Therapy by Proxy: ‘Is It Time to Break Up the Band?’
'Proxy with Yowei Shaw' episode brings emotional investigative journalism to bear on band drama
Bands/Those funny little plans/That never work quite right…”
‘Holes,’ by Mercury Rev
Well, somewhere along the line, we all bought the dream, didn’t we?
We believed that being in a band meant working hard, becoming good at what we did, putting in the hours, reaping adulation, and ultimately, buying a house in Malibu with a super-sick recording studio in it, where all our bandmates/best friends could gather and work on music in a perfectly balanced democratic state, until we grew old and grey together. (Of course, we’d maintain our devoted fanbase throughout all of this.)
That’s the dream. More often (much more often), the reality is something quite different. Particularly for bands that stay together for more than a decade, without ever growing immensely popular, but rather, staying close enough to success to smell it, while failing to grab a firm hold of it.
So what happens then? What if your dreams refuse to die, while simultaneously refusing to come true?
There’s a brilliant podcast out there in the ether that delves deeply into all of these “what ifs”. It’s an episode of a pod called Proxy, which its host, Yowei Shaw, describes as “an emotional investigative show” that explores “niche emotional conundrums through conversations with strangers who have relevant experience.”
For many years during what she describes as her “previous life,” Yowei was host of NPR’s popular Invisibilia Podcast, where she explored the “unseeable forces (that) control human behavior and shape our ideas, beliefs, and assumptions.”
Invisibilia—Latin for ‘invisible things’—laid solid groundwork for Proxy’s exploration of forces that, while unseen, are both deeply felt and highly influential in the lives of the pod’s protagonists.
Though Proxy is not specifically a music-based podcast, the most recent episode - dubbed “Is It Time to Break Up the Band?’ - offers an incisive, insightful and realistic portrayal of what life in a non-superstar band is actually like.
Here’s a description of the episode:
Evan and Chris are best friends and bandmates who at one point, were in a band on the come up. (The Superweaks, out of Philadelphia.) They were playing to thousands of people, opening for Taking Back Sunday and Manchester Orchestra. They were hustling and working hard.
And then Evan’s little brother and their bassist died in a freak health incident and everything fell apart.
It’s been 8 years and the band is still not really active - and Evan and Chris don’t understand why.
For Evan, he doesn’t get why Chris never picks up the slack. And for Chris, he doesn’t get why the band isn’t Evan’s priority anymore and why Evan won’t finish the last bit of vocals on their latest record.
In this episode, I find a proxy for Evan and Chris to talk to: Ryan Dusick, the founding member and former drummer of Maroon 5, who’s dealt with similar kinds of issues.
If any of this sounds even vaguely familiar to you - or if you ‘re simply interested in the emotional conundrums that affect all of us, in one form or another - I highly recommend you spend some time with this episode of Proxy with Yowei Shaw, check out further episodes, and subscribe to the podcast here.
