Goodbye To All That, by Sarah Flynn
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a creeping and warm blush of embarrassment, when my life in music began, but I can’t quite tell you exactly when it ended, when I lost the sense of success-is-just-over-that-hill wonder that is necessary to set foot each morning in an office lined with gold and platinum records. When I first caught sight of that world I was twenty, in the crisp early days of fall when New York seemed cozy and wide-eyed mere days before 9-11 happened. I got off the ferry at the Staten Island terminal and even the boat itself seemed romantic, cutting through the water in clean lines towards my uncertain but promising future. Everything about this arrival indicated that something, after all these years of almost-being, was about to happen to me. Years later, I would come to find myself close friends with the men who at that time were my brand-new bosses, and I would say, when asked how we met, “Oh! I used to be his intern!” in a voice that indicated that this was an event that felt recent, though I could not at all remember what it felt like to be that new.
Of course it is like this with any career. I could have been a doctor or a stewardess or the philosopher that I’d intended on being, and I would still wonder what happened to that girl, the one who first stepped into the operating room, onto the plane, up to the podium. I didn’t yet know that we all feel like this eventually, that somewhere after twenty-three or twenty-five or I’m not really sure when, we forget to keep looking behind us for the person we used to be. Because I chose the ferry terminal and Staten Island and a teeny tiny record label office with terrible carpeting, it is that beginning that I find myself unable to feel all over again. That first day, I rode home on the ferry to Manhattan, watching the sun set over the sparkling water, and I felt as though I had been granted a secret window into both the music that I loved and the city I was still coming to know. The Manhattan skyline looked so iconic as to seem unreal as it grew closer and, eventually, swallowed the boat as we docked. I had a simple internship, but it felt good, and I thought that I would flirt with the music industry for six months, or a year, while I was busy finishing other things. As it turned out the skyline would be destroyed in under two weeks and I worked at record labels for the next ten years.
In retrospect, as I sat down to write down my favorite memories of those ten years, most seem to come from that early period. Part of this is tied to the way it feels to be young and as though you have some say in what happens in the world around you. At twenty-one, still an intern, a publicist asked me to write a eulogy in the form of a press release for one of my favorite bands, who had just called it quits after twenty-odd years. Today, I recall this moment as perhaps the best and brightest in my career to date; it is hard to imagine getting that excited about a simple task now. This is in part a function of age, but also something greater. What I want to explain to you—and what I need to work out for myself—is why I gave up on the music industry. It is often said that music is a place for only the very talented and the very optimistic. It is said much less often that it is a place with a definitive time limit.
Recently, I brought up the writing of that band eulogy to the friend who’d assigned me the task, suggesting that I could have quit then and there and been satisfied. He, who had been doing PR for nearly ten years himself at this point, had just casually allowed me to draft what I saw to be the definitive last word on a very important band. He’d sent that draft to the bandleader for comments and received enthusiastic approval. I took the approval of the writing, of course, as an approval of myself, that people in bands I respected were glad to have me on their side. My friend laughed. “I don’t remember that at all,” he said. “Why was there even a press release? Who the hell read it? Who would have covered that story?”
Back then, at least in my mind, I had just done a great thing, and it would be a long time before that feeling would fade. It would take me years to learn that “on the band’s side” is not enough, and it took that long because quite simply, I was in love with music. I was in love with music in a way I never had been with anything else, least of all a man, and when I walked through the streets of my city it was the songs that paved my way. My days were punctuated with late nights at clubs, discovering new bands and new ways of thinking on the strength of the five or eight dollars that were left of the modest paychecks I received from my “other” job as the computer lab supervisor at my university. I was broke in those days, but it all seemed part of the charm at the time; I earned first, as an intern, nothing but an increase in muscle tone from lifting 30-count boxes of CDs all day, and later, as a part-time employee, $100 a week for a job I spent more than twenty hours working at not including my two-hour-a-day commute. There would be moments, like when I visited my friends in their East Village apartments filled with bookshelves and nice things, when I really felt poor, but mostly it seemed to me that I was paying my dues and starting from scratch. It didn’t occur to me, either, that there would be a point at which I would have to choose between this new venture and the chosen career I was still investing most of my time and money studying towards. I had the feeling, then, that I could wake up in the morning and do any of it. I could continue down the music industry road, or I could graduate and begin to teach graduate philosophy, or I could indulge my brief forays into music journalism and become a freelancer. I could do any of it, I thought, because at that moment I was doing all of it and I had no way of knowing there would be an end to that.
It never occurred to me that any of the things I was doing were really real. Music then felt like a dream, like a game I was playing because I could. I’d arrived on the whim of the friend who brought me into the office of an independent label and announced, to me as much as to them, that I belonged there. I fell concurrently into the music journalism game because a boy who ran a magazine had a crush on me. Philosophy was the only thing I had actively pursued, which is probably why in the end it was the easiest to give up.
That was the point of it, right? That in the end I chose the thing that seemed like it had most chosen me? I remember walking in the park with a co-worker at lunch a few years into the whole game. I was at the point where graduate school was becoming economically insane and my workload seemed slightly less than healthy: the point where it became time to choose. I have a vague recollection of us working through a pro/con list on a napkin in a bar on the Brooklyn Waterfront; I no longer remember what that napkin could possibly have said. Now, I can’t walk through that park or past that bar without thinking of that day, but no matter how many times I do, there remains a mental blank in the space where that list might have been.
I suppose this is normal, and that it is too late now to wonder whether this decision had been the right one. There have been plenty of friends who have echoed that same sense of “how did I get here?” throughout the years, but rarely have we given it real pause. In a way, our careers have shaped themselves in the form of the nights that once shaped us. We went to shows at small clubs on the Lower East Side, where we drank the cheapest beers and worked to endear ourselves both to the bands we most wanted to work with and the ones we already did. We ended up wherever: at other bars down the street, at cooler bars in Brooklyn, at diners at 5 AM. On one night in particular I woke up after the subway went above ground and watched the sun rise on a station far, far from my own as my phone chimed to tell me that a friend had just done the exact same thing.
It was easy in those days to sleep for two or three hours and roll into work; it felt like a continuation of the game if we were still drunk when we did so. To us, those nights were the best of what the music industry meant to us, and the days spent in front of computers in an office were mere formalities. During those days, I made phone calls, worked on album art, monitored production deadlines. I grew, on occasion, farther away from the actual music than I ever thought I could, taking sales data and morphing it into cold, hard royalty statements that showed the running tally of just how far in the red we were on each and every project. It did not take long for downloads to bear the brunt of that blame.
Some years passed, and even as I felt certain songs and certain bands lose their magic, I held enough momentum to stay in love. I moved to a bigger label, and another, as the smaller ones shut their doors and I lost jobs but reinvented myself strangely as the one person who could spit out a digital marketing plan at any given moment. Just those two words, digital marketing, were enough to soothe the minds of executives, and so I continued to rise in ranks long after the thrill of hearing new demos had left me.
Even this late in the game, I hadn’t lost my love entirely; I still liked going to shows and listening to records and walking down the streets of New York with a confident soundtrack in my headphones. It was a long time before I recognized the disconnect. I had become fully engaged in my job, viewing myself as someone who solved clever puzzles, pulling out marketing bullet points and goals and plugging them in with their appropriate retail or media counterparts. I knew how to navigate people: to convince the bands to get on board when new social platforms were introduced, to continue calming executives by illustrating how much more effective our campaigns were than those of our competitors. It remained a game, but now it was one of strategy and intellect and not one of sound.
I could not tell you when I began to understand that. All I know is that one day I could not bear to listen to an album that was still three or four months away from being released; I was tired of the arguments with my co-workers and the attitudes of the artist and at base, I did not think the songs were very good. It was becoming harder to act enthused about selling a work that didn’t feel like the best a band could do, all the while knowing they were living on as much or more money than I was making and taking better vacations. That day, I couldn’t listen to the album. The next, I couldn’t bring myself to go to a show. I felt myself degenerate from there until I began to make excuses for not being able to make conference calls so that I would not have to speak with feigned enthusiasm about anything. I called this a crisis of faith and cried to my friends, all of whom told me that it would work itself out, that a move to a new label would help, or that perhaps I just needed a vacation.
Instead I quit. I accepted a job in book publishing, knowing that I would still deal with creative content and solve all of the usual puzzles, but at least keeping what I by now took to be my sense of dignity. In the event that this wasn’t enough, I also took a weeklong vacation, using it to hike around upstate waterfalls, to lay on the beach, and to walk the bridges of my own city in efforts to reassure myself that yes, music was the thing that was wrong here. Many of the people that I know are baffled by this decision. To work in music is still cool, and to continue to hold a job in music—in fact, to keep being offered new jobs in music—is a rare thing. By contrast, my first conversation with the head of the office at my publishing job revolved around my willingness to wear blazers to cover my arm tattoos. When people ask, I speak of how much I love albums and songs, and how I wanted to leave before I lost the feeling of wonder I get at rock shows. I don’t say that I already have, and I try not to mention the times that my favorite bands have screamed at me or how many late night “urgent” emails I have fielded or how people who are meant to be at the forefront of an industry can not understand how to properly use the digital tools we intended to bank our livelihood on. I say, instead, simply that no one ever said thank you.
On the evening before my last day in the music industry, I went to see a band I love but have never worked with play a show in downtown Manhattan. The club was packed and sweaty and full of people my age (or at least not too much younger) jumping up and down, fist-pumping, and crowd-surfing. The band themselves could not have worked harder on stage, throwing themselves into song after song without even pausing for stage banter. It was simple, and it was inspiring, and I loved it. There were years when I would have left that show thinking “this is why I do this,” but now I know that really, this is why I can’t.
