🥳 TREE 786: Party in the middle

I’m entirely thrilled to bring you four fresh posts this week from producer, engineer, mixer, musician and FFOREST friend Steven Lee Tracy. —Jeff

The idea of the middle really used to bother me. It felt ordinary, boring, and noncommittal. It was a metaphor for a very uninteresting life wandering through the beige murk of unfulfilled potential. Being out there on the fringe, shooting for the stars was where the party was. No beige in sight.

This thinking started early with the traditional practice of adults asking me (a child whose brain was 20 years from being fully developed) “What do you want to be when you grow up?” There seemed to be an implied bonus if what I wanted to be was grandiose and statistically very improbable. Each time I answered with my delusional list of far-fetched employment scenarios, I was given the same response:

You can do anything that you put my mind to!

As it turns out, that wasn’t true. There were plenty of things that no matter how much I put my mind to it, would never come to fruition. I’m not implying that a better response would have been ‘Mmmm. That’s not very likely sweetheart. Aim lower.’, but at least I would have had a head start at learning how to fail.

All of that to say, I find myself here in the middle of my life and career, in the middle of a mid-level city and I’ve never been happier. Turns out that the middle really knows how to party. This week I’ll be writing about all things middle, and the joy that I believe can be found here.

In the spirt of being very on the nose. Today’s song is Jimmy Eat World’s mega-hit, The Middle (but the tender acoustic version).