Blog - musikcisalive

My journey with the Wagon Wheel song

Paul Seiz on March 17, 2023

How the Wagon Wheel song went from punch-line to a special moment between myself and my grandmother

The Wagon Wheel song, is a modern campfire classic and one of my favorite songs to perform live. Just a handful of chords, and some verses about being a traveling musician and missing a lover. Yes! The chorus is attributed to Bob Dylan, and Old Crowe Medicine Show filled out the verses. About ten years ago it got another push when Darius Rucker revived it as part of his solo-country career.

I first encountered the Wagon Wheel song while Brooke and I spent our summers in Alaska. At one of our countless campfire jams with fellow musicians, an actor friend claimed to be a novice on guitar, sheepishly admitting he only knew one song. And there it was, the first time I heard Wagon Wheel, clunked out next to the Nenana River on an endless Alaskan day/night.

The next summer, I joined up with several bluegrass bands as a bass player, and quickly learned how many of them considered Wagon Wheel to be overplayed to the point of exhaustion. The summer bluegrass season was populated with seasonal workers like me, many of them raft guides or cooks. The Wagon Wheel song was controversial. They hated it. Audiences loved it. I turned this tension into one of my favorite monologues in my shows:

“I used to play road-houses in Alaska. If you play enough road-houses, you learn two things.

There are some songs, if you play them, you get your ass kicked.
There are some songs, if you don’t play them…you get your ass kicked”

Then I start the Wagon Wheel song, and the audience laughs, and I let them decide if it’s number 1 or number 2.

Since that first summer in Alaska, I’ve learned how to play the Wagon Wheel song on guitar, bass, and piano. I can do it any key. I can play a harmonica solo on it (but only in the key of G), and I’ve translated it to a reggae feel. It’s usually a highlight of my shows, sometimes the opener, sometimes the closer.

About a year ago, I visited my grandmother Mary in Cleveland. At the time, Mary was 101 years old, and had no instruments nearby. At 101, she’d lost nearly all of her short-term memory, and anyone around her had to frequently explain their identity. I was there with my parents, my cousin David, and my aunt Phyllis, and after several minutes of explaining who we were, I decided to break the tension with a song. With my guitar I’d brought all the way from Kansas City, just to have ready for this moment, I chose the Wagon Wheel song to play for my grandma. Once I began, I saw her face, with a look of utter serenity and calm. As I clunked out the chords on her patio, she needed no explanation of who I was or what was happening. She got to chill and listen to live music. She had peace. And I had peace. And I’m grateful for the Wagon Wheel song for bringing my grandmother and I together in the last years of her life.

Mary always adored music, and my children practice on the same piano she used to own in Cleveland. My Aunt Phyllis coordinated moving that piano from Mary’s former home on Parker Drive to our home in Kansas City. It’s an old piano, but it sees plenty of action. And here we find music, transcending generations, and linking the present to the past. Music, you are like a wagon wheel. You can rock me any way you feel.

Workplace Leadership: My Boss Résumé

Paul Seiz on February 1, 2023

How hard do I have to smolder to get this done?

Workplace leadership has been a fascination for me since my time at UMKC, studying nonprofit management and innovation. This lovely, fledgling company is expanding, and Alaina will be taking the role of social media manager and booking agent.

To dispel any mysteries and/or awkwardness around my persona as a manager, I’ve prepared the following document for her.

Paul as a boss

Expressing Appreciation

When I’m making an effort to see to, communicate with you, and find us projects to collaborate on, then I’m expressing my appreciation. Long periods of time might pass without me expressing my gratitude verbally, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. However, I will receive a verbal compliment deeply and remember it forever. I’m comfortable with high-fives, handshakes, literal pats-on-the-back, and brief casual hugs, but in professional relationships I avoid much physical contact beyond that.

GRUMPY

I’m liable to become frustrated if I feel like I’ve had to repeat myself several times, as I begin to feel my time is being wasted. Similarly, I’ll get confounded when someone “ghosts” me in the middle of a business relationship. I’ve had multiple colleagues tell me that my standards are too high and I take work too seriously. A good way to reassure me is to encourage me to “look from the balcony”, and everything’s going to work out. :-). Even reminding me not to get too hung up on pushing my workplace leadership agenda…that’s helpful.

Skewed Encouragement

I very much enjoy artists who take risks and find authentic, honest ways to express themselves. This is an ideal I also try to cultivate in myself. I have much respect for these people, and I frequently encourage the people who work for me to find ways to express their own identify through their art, or at least find something joyful in what could easily be mundane. When fellow musicians report to me “this is just a job”, or they prioritize drugs & alcohol, I can get crestfallen quickly. I sometimes struggle to find a healthy detachment from my music career. At my lowest, I always find solace in my family. At my highest, I’m collaborating in a healthy, vibrant community of artists, and I’m helping musicians support themselves financially.

Communication and Boundaries

At 42 years old, my communication-ettiequte is both elder-millennial and young gen-x. I will not text or email negativity, and I prefer to administer feedback and/or criticism in person, usually in private. If the criticism is especially pointed, I’ll ask for a third party to monitor the conversation. Sometimes there are fun ideas or dialogues that will flow faster in a zoom-call or phone call, and if a text conversation is becoming too cumbersome for me, I’ll request to port it over to a different method of communication. I’ll utilize text for brief exchanges of information, and I prefer a response by the end of the day. I’ll utilize emails for sharing broader information or focused computer work, and I prefer a response from emails within 24 hours. Show-time is a bad time to try to reach me, unless in an emergency. I’m not a fan of group-chats and will nonchalantly exit them if the information doesn’t pertain to me. I want to detach from social media, using my day to focus on health, exercise, and coordinating creative projects and production.

Songwheels

I’m the band-leader for Songwheels, my favorite party-band in Kansas City, and I’m used to being around people with big, quirky personalities. I love them! A band, like or not, can sometimes feel like a workplace, in need of workplace leadership. Being emotionally aware of our quirks and flaws allows us more grace, and the good times can keep rolling.

Adventures in Weston, MO

Paul Seiz on January 30, 2023

Last Friday, Traveled to O’Malley’s pub in Weston, MO to hear Miki P play guitar and sing. Incredibly unusual music venue, inside abandoned bunkers and fallout shelters, long winding tunnels. Great vibes and music.

Miki P, covering White Rabbit and Running Up That Hill

New Recipes

Paul Seiz on June 25, 2020

Gears are turning, and it’s likely I’ll have regular gigs again.

In the midst of the pandemic, I’m asking myself what entertainment even means. Ask the crowd to throw their worries away, and live care-free while they sway along to our groovy tunes? As a nation, we’re more fractured than ever before. Over the years, my band has made efforts to steer away from material or themes that are political. Now, it seems the mere act of standing close to me without a mask…is political? Or merely ignorant? How much does somebody have a right to be ignorant in the midst of a health-crisis? By accepting a gig in a public space, am I dishonoring the efforts of those who valiantly quarantine?

Here’s my loose plan, that still has a modicum of honor in it. We’re all craving human connection. While we’re discouraged from congregating, anybody who walks into a bar isn’t looking for alcohol. They want people. They want to feel alive.

So make people feel alive. I’m going to reprint a section of Consider This, Chuck Palahniuk’s semi-autographical manual for writing.

Think of a story as a stream of information. At best it’s an ever-changing series of rhythms. Now think of yourself, the writer, as a DJ mixing tracks.

The more music you have to sample from (the more records you have to spin) the more likely you’ll keep your audience dancing. You’ll have more tricks to control the mood. To calm it down to a lull. Then to raise it to a crescendo. But to always keep changing, varying, evolving the stream of information so it seems fresh and immediate and keeps the reader hooked.

If you were my student I’d want you to be aware of the many different “textures” of information at your disposal. These are best defined by the examples that follow.

When telling a story, consider mixing any or all of the following:

…description, instruction, exclamation (onomatopoeia)…

…Three parts description. Two parts instruction. One part onomatopoeia. Mix to taste.

Okay, then. New recipes for entertainment. The above recipe is reversed for musicians. The onomatopoeia is our singing, our music. That’s dominant, that’s three parts. Two parts instruction? I get this, it’s telling the crowd what to do . Giving them enough structure so they understand when to clap, when to sing along, when it’s okay to laugh, and -crucially- when to applaud when you’re done.

The “description” I’m very guilty of overdoing. This is elaborating to your audience about context, exposition, or any other education. Done wrong, it’s condescending. Done right, it’s a good quick story, with it’s own pace and recipe. So instead of three parts description, this should be minimized. It’s still important, because it develops that human connection I was waxing about. It humanizes the performer.

That’s extra important if you’re performing for droves of strangers. They are lost, confused, scared. They want humans.

Here we come.

Purely

Paul Seiz on June 24, 2020

I’m not one for camping

but everyone should see the face of a loved one

lit purely by the break of dawn.

My body, offstage.

Paul Seiz on June 19, 2020

At the gym, I’m mostly sitting and staring into space.

It’s been about two years since I invested in a personal trainer. Lindsey gave me exactly what I asked for: a refreshed 4-day a week workout that drew upon a wide variety of equipment. Since the summer of 2018, I’ve been mostly faithful to the workout. I rarely took more than a week reprieve from it, and occasionally added additional cardio exercise to my day (swimming laps, or jogging with the kids to/from school).

It’s been three months since I’ve been onstage. Three months since I felt like a professional entertainer.

I’m not totally sure why I’m at the gym now. Conventional wisdom suggests that attractive, fit people have more successful performing careers. Confidence in my performing abilities has usually matched my confidence in my body, and that congruence has worked for in my favor for as long as I can remember. As I age, I wonder back to how much my youth, charm, and white privilege compensated from any shortcomings I displayed. There’s always a day that I could have worked harder, practiced more. More focus. More discipline. I’ll never get that time back, but would I trade my adventures and friendships for better piano technique?

Having children radically scrambled the equation. Comparing my weight or BMI to professional models and actors is an unhealthy practice. Maintaining that physique is a full-time job, and I could never rationalize that amount of exercise at the expense of my parenting duties.

So since being a parent, my simple fitness goals have been “don’t look out of shape.” My wife, a brilliant health counselor, routinely asked me “But how do you feel?” I know that choices that I make that will disrupt my energy and disrupt the flow of my week. I frequently stay up too late, browsing the internet. While my tolerance to alcohol has increased in the last decade, my resiliency has decreased. A big night of drinking will wreck me for the following morning, and my family has no patience for my hangover. Nor should they.

In the midst of the pandemic, choices like these are verifiably unhealthy, but I still occasionally do them because they make me feel like a grown up. I spend sun-up to sun-down with my children. Sun-down usually meant I was released into the music scene of Kansas City. That’s gone.

So I’m back at the gym, sitting on the floor, staring. Do I need to hit it hard? Is that what my body needs? Do I need to maintain an aesthetic that goes beyond pleasing my love? My children really don’t care what I look like; they just want me to keep up. I keep up with them on bikes and hikes, jogs and log rolls. I’m tan from being outside with them so often, and why concern myself with an even tan? Who cares?

People aren’t really thinking about me that much. That’s among the great ironies of life; some of the people whose opinion we value the most aren’t actually pondering us at all. Nobody really cares what I look like. What currency does it have? Who am I trying to impress?

I’d rather be reading a book. I don’t need intensity, although I do enjoy the feeling of resting sore muscles. I sleep better when I exercise more, but I already feel physically and psychologically drained from the pandemic. Every. Day.

I know that at some point, I’ll be onstage again, performing songs for strangers. Being fit and attractive (with a mask on?) will give me a shred of subconscious credit that I don’t deserve. I know this because it’s a mistake I make over and over. I mistake someone’s attractiveness for value.

Breaking Up The Band

Paul Seiz on June 10, 2020

Breaking Up The Band

I’m breaking up the band.

For thirty days, five library books sat piled on my bedroom dresser. They were chosen by me, checked out weeks before the pandemic gripped the world and my life. I’ve never been angered by books before, angered at their existence, angered at their residency in my house. They sat there mocking me, silly reminders of my pre-pandemic life. The man who checked out these books was from a different time, a different world. For the first 30 days of the pandemic, I was obsessed with science fiction. Anything I read or watched had to be about outlandish, bizarre places. I was particularly drawn to any stories of a person experiencing parallel realities, or altered timelines. For much of April, I felt like I didn’t belong in this world. I had been both misplaced and displaced. All of my basic understandings of the world had been dashed, and these damn books just sat there, taking up space. Piled together, they were about the size of a large box of kleenex. Like me, they had been thrown out of an established continuum, and were now locked in this new reality with me.

Libraries were closed, I was ordered not to return them. Burn them? Tempting.

I didn’t. Eventually I read them. I’m putting on record that the order I’m experiencing these books is worth noting. I’m marking this feeling now, because I’m breaking up the band. I’m returning some of the books to the library, and checking out new ones.

Completed before the Pandemic:

Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work That Lasts, by Ryan Holiday

This was the only book by Ryan Holiday readily available from a nearby library. Earlier in the year I’d stumbled across one of his blog posts about stoicism, and I was eager to read one of his books. I’d been struggling at my job with how quickly we seemed to turn over material in our band. Why did some pieces seem to outlast others? Was there a piece of that formula that could be explained to me? I was also trying to find motivation to write my own book, create my own music, and start my own band in Kansas City. In retrospect, the early parts of the book about creativity have aged well in the pandemic. The last part about marketing has not. Holiday’s first book was a tell-all about insider-secrets of the American advertising industry, and the pandemic has turned industries upside down, or eliminated them entirely. Some of the advice in this book was relevant in February 2020, and was rendered stunningly stupid.

Begun before the pandemic, paused, and now completed:

The Infinite Game, by Simon Sinek

This book probably angered me the most, because I was so excited to read it and channel the ideas to my band, but instead then I had to swallow the ideas myself. I can encapsulate thusly: There are finite games and infinite games. In finite games, there is a clear winner and loser. By contrast, infinite games have no winners or losers. Players can come into the game and leave the game at anytime. In infinite games, you can’t control the rules. You can only control how you play.

For years at my job, I’ve imparted a variation of this philosophy to the people who work for me. Don’t get too attached to how we operate here. Don’t get too stuck in believing that this defines a career in music. Be prepared to port skills here to other bands, venues, and formats.

Guess what? The pandemic hit, and we were all laid-off, and live music in this country has been redefined forever. The modern music industry was already a strange mutation leftover from post WWII prosperity and technological growth. Now it’s unrecognizable, and anybody who had a “get-rich-quick” mindset to the performing arts is jockeying for viral fame on Tik-Tok. I have no choice but to redefine my place in the worl as professional creative, and how important that is in the new landscape. I hated this book for how prescient it was. I hated taking such a strong dose of my own medicine.

Completed during the Pandemic:

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, by Stephen Pressfield

I credit this book with pulling me out of a funk. I’d read one of Pressfield’s other books, Turning Pro, two years ago. Pressfield’s chapters are brief, deft, and styled in a way to not intimidate the reader, even as the subject matter forces me to confront my resistance to creating art.

This was the first book I chose to read during the pandemic. It didn’t demand much concentration. It demanded reflection.

For a few weeks in April, I’d jog after my kids as they rode their scooters to a nearby creek. With playgrounds closed, they found joy in playing by creeks. They throw rocks, observe plants, create small forts from sticks, marvel at animal tracks. I’d sit on a rock and read this book that I’d carried as I ran. It was about resistance. Resistance is ever present for artists. The book asked me if I’d succumb to it, or figure out how to keep it at bay. This book helped me form an inner permission structure to take in new art and ideas. I was less angry when I read it. I began to release my resentment of the world, and contemplate how I could get back to creating something.

Completed during the Pandemic (but previously read three years go):

The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, this latest translation by Michael Nylan (notably first published translation by a woman)

I noticed myself with strange habits when I read this book. I felt drawn to thinking of my band. They were my troops. I loved being their leader, even when it was difficult. I took so much pride in my job; I took it so seriously. This is not my wisdom, but if I man walks into the woods and others follow him, we say he’s a great leader, but if a man walks into the woods and nobody follows him, we say he’s going for a walk.

So instead I just tried to go for a walk while I read this book, systemically putting down my desires to lead a band into battle with an unruly, skeptical audience. I realized that my children were my new troops. My family was my band now. The lessons about command resonated with my challenges of being a parent. I thought about it, and wrote about it.

Unfinished:

A mystery book. 🙂

What this all does is ask me to re-evaluate my priorities. I’d begun to tell myself that my musical legacy would be left by the people I mentored. In the wake of the upheaval in the country over unbearable racism, I think about my children. I think about how critical it is that Brooke and I raise them with the right set of values. We think about our children’s sense of humanity and how to shape it. That seems so much more urgent then lessons about being a professional musician. As I re-attune my priorities, my definition of success changes, including my desire for success. The events of the world bring my focus to my immediate community, and how I can affect change. I spend more days thinking about I can actually control, and that’s fairly limited to the walls of my home. I can control my interactions with my family. I want to reposition my confidence, away from my worth as a professional musician, and closer to my family. Will this mean less discretionary income and less professional opportunities? Maybe. Will I be out doing less things? Will I see less people? Will I gain deeper bonds with my family by sacrificing a dated set of values?

I’m breaking up the band.

I already returned The Art of War and The Infinite Game to Missouri. I’ll return The War of Art, Perennial Seller this week, back to Kansas. I’ll finish Why Good Sex Matters soon.

Thank you, books. You were here for a reason. It’s time for you to move on, and take your ideas to somebody else. I’ve taken my notes. You don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to look at you. The space on my dresser will be occupied by a different pile. The moment has passed.

This Weird, Freaky Bird

Paul Seiz on June 5, 2020

Here’s one of my favorite paradoxes, courtesy of Bruce Springsteen, from his 2012 SXSX Keynote Address:

Don’t take yourself too seriously, and take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don’t worry. Worry your ass off. Have ironclad confidence, but doubt – it keeps you awake and alert. Believe you are the baddest ass in town, and, you suck!

It keeps you honest. It keeps you honest. Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times. If it doesn’t drive you crazy, it will make you strong. And stay hard, stay hungry, and stay alive. And when you walk onstage on tonight to bring the noise, treat it like it’s all we have. And then remember, it’s only rock and roll.

Here’s a similar one from author Elizabeth Gilbert, taken from her book Big Magic.

…Art is absolutely meaningless. It is, however, also deeply meaningful.

That’s a paradox of course, but we’re all adults here, and I think we can handle it. I think we can all hold two mutually contradictory ideas at the same time without our heads exploding. So let’s give this one a try. The paradox that you need to comfortably inhabit, if you wish to live a contented life, goes something like this. “My creative expression must be the most important thing in the world to me (If I am to live artistically), and it also must not matter at all (if I am to live sanely)

Gilbert goes to on claim that we need the mental agility to leap between these two polar opposite in a matter of minutes.

So if I attack these paradoxes from a different angle, do we actually find balance? That seems more like an ideal, not quite a practical way of living. The equality of the paradoxical ideas is an illusion. We must accept the paradox, but then also accept that we will forever be sliding back and forth between these ideas.

I can’t freeze my mind the moment that It trips the threshold between the ideas. My mind is too fluid. Perhaps that’s a lie I’m telling myself. To slow my mind down, find the balance between contradictory ideas…that would probably earn me some genial applause from the zen masters.

In reality, when I find myself too far on one end of the spectrum, the other end beckons. It calls to me, either “Get serious” or “Relax!”, depending on where I find myself.

I frequently fumbled this balance as a leader. I always espoused to my band that our music was important, that we were part of Kansas City’s heritage, that we were bringing people together with the power of live music. I worshipped that god every night. I transformed our stage into an altar, and I sacrificed myself on it, again and again. I cared about every random customer that stumbled into our bar, rushing over to them in exultation.

This was really intense to be around, and it wasn’t easy to talk me down from this position. The only compromise I was willing to make was that we had to entertain these people. To be an effective professional entertainer is to step outside of yourself and take a seat in your own audience. You must observe how you appear to others.

So here we find that rack that I was mounted on for six years. I was a slave to the holy mistress of music, while also a professional entertainer. Was this a perfect balance?

Depends on your viewpoint of me at the time. If you were a patron, stumbling into our bar, looking for a good time, a good beer, or good company, then you probably saw a professional entertainer onstage. I loathed being self indulgent, and the interactive element of our platform allowed me to directly poll the audience for the kind of music they wanted.

However, if you were a fellow musician, in a band with me, then I was a fireball of passion, angst, and sacrifice. This was tough to take for long periods of time, anything more than a few minutes. These dogged professionals, their skin burned from my heat, have been thankful to be away from me during the pandemic. I might never recover them.

It runs counter to my narrative that the power of live music pulls us together. But we’re not talking about music now. We’re talking about egos (crowds love me!), sacrifice (extra rehearsal to get this bass-line right), determination (this isn’t good because we didn’t practice enough), and disappointment (we worked on that and the crowd didn’t care). The artist in me says that all of these things are necessary steps on a journey. The human side of me, my heart that values connection, is unsure what I gained from all that tension.

We’re so bad at saying goodbyes these days. Social Media allows us to stay connected forever; we’re perpetually presented with photos and videos of anybody, ranging an entire life span. There’s a distinct possibility that I’ll never see some of these musicians again, but the more I evaluate that, the more remote it seems. What’s lost forever is our context, not necessarily our bond. Live music is being reborn like a phoenix, and we don’t know what the plumage will be for this weird, freaky bird. We sure as hell watched it burn, though.

Now we see it again, so small and fragile, yipping around in the ashes of what it was.

This eternal, mythical phoenix is also a contradiction. It’s always dying, and it’s always being born, in a cycle. There’s a big burst of fire when the cycle starts over, but it’s death and birth at the same time.

Death and birth at the same time.

Unique, But Not Special

Paul Seiz on June 4, 2020

I’m up really damn early today.

There are humans out there, getting up even earlier. Pounding it harder.

The pandemic draws me to stillness. The morning hours, so peaceful, before my kids wake up, transforming the home into a crowded bounce house. This place, this mind, asks not for more noise. I’m seeking ease and calm. Time to be alone with my thoughts. This journal.

There are musicians getting up before me, and practicing. Athletes who are rising and stretching, exercising. Some of them even do it with kids, even in a pandemic. Some of them are sick, some are near death.

I’m unique, but not special.

I know all these people are out there, some in my neighborhood, many scattered across the globe. Artistic, creative, passionate people. They are unencumbered by all the things I complain about. Sure, they’ve got their own demons, their own battles, their own injustices to rail against. But they complain less than me. Some don’t whine at all.

For months, I’ve been a heartbeat away from renouncing the cloth and burning all the musical instruments in my house. I’ve crafted goodbye speeches and drawn up wills, all in my head, all in my angst.

For now, I don’t practice songs. I practice something simpler.

At the piano, I practice scales. Technique, the mere art of having my fingers touching the keys. Up and down, at a brisk pace around the circle of 5ths, back to home, back to middle C. No songs, but it’s still undeniably musical. Undeniably purposeful. Gains. No wanderings. The musical equivalent of push-ups, crunches, and jogging. Training for the moment. Conditioning for the moment. Look at all these people, pushing themselves forward. Look at the humans! I can say it with joy: I’m unique, but not special. I’m not alone!

How many of them train without knowing what it’s for?

Martial artists train for a fight that might never come. They can prepare their bodies and minds, but they know that the fight will have a host of variables beyond their control. That’s okay. The ones I admire bring a quiet sense of confidence, because they have a plan and have been trained to respond correctly.

I train now for a different world, a world not seen for generations.

We’ve been here before. We humans made it through. Look at the humans.

I’m unique, but not special.

I’m still here.

I’m here.

Who Knew All Along

Paul Seiz on June 3, 2020

I would like to know who I fooled

at the end of my life.

I kept deep, dark secrets up until my last breath.

Who bought it? Who remained fooled?

More importantly…

…

who had me figured out?

Who knew my secrets, but never told me.

Who accepted these dark things about me, and walked along.

Why was I never able to talk to them about my secrets.

Because

the deepest, darkest secrets are the ones bursting from us

The ones we most desperately want to share

to scream from the roof tops.

But I’d rather know

who knew all along.