No Proofreads. No Edits.

It’s wild how your favorite song today will be nothing more than an overplayed melody in a few months. You go from listening to it on repeat, windows down, feeling like you’re part of the band, but several weeks later by the third note you’re pressing next. That is unless someone is with you and then you sing every word like they are going to want to hook up with you in the tour bus you don’t have after you get done with Toyota 4Runner Karaoke. Never been laid after rapping every word (flawlessly) to Kanye’s “Power”, but that’s just because I felt bloated and I was tired and we got home too late.

The human experience can only take so much of one thing before it looks for a way out. Maturity, I presume, is realizing that some things don’t have a way around them. Gotta go through. There is no next song on the playlist of parenthood. Right now, however, it feels a little like we added a sax player to our death metal band. How the hell do we make good music again?

Honestly, the answer is that we don’t. Not today. I am just not sure if we kindly ask her to put down the brass and grab a guitar or if the rest of us find our loafers, move to New Orleans, and act like we’ve been fucking with Kenny G for years.

Surely you make the 5 year old conform to your band. That’s how parenting works. You lead, they follow, and you encourage therapy for all. I guess. Yet, maybe it’s not that simple when the music is so different. Maybe we need to take this band off script or all go back to the drawing board together.

It feels sometimes during most days that something isn’t quite working. There are too many tears, too much frustration, too much miscommunication. It’s like the more we love, the more we trust, the harder this shit gets. You just want to press next on the playlist- next to bed time, next to silence, next to tomorrow. Then you get to that part of the night and all you can do is wonder if you should hit rewind and do it better.

This band will get back to the Billboard Top 100 soon enough. The paparazzi is waiting for us to emerge from the garage and get back into the arena. It probably won’t be this year. By God’s grace we can challenge Taylor’s 45th album in 2027 or get in the middle of Drake and Kendrick’s beef. We just need to find our sound and once we do, it’ll be something our little world has never heard.