By Anthony Kuzminski
{Buy Will Hoge's music at this link}
What's with all these awards? They're always giving out awards.
-Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) from ‘Annie Hall’
Growing up, I loved watching all award shows. I would root for my favorite actors, directors and music stars to win. Sometimes in the 1990’s when Sheryl Crowe’s “All I Wanna Do” beat out Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” for Record of the Year, I stopped caring. I realized that awards are hollow, unmemorable and that it’s the music that lives on. In recent years, the Grammy Awards have at least given us some decent performances, but aside from last night’s Lady Gaga opening (which every other act failed to come close to touching) and Butch Walker helping Taylor Swift reinvent one of her biggest hits, the whole evening fell flat to me. Was this really the best music had to offer this past year? Is there a struggle by any of these acts? Can we trust them with our hearts and dreams?
This morning, “Even If It Breaks Your Heart” by Will Hoge popped up on the iPod shuffle. I won’t lie, Hoge’s last record, The Wreckage while very good, didn’t blow me away like his previous releases. To be fair, I awarded those discs five-stars each and the guy had three records in the top fifteen of the decade so my expectations were too high. But with each listen and random song that comes across the iPod, I become more entrenched in the record. This morning, some plaintive acoustic strumming started…
Way back on the radio dial
A fire got lit inside a bright eyed child
Every note just wrapped around his soul
From steel guitar to Memphis all the way to rock and roll
I love all types of music and will gladly admit to loving forgettable bubblegum pop, but it’s the artists who I feel invested in that speak most to me. Will Hoge is one of those artists. Over the last few years, I think we’ve all seen our own dreams dissipate into a world of chaos where I wonder if it will ever get better. Dreams become distant memories that are succumbed to the dustbin in the wreckage of our lives at times due to circumstances beyond our control. But as I watched the Grammy Awards, I couldn’t help but feel completely disconnected from the whole thing. Every performance seemed to want to top the previous one. Don’t get me wrong, there were spectacles that I thought were great, notably Pink and Lady Gaga, but the bedroom intimacy of music was missing. The guy who writes a song in his bedroom and plays it two-hundred nights a year was missing. Last fall, I caught Will Hoge in the Double Door club in Chicago and the way he ever so gently delivered the lyrics of “Even If It Breaks Your Heart” was nothing short of devastating. I could hear his fears, his desires and his dreams all in the course of less than four-minutes. I heard my fears, desires and dreams as well. While I have no issue with spectacle, you should never let it overshadow the soul of the song. Last night on the Grammy Awards, no one spoke to me.
Some dreams stay with you forever
Drag you around and lead you back to where you were
Some dreams keep on getting better
Gotta keep believing if you wanna know for sure
I felt something this morning when listening to “Even If It Breaks Your Heart” I didn’t feel at all the previous evening during the Grammy extravaganza; soul. In some ways, the battle is greater than who wins. Art should be a guide for us to get through life, not just a distraction. We aren’t given a compass for life so the best we can do is to find hope in everyday things that make us believe. There’s no formula to success, despite a lot of hard work, sometimes it boils down to luck. But it’s what keeps you moving forward that defines your life. For Will Hoge, it’s the music in his soul he wants to share with people. He doesn’t need a Grammy to confirm his existence, he just needs an audience. And for us, the audience, all we need is the unadulterated truth. You only lose when you truly give up. When you surrender to the complexities of life, then it’s over. The key is to find something to grasp onto, something to believe in and keep chugging along because that’s how we make it day to day. Like Hoge says in the song, “Keep on dreaming even if it breaks your heart”.
Listen to “Even If It Breaks Your Heart” here
Anthony Kuzminski is a Chicago based writer and Special Features Editor for the antiMusic Network and his daily writings can be read at The Screen Door and can be contacted at thescreendoor AT gmail DOT com.
