the order of fear

week four of eight. drums, a shower, and the thing i'm not yet doing.

may 24, 2026

the shower is running and the kettle is up to a boil and i am in the kitchen, in a t-shirt i’ve owned long enough to have a personal feeling about, watching the steam from one room meet the steam from the other in the hallway, and thinking, idly, about kick drum velocities.

the cat is doing the thing cats do where they sit with their back to you in a way that is statistically improbable and weirdly pointed. the laptop is open on the desk from last night. there is, on screen, a session file with one element selected and the playhead frozen at 2:41, which is the bar i’d been fussing with at 1am when i decided, charitably, that the version of me available at 1am was not the version of me who should be making decisions about a snare drum.

this is week four of eight, and what i can tell you is that i am still in drums.

not vocals, which is what the calendar in my head and the calendar on my computer both insist should be happening by now. vocals are next week. next week. a phrase i’ve now said to myself for the third sunday in a row, which is, i’ll grant you, suspicious behavior.

the drums are not, technically, taking this long. the drums are taking this long because i am letting them. there’s a difference. a thing i’ve been figuring out, the slow way, in this apartment with the radiator that speaks its own private language: most of what i do, when i think i’m working, is choosing what to be afraid of. and i am very good at choosing the part that doesn’t hurt.

the drums are semi-programable. you can mostly move a hi-hat eight ticks earlier and pretend you’ve made a choice about the song instead of a choice about a hi-hat. you can sit with a kick for forty minutes and call it tracking. you can stack snares the way you stack books on a desk you don’t want to clear, and at no point does anyone, including yourself, force you to look up. drums, in a home studio, on a sunday morning, with the shower steaming in the next room, are the safest possible thing a person can be doing while telling himself he is making a record.

vocals are not safe in this way.

i am not going to tell you why. i’m going to tell you what i’m doing instead.

i’m doing vocal exercises this week. lip trills in the studio, straw phonation at the kitchen counter while the coffee is boiling. a set of arpeggios that, if my neighbors knew the source of, would file something. and underneath all of it, in the back of my head, is the small and not particularly noble awareness that vocal exercises are also drums. they are technical. they are measurable. you can do them well or poorly, and either way you can do them without ever having to sing the actual line.

i think most of us, most of the time, are in our drums.

i think you, probably, this week, did a thing that felt like work, and was real work, and was also, gently, beside the point. you cleaned the kitchen. you reorganized the email folders. you went to the gym. you researched the thing instead of doing the thing. you wrote a long, careful, considered text and didn’t send it. you sent a different one. you did the spreadsheet at 11pm. you alphabetized something. you scrolled. some of this was good. some of this was necessary. and underneath some of it was a room with a microphone in the middle that you weren’t yet ready to walk into.

i’m not going to tell you what your microphone is. that’s between you and your kitchen.

i can tell you that mine, this week, is the booth. wednesday, probably. thursday at the latest. by the end of this week i'll know whether i meant it. that’s a sentence i’d like to take back, because it sounds like the kind of thing a man writes when he is trying to convince himself, which is, of course, exactly when i wrote it. you can have it anyway. it’s not for me, at this point. it’s the price of admission.

the shower has stopped. the cat has turned around. the laptop is still open. the snare at 2:41 is still wrong, and i still know, in the way you know these things, that i will keep being wrong about it for at least another forty minutes before i find what is actually wrong, which will be something else entirely, four bars away, that i have been ignoring on purpose.

here is the thing i’m trying to say. you don’t get rid of fear by waiting for it to leave. you get rid of it by going in the order. the drums first, because that’s what i can do today. the exercises this week, because that’s what builds the breath. and then the booth, when i can no longer pretend the booth is next week. fear, in my experience, runs out of inventory only when you make it stand in line behind the work.

i would like, this morning, to be the man who is already in the booth. i’m not. i’m the man who is in the kitchen, in a t-shirt with feelings, watching steam. the booth is on the schedule. so is the rest of it.

so is being thirty six. so is being honest about what you’d rather not do. so is the snare at 2:41.

next sunday i’ll tell you what week five looks like from inside it. i’ll be more tired. i’ll know more. some of it will not be flattering. that is, i think, the deal we have.

the shower is off. the coffee is ready. the booth is wednesday. the snare is wrong.

i’m going back to the desk.

low tide, fri jun 26. pre-save lives at this link if you want it. no pressure, i'm not done with it yet.