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NFT
"Freedom is something that dies unless it's used."
- Hunter S Thompson
I write this from the studio I put together, piece by piece, over the past 18 months, in an Air B&B in Mexico. I’m here because I used my freedom. I used my freedom to decline to put something in my body that would have allowed me and my family to return to the home and the life we’d built for ourselves in the USA. The same freedom that led us, 10, long years ago to decide to move to that country from the one we were born in. The same freedom that granted me all my adventures, all the experiences that make up the improbable collection of ridiculous stories that my life has been made up of.
I was three years younger than my ten-year-old son the first time I ran away from home. I left home for good on the day before my 16th birthday. As long as I can remember, I prized freedom above all else. Freedom to roam, freedom to think, freedom to dream, freedom to do,freedom to be. Freedom to exemplify as pure a living embodiment of who I really was as I could manage, no matter the personal cost, no matter what scorn, resentment, and violence it bought my way.
I set out into the world on my own, little more than a child, and I lived free, and I roamed, and I thought and dreamed and I did… and surely enough, scorn came my way, and resentment, and violence, and worse.
When I look back, which I do exceedingly rarely, because I am very much engaged in that being of which I spoke, I am amazed at how powerful that young, free mind was. My refusal to accept anything less than what I conceived of as pure freedom eventually brought me everything I ever dreamed of as a boy. For good, and ill, but mostly good.
Indeed, the deeper into the tale I get, the more improbable and ridiculous it becomes. Once upon a time I slept on, or under benches, depending on the weather, and I lay alone at night looking up at the stars, dreaming of another life. Today that life is my own. I live in paradise with my beautiful wife and son, and I sleep like a baby rock, knowing they can depend on me, and be proud, knowing I never sold us out, or short, and I never will.
I use my freedom to make Meaningwave: the music I want to make, in the styles and on the subjects of my exact choosing. Choosing to do so brought scorn and resentment, and even threats of violence, yet all that was but piss in the ocean of love and gratitude and joy and satisfaction that making this music has brung my way, and continues to every day. I am an astonishing 19 years deep into a full-time career making music, I have seen thousands of artists come and go, yet I remain, getting better with every release, still just at the dawn of the adventure, having barely scratched the surface of the potential of this thing.
I wrote to Norm Macdonald, a few years after I first made Meaningwave. To me, he exemplified that freedom of being that I’d spent my life in pursuit of. I spoke about him on my broadcasts often. I lost my major label record deal in 2005 for refusing to change the lyrics of my songs. He was kicked off Saturday Night Live for refusing to change his jokes. He went on chat show after chat show, holding up a mirror to our world, cheerfully, unflinchingly, brutally, and truthfully. He told the truth, or at least did not lie, especiallywhen it was likely to cause him personal and professional harm, right till the end. He was as pure and uncompromised a living embodiment of that which he truly was as he could be in this lifetime, and was thereby peerless as a result.
I wrote to him, asking his permission to use his voice in some songs.
“Certainly,” he replied. “I’d be honored. You strike me as my favorite type of person; a free man.”
Enjoy this Meaningwave mixtape.
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TRACKLISTING:
0:00 - Freedom of Speech ft. Noam Chomsky
4:39 - Speak Publicly ft. Norm Macdonald
9:30 - THE MOB ft. Douglas Murray
14:04 - My Language ft. Jordan Peterson
18:50 - Illusion ft. Jordan Peterson
22:11 - What the Hell Is Water ft. David Foster Wallace
27:18 - Beware of Virtue ft. Alan Watts
31:01 - The World Has Gone in Circles ft. Paul Harvey
34:48 - You Can Say No ft. Jordan Peterson
39:42 - Catalysts ft. Terence McKenna
43:58 - One Is Free ft. Joseph Campbell
47:03 - What Has Meaning ft. David Foster Wallace
55:49 - Thank You God ft. Paul Harvey
1:02:24 - The Great Dictator ft. Charlie Chaplin
1:07:30 - Among the Stars ft. Elon Musk
