Yahoo Lifestyle Charlie Peacock on His Memoir, ‘Roots and Rhythm,’ Going From Pop Aspirant to Producer, and Maintaining a Spiritual Path in a Cutthroat Business
Charlie Peacock’s stage name sounds like it was designed to be the nom de plume for a pop superstar, not someone who would become more renowned for his behind-the-scenes work as a producer, songwriter and label owner. He did enjoy cult success as a singer-songwriter in the 1980s, especially among the wing of more progressive Christian music fans who were eager to see artists with a spiritual bent bringing their ideas into the alternative rock scene. But outside of a bubble that did and probably still does consider him a star, he never became truly famous — “just well-known,” as his daughter once explained to a friend, in a straight-faced quip that Peacock (born Charlie Ashworth) enjoyed enough to repeat more than once in his new book.
Said memoir, “Roots and Rhythm: A Life in Music,” includes plenty of recollections from his time in the ’80s with Island, A&M and the alt-rock Christian label Exit Records, but also a career that has zigged and zagged in many different directions — from his earliest days as a leading light of the Sacramento rock scene, into his breakthrough as a Nashville-based pop hitmaker with Amy Grant’s “Every Heartbeat,” on through his founding of the Re:think label and shepherding of acts like Switchfoot, to his biggest commercial breakout, as the producer of the Civil Wars’ two albums. If those weren’t wrinkles enough for one career, there was his late-breaking side hustle as a serious jazz cat, making the jazz top 10 as he played alongside heavyweights like John Patitucci, followed by a stint doing music for Facebook, reaching many millions more ears than he ever could’ve as a solo artist — while dealing with the onset of a debilitating neurological disorder.
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As fans of his prose might expect, it’s hardly just a career overview but also a spiritual memoir, as well as a book that explores the effects of geography and ancestry and of loving Kerouac, Coltrane and Jesus in… well, not quite equal measure, but close enough for rock ‘n’ roll and for a tome that means to tie together a lot of loose, literarily minded threads. “Roots and Rhythm” is an autobiography that will satisfy those looking for a how-the-sausage-gets-made exploration of the record business, and those looking for broader-based insights on life’s big picture — not necessarily always in the same chapter, but all in good time. Variety spoke with Peacock on the morning the Eerdmans book was arriving on shelves.
You’ve had two books come out in the space of a year — one you wrote with your wife (2024’s “Why Everything That Doesn’t Matter, Matters So Much: The Way of Love in a World of Hurt,” with Andi Ashworth), and then this memoir. They can’t have been written too concurrently, can they? This has such careful writing and thinking that it has to have been the product of a lot of years of work.
Oh, yeah. I was just asking Andi a little bit ago if her memory was that I started it 15 years ago, and we both agreed. I started it when we went back to Northern California and had a house there for a time to spend time with my mom and family. It was then that I decided that I would start writing something to see if it ended up becoming something. Because I was really consumed with the power of place and going back to look at Northern California, and especially the whole farm community of Yuba City that that I grew up in in the ‘50s and ‘60s, to see how that shaped me. Then it moved on to the proximity to San Francisco and why I became a musical eclectic and how somebody like Bill Graham, with the way that he programmed concert music, defined the kinds of musicians that we would become, when you’ve got Jefferson Airplane and Albert King on the same bill with Miles Davis.
It’s like there are multiple books within this book. You could have probably written a whole book about your roots and family ethnic background and roots, or one about the nitty-gritty of the music business overall, or the CCM industry individually, or a collection of your philosophica and spiritual musings. Those are all in here. People will come to the book for different reasons: On one end, there might be people just want to know what Charlie’s thoughts are spiritually. And then at the other extreme, there could be people who just come for the pure music business insights…
“I want to know who was in the room” — yeah. Well, I know I’m safe to tell you this, because you’re a journalist and of course you would never report it, but I really started the book as a book about epistemology.
That is a saucy secret to give up about it.
To me it was a book about how I know what I know, and to investigate that, I realized that the writing technique that was working for me was to just sort of pull these threads and see where I ended up. And I would again and again find this interconnectedness between these stories, which for the first-time reader might seem disparate or disconnected, but for me, they became profoundly connected. And that’s when I realized that was the way the book was gonna be shaped.
A memoir that bounces around in time and them can benefit not just from making those unexpected connections, but also giving the reader some dynamics, so it’s not 30 pages straight on one subject or time frame.
Exactly. Like you, I’ve read at least 100-plus music biographies or autobiographies, and the ones that I have loved the most, like Elvis Costello’s and of course Dylan’s “Chronicles,” are like that. And I think one of the things that was really hard to overcome — and actually, it’s been hard to overcome the whole time I’ve been in music — is to be treated as a writer, and not a musician who’s writing a book. … I wanted to have that feeling about this book as a piece of art and not just like, “Oh, I’ve had a music career and so I should write a book.” That wasn’t what was driving this project.
In the course of working on it for 15 years, was there an element you discovered later in the process that wasn’t necessarily part of your early drafts?
The interconnectedness theme was there from the beginning, and the power of place. But I think for me, the big sort of point of tension is that you can’t be in the music business if you’re not in the name-making business. Yet to be in the name-making business can be such a soul killer. And so I wanted to wrestle with that as somebody who’s not famous, and who is — as I quote my daughter saying in the book — “just well known.” And to be a largely behind-the-scenes person whose solo artist career really didn’t go much past college radio and Christian music, and to survive the music business and survive that thing of making a name for yourself… seeing how much fame drives the opening of doors well before talent does, or well before the quality of your artwork. And so that became a theme through the whole book, of just living in that tension, watching others combust, having moments of falling apart… In the music business, you’re just never, ever done proving yourself.
You write in the book: “Name-making is in the top five of the world’s most exhausting and inhuman undertakings.” But you might have a hard time convincing a 21-year-old reader in 2025 that they should not be focused on that when everyone else in their world is talking about impressions.
Yeah, Andi and I just had this conversation the other night, over Mexican food, about the advent of impressions, like when we first started hearing that word. … And yet how many great artists were literally signed sort of on Gladwell’s blink thesis, right? You have these heroes who came down from the mountaintop who just had the gut, and they just knew in a split second: “I’m offering you a deal.” No metrics, just, “I see something in you and I can extrapolate outward from it for 30 years down the line. You come with me and we’re gonna make something together.” And how almost absurdly ridiculous that sounds in the context of a world of metrics.
At one point in the book you quickly lay out a rough outline of major transitional points in your career, where something has been fruitful for you for a period, and then you realize how stifling it is and you’ve had enough. That happened when you left the church-related scene you were part of in Sacramento, being part of the Exit Records scene there, and then moving to Nashville and working mostly behind the scenes as part of the CCM world for 10 years, and then you had your own label, and then you sold it and deliberately left that behind to produce other types of artists… And then there came a point where jazz seemed to become your primary musical interest, and you had an album charting in the top 5 on the traditional jazz chart. Was it always clear to make a decision that something wasn’t working for you anymore?
I think I touched on that a little bit in writing about the influence of the beats on me as a teenager, and also just being from the west and migrant culture. I really am sort of the spawn of individualism, and also just rebelling against the status quo. But on the other hand, I’m a fairly good-natured person, I get along with people well, and I like people. I like to work with others. So there’s always that tension where at some point I’m like, “You know what? The freedom’s not here anymore. It’s somewhere else.” And I think having those early influences and those familial influences, they just don’t leave you — they’re narratives and micro-narratives that are driving you that are so powerful. And then there’s the jazz part of it too: If I’m in a system where I’m not allowed to improvise, then I have to get out of it, because I value risk and surprise so much.
You start the book with a dramatic moment in progress — the breakup of the Civil Wars, when you were enjoying a major career peak as their producer. You make it emblematic of a lot of reversals of fortune, and how often that occurs over the course of a career, at least a career like yours.
Well, some of the younger people haven’t been on the other side of the mountain yet, but they’ll get there at some point and they’ll wake up one morning — and they’ll be incredibly wealthy, perhaps — but find people have moved on, and think: What is it worth to me to show the world again that I have value? And can I change their minds about me? Can I make the phone ring again and the emails come again and the agents come calling? And I mean, every one of us, whether it’s somebody like T Bone (Burnett) or myself — I’m a little younger than him — but I mean, you have to have the will to reinvent again and again, and basically say, “You’re wrong about me. Let me show you again who I am, and what I’m capable of.” And that’s an exhausting enterprise. And it does put so much focus on the will and the self, when, hopefully as you’re getting older, those things are becoming less important. You want to become more outward. Instead of making a name for yourself, you want to be making a name for others and building them up. Yet in every industry, every vocation, we battle that, because there’s always a group of talented people coming up behind you who are gonna take your job.
How much of who survives is luck, or are there people who are just hardwired like yourself to adjust at the right moments?
You know, I talk about hyper-vigilance in the book, and resilience. I can’t say for everybody, but for me, those were things that helped to sustain me, even in my sort of my brokenness and weakness, and kind of get me through. I took a test one time about childhood PTSD, and I scored a 6 on the test about childhood incidents and whatnot— and then you take the resilience part of the test, and I scored a 10 on that. And when I got sick a few years ago, I went to the Mayo Clinic, and the doctor explained to me, “This is why it’s taken so long for you to come apart, because of how strong your resilience is.” And that really helped me to see that I had kind of cultivated this ability to absorb pain and wear it and just take it, and to be in a constant state of pain, whether it’s psychic pain or physical pain, related to how much work it takes to sustain a music career.
And to be super-honest about it, there’s just been so many tearful moments, and moments of “I just can’t believe this is happening. This is so ridiculous, so absurd.” And then the next morning, you’ll like, OK, well, that’s the way it is and I just gotta keep going. And I do know that there was a period of time I dealt with that with substance abuse. Any 12-stepper is gonna tell you, that creates this whole series of circular incidents and accidents. So I learned that that wasn’t gonna be the answer either, and that I was gonna have to figure out a way to just do the work, and to become really obsessed with doing the work well. That meant writing songs, producing records, delivering those records on time, having great bands, rehearsing, being prepared and not leaving the basics up to chance. That leaves a whole lot of other things that were really more important to me up to chance, like a kind of magical improvisation within the music, and also being able to just dream dreams about what I wanted to do, which required having a certain amount of success so that I didn’t always have to ask for someone else’s money.
As you say in the book — or your daughter does — you’re not famous per se, “just well known.” Was it ever hard to give up a dream of being a pop star, or did you just transition to behind-the-scenes that gracefully?
I don’t think it was natural. I think I’d have to admit a little bit of confusion and jealousy. But I’m so analytical, too, that I quickly realized it was like, “Oh, I get it. If artist A is really better at this public-facing role, either through their musical choices or who they are as an entertainer, then when you combine 37% of me with that, the whole thing blows up and it’s better.” And I started to realize, OK, so that’s what I’m here for. At least that’s what people are asking me to do. They’re saying, “Don’t put your whole thing in, but put some of your thing on this project or with this artist, and it will improve exponentially.”
I never had the ability to do that for myself, because I was just too stubborn. I think in some ways, if I’m really critically honest, I would have to say that I was probably the artist that I wouldn’t have enjoyed working with. [Laughs.] Because when I was working on a set of songs or a project, it was about what I wanted to do in that moment, and I never did it for money. I never was trying to figure out, “Oh, this is what’s really getting over right now, so let’s do this.” I just never had that thought come into my mind, on any records that I’ve made myself as an artist. And I had a good teacher. My very first development deal with A&M Records was when I worked with David Kahne. He was a great example to me of an art-centric guy who’s succeeding at a popular level as well. And I think I hung on to a lot of those values that I learned with David. And I mean, I just love the search. I have no problem making a thousand mistakes to get to the one thing that I think is great.
For all the issues and problems you deal with in the book, there’s not an overwhelming sense of frustrated striving, where it’s “I must have my own shot at the golden ring or nothing.”
No, in fact, I think once the kids were a certain age, it was sort of like, “Hey, I’m a dad first, and I’m a husband, and I am so privileged to have this artistic life and privileged to be able to work as much as I wanna work.” So it became a little bit absurd to think, let’s say when I was 35 years old, “I really want to be a pop star.” I mean, at that point I would’ve said, don’t be a freaking idiot. My mind just wouldn’t work like that. I would’ve felt silly, to think that that was an option or something that I should keep knocking on the door of. And at that point in time too, I didn’t stay with a particular genre. If I had just stayed in an acoustic singer-songwriter thing and just done that forever, that might’ve been one thing. But I’ve done so many different kinds of music.
And that’s the last thing that any record label wants to hear. They really want you to find your lane, and I had five or six lanes. so that didn’t really work, being a pop star. I mean, think about this; If Paul McCartney can’t do it — like over the years, every once in a while, he’s dropped orchestral or experimental electronic music, and everyone yawns — who do I think I am that I could get away with being a pop star and having such eclectic interests? I mean, there’s very few people that are allowed to do that. You know, obviously someone like Paul Simon has continued to experiment and try things, but also there’s no expectations — so I look at people like that and they’re my heroes, because they continue to be out on the horizon and coming back to all us regular folks and reporting, “It’s safe, keep going.” They’re the scouts, and I’ve always wanted to be more of a scout.
For people who are interested in the history of contemporary Christian music, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in here, especially looking back at the ‘80s and the way that people looked at crossover attempts. For your own part, you draw a few parallels to what was happening with U2, in that they were getting some advice from their ministers around the time of “October” — which they did not follow — to quit the music business and play exclusively to glorify God, whatever that was meant to entail. But there was a twist on that story for you. You were for a short time in this Warehouse scene in Sacramento where there were all these impressive bands being spiritually led by this pastor who wanted you to play for secular audiences and not be associated with Christian music per se. And that was frustrating to you and you got out. It’s sort of complicated and nuanced.
Yeah, it was a reverse thing from what was happening with U2. And with Steve Soles or T Bone, because they were already ensconced with Dylan, I never got any sense that the Vineyard [their home church at the beginning of the ‘80s in L.A.] was giving any pushback to them. As far as the Warehouse and Mary Neely and Exit, I don’t even remember any talk of crossover. It was mostly like, “We’re a church that’s doing this unique thing… and now we want to do this music thing… and we don’t want you to have anything to do with Christians.” But then they go and they make a record deal with (the Christian company) Word Records for distribution. So they didn’t know what they were doing completely, either. And I guess I wanted to just tell enough of the story to show how much of it was people who had strong philosophical ideas about what they were doing, and how it was also sort of being made up on our own dime. And then in retrospect … I mean, I’ve been dealing with it my whole career. I remember years ago, Dan Russell telling me, “You are where you are distributed.” Your whole identity is that. And that identity, it’s been my achilles genre heel for most of my career, whether it was the first period, with Exit, or later moving to Nashville…
And I don’t think I was that naive. But on the other hand, I thought if you talked to people about where you were coming from, and you explained to them that you didn’t consider yourself to be a CCM artist, that they would take your word for it, and they would understand it intellectually. Which they did not. So, of course, yeah, that was hugely naive, on my part. I guess I will never reconcile completely with it … I have no problem being aligned with projects or people and community and all of that. But I strongly dislikes ever being called a CCM artist. It kind of makes my stomach turn, and always has. Because from a spiritual level, I’ve always felt like myy work on the planet is to be a musical person, everywhere and everything, as much as I’m allowed to be. That has driven me from the beginning. So anytime somebody tries to put me in a box, I’m ready to fight.
But nevertheless, I respect history enough to try to tell it honestly, and to say, “This is what was happening at the time. These are the ways that people were thinking about this. These were the challenges. Some of them seem anachronistic now, but this is what was going on.” And, you know, a lot of people from that generation have gone on to make all of these different contributions in popular music, and they’re not held by that moment in time. But yet, whether it’s myself or anyone else from that era, we have to say, “Yeah, I was there and that was the work that I did and those were the people I did it with.”
But yeah, it was very, very different breaking out of the Exit Records world with the 77s and those other bands from that time and coming to Nashville to purposely work with Christians in the Christian music business. So much of that was about how I really needed to work. I needed to take care of my family. And Peter York and Mike Blanton had both told me, “You know what, if you move to Nashville, you’ll never stop working.” And their word was good.
After a fruitful time when you had hits like Amy Grant’s “Every Heartbeat,” you moved on and had your own label, Re:think, and then had enough of that too. But your spiritual convictions stayed strong and it seems like there was no bitterness there.
Yeah, exactly. It became just a box too small, again. And for a long time there was a lot of freedom, a lot of joy in it, great friendships, and I made a lot of community — and also, there was recognition of different skills and abilities I had. It wasn’t long before Bill Hearn and Peter York recognized that I had the ability to attract other artists and sign them and develop them, so that was of interest to them, and of interest to me too. Yet having my own record label, you know, I think that was really what was the beginning of the end. As much as that would be a bucket list thing, it was also getting in the belly of the beast, and realizing, “You know what, I don’t want to spend this much time talking about metrics and worrying about money. That’s not why I make music. And I can feel that getting my mogul on is really diminishing the music.” So I was fortunate enough to sign Switchfoot and Sarah Masen and develop them and get them started, and then it was just time to say, “You know, I’m out,” and create some space to see what would come next.
And then while that space was open is when all of the work that we did with Switchfoot really blew up, and we had a great season of top 40 hits with them. That led to me realizing, OK, I can drop in and out of this community now and again, but it can’t be the thing anymore. I can’t be the guy who’s producing five or six records a year in this system. That’s not it.
And so one of the things I did was that, as you mentioned earlier (about the jazz turn), I just started practicing the piano again, and that was kind of my healing. Every day I would go to the piano and just work through musical problems, getting my digits to go where my imagination wanted to go. Then I started playing and hanging out with this saxophonist named Jeff Coffin, who’s in the Dave Matthews Band now and was with Bela Fleck at that time, and then met some other guys in New York. I’d not really been in jazz spaces for years, since I was in my early twenties. I was kind of just like dipping my toe in the water, wondering, can I even really hold my own with these guys who do this every day? But just moving away from the pop song form was so helpful. It was actually what got me back into writing pop songs again, because I just had to experience the freedom again of being in a place where there was nothing and then there was something, and I had to feel that joy of just sitting in a room with people and having all of these musical moments of, like, what if?
Then I had fresh ears and fresh eyes to come back to, and it just so happened that when I landed back into it, it was really the beginning of the whole indie scene in Nashville. I just thought, well, I’ve been blessed by having the top 40 radio success with Switchfoot, and instead of trying to replicate that, let me dive back into artist development and working with indie artists. It wasn’t making any money, but it turned out to be the right move because it ended with the Civil Wars and a lot of other great projects and it gave me a completely new production career.
You mention how ironic it is that Re:think continues to be a brand within the EMI system, but used for a distribution arm for artists you mostly don’t recognize. Kind of in the tradition of A&M somehow surviving as part of the Interscope brands, but it’s not really clear why they’re still using it.
Well, I am in good company, that’s for sure.
You have an interesting mixture of stories of shepherding artists, and the ways things can go right or wrong — from Switchfoot, which seems to have been a relatively uncomplicated success story, to the Lone Bellow, where you feel like you were driven apart by outside parties almost from the outset… and then the Civil Wars, where things went so right before they went so wrong.
Yes, exactly. As you point out, the Civil Wars story is really how everything went right and wrong at the same time. Yet I’m still incredibly grateful for the journey and just to participate in all of these stories. I love stories, and I think our lives are enriched to the degree that we remember them and that we recognize people and their influence on our lives — and yet do it honestly, and say, “This is where I was wrong and I got it wrong,” or “This is where you hurt me,” or so on. It doesn’t have to be super explicit (in the book), but I think you want to tell the most honest story that you can. I think this is why Mark Twain said “I’ll never write my life story, because I can’t be honest enough.” It’s super difficult to put any part of your own failures out there, because you’re so oriented to presenting your best self, and literature doesn’t work well that way. It’s like every sentence almost has to have a tension and release in it.
Did you struggle with how much of the Civil Wars breakup story you could tell? It’s still intriguing and mysterious to people how that all fell apart, right when they were on top of the world.
It was really important for me to tell my side of the story and not try to tell the story for John Paul or for Joy. It was one of the reasons why I used the reporting that was already out there as much as I did in that particular chapter, which I don’t as much in other chapters, because I wanted to just say, “This is what Rolling Stone was saying,” so that there were other voices in the mix. It wasn’t just me saying, this was my take on it. But I wanted to be able to acknowledge, like… man, that was bad. That was really bad. It was an extremely painful time and very lonely and a really difficult period that we all got through together. But it wasn’t neutral, and it’s a story that I’m not going to forget in my lifetime, clearly. And it has become something of a cautionary tale.
It did sound lonely, as you tell the story of sitting there by yourself in the studio, trying to piece together a sophomore album out of the remnants of the early sessions after they had stopped talking with one another and both basically quit working on it, leaving you to your own devices. And you got a bestseller out of it even though you were, as you say in a funny term of phrase, “arting without the artist.”
Yeah, I mean, I’d be interested to know how many other No. 1 Billboard albums have that story. I wonder if it’s solely unique. I wonder if it’s the only time in history it’s happened in pop music in the last hundred years.
The only one I can think of.
I think, too, there was just the disappointment of being at the mountaintop again, without any of the mirth and merriment and flags and pageantry. Everyone was being so cautious (when the album debuted at No. 1), and there was really no party to throw. Everybody was on pins and needles waiting to see: Could this thing be reconciled? There was still enough momentum for the record to succeed commercially without the group. Then, of course, six months after the release, it really begins to become apparent that, without an entity, we really can’t go much further with this. Which, after all of that work that all of us put in, with that much excitement and success surrounding the project, you couldn’t help but think how much further it would’ve gone, had the group been whole.
Moving closer to the present, you worked for a good while with Facebook, at FMI or MMI, as it’s known since the change to Meta, creating instrumental musc for their platform. You certainly proved adaptable to the times in that regard, going where the technology has created a demand.
It’s just such a weird thing, because of where we’re at politically right now, and because (Mark) Zuckerberg has definitely become more explicit about where his interests lie. And so I’m so glad to be out of it, for that reason. But on the other hand, I’m also really grateful for that transition time, because I was also just very ill at that time with this neurological disorder. So the ability to kind of sit in my home studio and make music was really good for my brain and kept me from having to concentrate on how much pain I was in.
I can’t remember if I said it explicitly or not in the book, but I basically have had an intractable headache for eight years now. I live with that. They haven’t figured out a way to bring the pain level down except through stress management. So of course I spent a lot of time at home, and the idea that I could sit here in my house and unlearn my pain and hope to get well and dream up everything from orchestral projects to improvisational music to folk, Americana and pop and just turn it in and get paid for it, and have the biggest audience that I’ve had in my lifetime… which is crazy, at 68… Of course, I’m not getting rich off of streaming royalties, but I definitely have more people listening to my own music now than I’ve ever had in my lifetime.
Are you still doing that for Facebook, or MMI?
No, I’m not. I had to say no.
Easy to see how what’s been going on with Meta might make feelings about doing that work more complicated than a few years ago.
Yeah. I mean, it went from a gray area for me to a black and white. So I’m just gonna leave it at that.
We’re curious about the headache, the neurological condition. For most of us it’s hard to work through even the mildest pain. You have it ongoingly, yet you’re amazingly productive, as this book itself indicates. Have you acquired the ability to compartmentalize somehow how you’re feeling and separate that from what you’re doing?
Yeah, I mean, on a zero-to-10 headache scale, most days I’m just like a four. And then when it’s aggravated, it’s goes up to six or seven. Beyond that, I usually go to ER or something and get some narcotic. So once it gets above that six zone, where I have blurred vision, then I have to stop working. I just have to be kind to myself.
You know, the one thing that I’ve had to learn in this process is that inasmuch as hypervigilance and resilience have been a part of my creative life, I have to be in control of them and say no to things now and to sort of say to myself, “No, you have nothing to prove. You don’t have to be a hero. You can say that you’re in tremendous pain, and you can stop working. You can tell someone, ‘No, I can’t do that,’ and then you can go take a nap.” So that’s the stage of life that I’m in, where I try to be kind to myself and say, “You’re just one small little man, you know? You’re in tremendous pain. Why don’t you take a pill and go to sleep for a few hours?”
One of the crazy things about suffering is that it has produced in me qualities in my person, maybe even in my character, that I didn’t have before, or I didn’t let come to the surface, because I was so intent on being a finisher or being faithful or whatever way I put the logic of it together. I just try to not think like that anymore and try to think more that I did good work; I have had a long, sustainable career for which I’m very grateful; and now I’m Ill and I’m not 35 years old anymore, and I can be kind to myself. Part of that is just to say, “You know what? I can’t do this. Gotta rest,” and it’d be okay. Someone in our neighborhood was asking about some HOA thing, “Well, don’t you think you could do that? You have all these skills. You could help us do this,” and I was like, “No, no, you don’t understand. I’ll definitely let you down. I’m not that person anymore. I could be right in the middle of helping you with it and if I feel like it’s not right for me, then I would just say, ‘Hey, I gotta quit and go take a nap.” They looked at me like I was a crazy person, and I just felt like, it really is OK. And it’s a good feeling to be kind to yourself when you’re sick.
And also, it’s a good feeling to not have anything left to prove or the need to reinvent yourself again, or to earn someone’s attention.
You will get some attention now with people paying attention to the book. Are you feeling good with what you’re exposing to the world at this point?
I’m so happy. I’m really happy with the book and glad to be at this point of life and look forward to the next couple of months of talking about it. And I’m also creating space for new things, and then getting together with the family in May and celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary. I’m just trying to be in a posture of gratitude, and as I said earlier, moving from name-making to making a name for others. Maybe that would be finishing this interview and telling someone I had a great conversation with you, and advocating for you to tell your story and just be more oriented in that direction… not having the need to tell my story anymore. I’m really excited about getting off of social media very shortly and trying to recover some older practices about what we used to do with our hearts and minds when we had open space and time before us.
And who knows, maybe I’ll even get a flip phone. We’ll see. I was asking my granddaughter about them yesterday. I was saying, “Hey, are flip phones back in fashion?” She says yes. Apparently you can get them where they’ll still do GPS, but you can’t do any social media on them, so we’ll see. I’m completely sensitive to how someone like yourself and hundreds of other friends have to stay in the game, so to speak, for whatever amount of time you need it vocationally. But I’m just grateful that this book sort of represents, I hope, the last time you’ll ever see me selling anything. Listen, I am pleased to sell this book. So what I meant by not selling was just that I’m looking forward to the time, if I’m writing on my Substack, that I’m not pitching anything and that maybe it’s just writing about something that’s not being monetized.
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