tape is refreshing. It doesn’t lie and gives me a break from the fucking computers.