Since I wrote this, I spoke with Levi about it. He told me it was never about the lack of attendance to his shows, and I understand now that I was seeing the tip of the iceberg of a bigger struggle for Levi. Nonetheless, I plan to retain this piece as it was — my recollection of my time with my friend.
It was 2014 when I stood in a dark parking lot, guiding an RV into the gravel lot of the small music venue I managed. I was excited to see the mobile home; my friend Levi’s nomadic life on the road was something I aspired to. I loved the vision of raising a family with a creative career that would bring us to new, exciting locations, and that was exactly what I’d pictured Levi’s life was like these days. It was something I was eager to talk about.
Levi climbed out, his wife Heather and two young kids in tow. They breathed crisp clouds into the cold air and looked exhausted. I knew they had spent months on the road this way. Levi stood more than a foot taller than me, and I felt like a little kid next to him. His blue eyes began to gather wrinkles at the corners. He offered me a loose embrace around the shoulders. Something in it felt different.
“Five tickets sold,” I told him. “It’s alright though. I’ve got you covered for your minimum.” A beat passed as he processed this news, and I wondered if he was trying not to look disappointed.
“I know.” He patted my shoulder, and headed back to the RV to grab his gear.
I felt strange as I went inside the venue to let our sound guy know our artist for the night had arrived. I sat behind the soundboard and felt heavy. Something was changing.
I met Levi seven years before this night in the parking lot. He was a young musician on tour with a pop artist and I was in my junior year of art school, excited for the world ahead of me. I’d seen him perform, and wrote him a lengthy email that night about how his music resonated with me. I did this a lot with artists I admired.
Most emails were never returned. Levi, though, wrote back.
We became friends quickly. My conversations with him early on were the wistful conversations I dreamed I’d have as an art student. We talked about our inspirations — old favorites in art and music, new album releases played through weighty iPods, and chats over AOL Instant Messenger about what we thought the songs meant.
“The new Nickle Creek album?”
“I KNOW. That bridge? Rip my heart out.”
“God, it’s beautiful.”
We talked about being famous, and what being famous meant. We celebrated over email when he told me he’d been signed to a record label. I received an excited text from him when my work as a cake artist was featured on the Food Network. All along the way, we boosted each other up. I booked shows for him in the cities I was living. He called on me to create album art, and offered constructive feedback on the work I shared with him. For both of us, “fame” was just around the corner. It had to be.
Over time, conversation drifted from music and art to other areas of life. Levi shared his deeply religious background, and I loved hearing about its contrast to my progressive New England upbringing. The conversation felt important. I was learning about the world around me in ways I hadn’t before. I understood how it could inform my work, and I loved how his music helped me learn. “Which drink did my memory drown in?” was an easy lyric for my 20-year-old brain to latch onto. “Let’s talk dissent, I’m not talking about the state of government” was a little more difficult.
One night, we got into a disagreement about sexism in politics and the church. My secular childhood couldn’t rationalize a different perspective on the relationships between men and women in the workplace. It was the first time the differences I treasured between us felt like a rift. We didn’t talk for a while afterwards. “I don’t know, man,” lingered as my last text with him.
Several weeks later, my phone’s screen blinked. “Do you have time to do some album art for my new song?”
“Yeah, what’s it about?”
“It’s about struggling with your faith.”
I was completing my internship in New York City when Levi came to play a show there. It was crowded, the small bar filled with ears listening attentively. I loved to watch them learn the lyrics as I did, and was proud to call the artist on stage my friend.
After the show, packed into his small hatchback with more fans than were legally allowed in the car (his biggest fan, his wife, included), I felt the potential of our lives ahead. I listened to his fans muse about the show from the backseat. He bashfully feigned ignorance to it, and I thought of our conversations about his younger life, growing up as the son of a preacher in Texas.
“Soak this up,” I wanted to tell him. “This is special. Live in this moment.”
When we arrived at our destination, Levi danced over to a piano in a park and laid down a few skillful notes to the delight of passersby. I smiled at the reaction he drew from his spectators. The fans from the backseat clapped. The lights of New York City sparkled. This artistic dream was working. How lucky were we to be here?
He was beaming when he left the piano to meet us. “Let’s get gelato. Real Italian gelato. I know a place. Everything has Italian names.”
I’d never had gelato, but I wouldn’t admit that to him. “I’m in. But I don’t know any Italian.”
He waved that aside. “Please. I’ll order.” Levi had recently returned from a couple years in England and felt worldly to me. He was 28 then. I was 21. He had so much to teach me, and I looked up to him. Looking back, I was searching for a mentor in him. Someday I’d make it to England, too. I could have a little painting studio and a collection of artistic friends like he’d gathered there. But for now, it was all about gelato. We deserved it. The world was our collective oyster. Fame for this group of young artists was just around the corner.
Things started to feel different in the fall. I was back in Georgia to finish school, and I booked Levi a show at my local coffee shop. He had been busy placing roots in Nashville then, and we talked about his new house and how hard it was to be away from his wife. Seated on a dusty couch before the stage as attendees to the show trickled in, the smell of mochas wafted.
Levi shifted. “We just found out we’re going to have a baby.”
I paused. This idea seemed hard to conceptualize. My younger mind immediately processed this in an “oh god, what will you do?“ state of mind. It occurred to me that, seven years older, this might not be the same reaction he had to this news.
“Wow!” was all I could find for words.
“Yeah. I mean, I’m thrilled.” He glanced at me with a sideways smile. “But also….terrified. Like, how do you raise a kid?”
I couldn’t begin to answer his question. This was an area where I way out of my element.
“What if it’s a boy? What if he’s like me?” He wasn’t looking at me now, and I knew this question wasn’t intended for me to answer. Touring as he knew it would change. He handed me the tip jar and got up to tune his guitar. It was an old coffee can with a slot cut out from the top that I’d made for his Savannah shows the year before. Now it felt like it had a greater purpose.
“Will you make sure this gets around?”
“Sure,” I responded. “But I’ll cover whatever else you need from this show.”
He laughed a little, not looking away from the guitar. “I know you will.”
‘I just wish you didn’t have to’ felt unspoken.
This coffee shop felt far away from the place I’d first seen him: on stage at a grand theater in Atlanta with hundreds of people before him, stage lights spotlighting him. It would just take a little more effort. Just a little more trying. A few more people to tell their friends. A few more CDs shared. The idea that the “music thing” wouldn’t work out for him seemed unfathomable. It had to. He was so talented, just like everyone told me I was. If it couldn’t work for him, who COULD it work for? Could it still work for me?
I was married in 2013. My new husband reached out to Levi and asked him to write a song for us as a way of proposing. I cried when I heard it: a tinny melody, just Levi’s voice and his guitar, recounting the place I’d been in when I’d met him, at 20 years old. He mostly got it right, but the degree of accuracy didn’t matter. I felt honored to have this nugget of art I could treasure. At our wedding, my husband and I danced to the song in front of our closest friends and family. It felt to me like a beacon of my art background, my friendships, and the incredible artistic lives we’d all have ahead. “The dartboard on this wall reminds how far time has brought me/I am now a score.”
Behind the soundboard, I lifted my head as Levi’s leather shoes clicked onto the stack of pallets that acted as a makeshift stage. He didn’t look up at me. Hardly looked up at the crowd. Barely five people scattered through the chairs ahead of him. I shook my head with a sense of responsibility about where we were. He cleared his throat and launched into song, and I found some relief.
Truthfully, I too wasn’t where I thought I’d be. I opened a wedding cake shop a few years before. It was my creative business, not unlike his work as a singer/songwriter. I churned out sculpted cakes that looked like dogs or bowls of chicken wings, and worked long days making grand wedding cakes. I’d been featured on national television enough times to count on two hands. But I couldn’t make it pay the bills, and I’d closed it a few months before this night. He and I hadn’t talked much about that. I worked in marketing now, which brought me to this venue. The money was better, but I felt a sense of betrayal towards art as I had known it. If I was so talented, why couldn’t it work?
Levi was an anchor for me in that way. Our lives had been running in parallel for much of the time I had known him. Even if my creative venture had failed, his was still working, and he’d been at it much longer than I had. Wasn’t it working? Heather and their kids watched him sleepily from a couch, and I thought about how welcoming even a dusty old couch must feel after days cramped in an RV.
When he was finished, I stood by the door and thanked our five attendees for coming. A young woman clasped one of his CDs at the merch stand, and he quietly scribbled a signature on it in Sharpie.
“We drove here from Johnson City,” the woman’s mother explained. “She just loves your music.”
From behind the girl, I dramatically raised my eyebrows to say “wow, Levi!”
He caught my glance, but only returned me a tired look. He smiled weakly at the CD’s owner. “Thanks for coming,” he said, handing the CD back. “That really does mean a lot.”
The next morning, my husband handed coffee to Levi and Heather as the kids played on the living room floor of our house. Levi was still quiet and the conversation felt tense as we made small talk around him. The RV loomed outside the windows of my house. Now, the presence of it almost felt like a threat.
“So, I saw the documentary about you. That was great.” I offered, trying to pull him back into conversation.
“Yeah,” and a pause. “You know, I’m not sure how well this is working out anymore, though.”
He looked at me, and I looked to Heather, who didn’t look surprised by this news. “This, like….?”
“Like music. Like living in an RV. Touring. I don’t know how much sense this is going to make, long-term.”
It almost sounded like a plea. I wanted to tell him more about the sale of the cake shop, and tell him it was okay on the other side. But he was my creative mentor, not the other way around. He knew more than me, and I knew that. And I still wasn’t sure if I’d made the right choice. So I stayed quiet. Their son ran up to hand me a cat toy he’d found on the floor, telling me about where the cat had gone to hide. It became a diversion from the conversation, and we didn’t talk about it again.
Long after their RV pulled away, I found myself stuck on Levi’s words. I had gone the route of full-time work that wasn’t “creative” in an effort to pay my bills. Why was I expecting anything different of my friend? Was my work in marketing temporary — a bail-out until I could come back to “art”? I wasn’t sure if it was. What obligation did he have to be that creative inspiration for me, and for his fans and friends? None, really. I remembered the anger I felt as I closed my cake shop, when my own fans told me “I wish I had the chance to buy a cake from you!” Sometimes I wished I’d said “yeah, well, that would have been great two years ago.”
We lost touch for a while after that, and I wasn’t sure if that was because of the sparse show or the conversation we had. I felt bad about not asking more questions; about not offering the little bit of advice I had in this situation. I knew he was in a dark place then, and I wasn’t sure if it was apparent to everyone.
I learned on Twitter about Levi’s new job as a sports writer. By now, I was two years into my marketing career, and could feel the lifted weight this stability afforded me. Before, his choice to pursue the life of an artist felt important to me. But I surprised myself in feeling excited for him as I read the tweet. He was so well suited to this new work. It was creative, although maybe not in the same way. Like my journey had been.
Twitter lit up with his fans, some of whom were disappointed that they wouldn’t have new chances to learn from his music the way I had. Some people had been with him for years. Others were just learning about him.
But they didn’t know about the stress on my friend’s face years ago when thinking about his new baby boy. The fatigue that built tour after tour. I don’t know where that stress lives now. It could live for him, as it does for me, in a different way. In a sort of longing for the art I wished could pay my bills. For the studio in England that never materialized. It could be that that stress has evaporated for him with this transition. And for the sake of my looking up to him, I hope that the latter is true.
In that moment, all I could do is respond to his tweet:
“Proud of you, brother. Big things are ahead.”
This week, Levi plays his final show as a musician. Why does this feel like grief for me? It could be a mourning for a chapter of my life that is past. It could be sadness over the derailment of train tracks of artistic careers.
When he changed careers, he texted to tell me he was releasing a final album of all his unfinished songs. It included the song he wrote for me. It should have felt cathartic, and as much as I craved the new glimmer of creativity, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to it. It felt like attending an open casket funeral for a beautiful thing, and I averted my eyes at the wake. But this week I’ve binged on that unplayed album and all the others, and put myself right back in that place I was at twenty years old.
I know that Levi found fame in a different way. His creative life isn’t dead: it’s changed. He has scores of new friends and new fans who love Levi the Sports Writer. This week, they get to experience that human connection through music the way I did twelve years ago.
