RETURNING

I'm back; I'm writing again. Fans of my work (all three of you) will be happy to hear that there is a lot of it on the way. I actually never stopped writing, and I remain endlessly inspired, like, no such thing as writer's block. But for the past several years, since shutting down the JOSHGUITARS blog (your one-stop shop for all things guitar-related, from gear reviews to how-to's to song walk-throughs), I've had this abiding feeling that I needed to keep my mouth shut.

Hard to do. One reason I've felt I needed to keep my mouth shut is because I said my peace. The blog post that went viral said it all. If you don't know which one I'm talking about, ok, full backstory but I'll be brief: I was in a touring band in college and played all over the U.S. on basically zero bucks and it was the thrill of a lifetime. The music, the people, the sights—I had never traveled before. It was a joy.

Then I got a real job, and transitioned to being a sort of weekend-warrior on the guitar, and I was happy enough. Even as we watched the emergence of YouTube and then streaming services which don't pay artists, and then that brought on the death of the whole recording industry and this beautiful blossoming of independent artists online, but then those indie artists were working alone on GarageBand and so it kinda marked the death of the actual band, and then COVID happened and killed the music scene but I didn't write about that... Long story short: I was just seeing all I had known of the sweetest time in my life just dying, just like that.

And I wrote about these things from the perspective of a working, professional 9-to-5 guy who formerly had a career doing what all guitarists dream of, and how, in those later years it had become much more about collecting exotic guitars and having every new toy imaginable and right then, on the day it came out. Basically in the death of my actual music career and the death of actual music, I let myself become a Blues Lawyer.

A 'Blues Lawyer' is a phrase guitarists have for a guitarist who can play just fine, but he's got a real job and real money and so he buys those fancy-looking rainbow-colored PRS 10-Tops and he buys vintage gear and he's made the whole endeavor of music just all about having a collection of nice stuff. For perspective, when I was a touring, working, actual, real, legitimate, traveling professional guitarist, I had a guitar that was given to me, an amp I paid $100 for, and two effects pedals (it was a Full-Drive 2 non-Mosfet and a DD-5 Digital Delay later modded by JHS to give me two presets). Maybe $300 all-in, all my gear. Not making a living to be sure but getting by splendidly. In contrast, as a 9-to-5 working weekend warrior on the guitar, I regularly showed up to gigs with $35,000 or more worth of equipment.

All on credit cards because I don't have Blues Lawyer money.

Now, my faith is incredibly important to me and it will inform the whole of this new blog space (reason I started over was to further divorce myself from that JOSHGUITARS brand). And as a faith-filled guitar player, it's only natural that I found myself volunteering at churches, leading worship services. So the gigs I'm showing up for with $35k+ of kit on me? Church gigs. Unpaid gigs, some of them. I almost never asked my actual going rate.

And here's the kicker: The other musicians I was showing up and playing with were doing the same thing. So to frame the problem perfectly, I saw how hundreds of my peers in ten or twenty area churches had abandoned the pursuit of music as an art, as an offering to our Creator, in favor of becoming social media influencers same as me through the flaunting of thousands of dollars worth of flashy toys. And I saw my metrics, as an influencer. I saw it all. If I spent $5,000 on an Andy Elliott-made, boutique Telecaster-style guitar, I would gain 500-800 followers. If I posted a selfie I would lose as many followers. I let all my self-esteem get wrapped up in all this.

I said long-story-short and then I wrote a long story. I apologize. I have so much to say, these years later, after so long with my lips sealed. Things got so dark, so fast, and I was so deep in debt, I was actually totally strapped and I felt like if I didn't find a way to make $5,000+ purchases several times per year I would not be able to sustain my following, and in turn I would lose what little connection I had left to the music.

I now know how silly that is. I'm debt-free, nothing on credit cards, and I have all the gear I need to make great music, and I've been having so much fun making great music with my friends every weekend, and my 9-to-5 is no longer the boat anchor that it once was, and in so many ways I am so fulfilled. And I'm so ready to talk to you about it.

Another reason I’ve kept my mouth shut is because I felt I was becoming too sharp a critic of the praise and worship music industry, and the common church which it serves (what some call the universal or capital-C Church).

Another reason I shut myself up is because I needed time to heal. I had to make a full and clean break from blogging and from social media for a couple of years before I was ready to even think about writing again. I’m here now because I’m ready, now. In a place where I don’t feel like a hypocrite talking about my struggles with these things anymore.

Wrapping up. This blog post will serve as a kind of re-introduction I guess. And I admit, it's sounding like one long run-on sentence to me. I just needed to get this one out there before I could start actually posting new content.

A few things. Ground rules, if you will. I have a real and abiding sin in my life and that sin is clout-chasing. So for the sake of my moral purity (I'm not kidding), I have turned off comments, likes, and follow-count on everything, and I don't check it. I don't have any of this stuff on my phone. I am coming to the blog only to hit Publish, even writing my drafts on a sandboxed old computer.

Everyone struggles with an abiding sin, or, as one writer put it, a sin 'which so easily entangles.' Sin is a religious word. All it means is, an area where you are missing the mark. You’re off-target. I was most consistently off-target in the areas of my word, my bond, my reputation, and how I wanted to be perceived by you. Frankly, I was never entangled by the temptation of illicit sex. For me, it was always the temptation to game, to strategize, to manipulate, to control, to gaslight, and to lie, all for my own reasons, most of which were kinda noble. I’m not evil. I just grew up gaming life in this manipulative way, trying to manufacture favorable outcomes for myself. When I come to you now expressing these vulnerabilities—areas where I am missing the mark in my life—I'm doing so in violation of everything in my sin-nature, in my ‘flesh.’ Everything in me wants to color over the truth for you and make it look so nice.

It won’t look nice. The truth is (and you'll read it here first) I have come a long way but I still have so far left to go. We'll talk about it. My first actual blog entry is going to be on human nature, on sin. And for a short season, this blog is going to read much like my confessions. As always, ignore the typos; it’s a blog for Christ’s sake.