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Episode 7 - Jon Guerra
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Jon Guerra is a musician, singer, songwriter, recording artist, performer, producer, and composer. He does it all. He composed music for Terrence Malick’s film “A Hidden Life” and has a new record coming out in May 2023, with singles releasing prior.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'What's Next' Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome to What's Next. I'm Joel Krogman and this is my podcast where I talk to people who are doing cool things and try to get to the
Featuring John Guerra: Musician & Composer
00:00:20
Speaker
bottom of it. Today on the podcast is my conversation with John Guerra. John is a musician, recording artist, performer, producer, composer, Renaissance man.
00:00:30
Speaker
Most notably, he was a composer on Terrence Malick's film, A Hidden Life and on Terrence Malick's upcoming film, The Way of the Wind. I think that's right.
00:00:45
Speaker
the way of the wind, yes, the way of the wind.
Joel's Journey: Canada to Chicago
00:00:49
Speaker
I get into this in the conversation with John, but when I first moved down to Chicago, I was right on the edge of no longer playing music. I grew up in Canada until I was 23. I moved down to Chicago to get married to my wife, Mo. And up until that point, my lifelong dream was to be a musician.
00:01:10
Speaker
a guitar player, a rock star. And in hindsight, I had that dream because I wanted to be loved, universally loved and liked. And so that seemed to be the best way to go about that.
00:01:30
Speaker
Pursuing that I had played guitar professionally for a little while and I didn't have a huge amount of success by any stretch, but I was doing it for a living. I had found while doing it that it just wasn't what I had thought it was going to be. So when I moved down to Chicago, I was ready to be done. That's when I got into filmmaking beyond just a passion and a hobby and into it as a
00:01:57
Speaker
as a job. I started a business and all of that shortly thereafter when I was able to.
Christian Themes in Music: An Introspective Approach
00:02:04
Speaker
But John was somebody that I met through a mutual friend in Chicago and I just couldn't believe how talented he was. And he's just a good dude. John's music is definitely firmly in the Christian world of music, which is a world that I'm not really a part of anymore.
00:02:25
Speaker
But it is unique in that world in that it is very introspective and asks a lot of questions and doesn't have easy answers, doesn't present things in black and white. And I really appreciate that specifically about his music and his approach, especially given how difficult and painful the last few years
00:02:49
Speaker
have been politically and the role that American evangelical Christianity has played in all of that and continues to play. He asks really hard questions of himself and of what his faith should be and should produce and should look like in the world.
00:03:08
Speaker
in a time when I think a lot of people are not willing to ask these kinds of questions to challenge ourselves and who we say we are and what we say we believe and why and what that should mean.
COVID Context & Personal Impact
00:03:22
Speaker
So I was really excited to talk to John. I also just want to say that this conversation was recorded a while back last year. John talks about how he and his family have just tested positive for COVID, but that is not current news.
00:03:36
Speaker
So I hope you enjoy my conversation with John Guerra. What's going on? Well, half COVID. Oh, do you? Oh, no. Yeah, me and Valerie and Winslow do. Oh, shoot. Yeah, we got the bug. How's it been? Has it been rough?
00:04:03
Speaker
Um, it's been more rough for me than it has been for them, which is, which is, it's good, but it's mainly just been like, uh, just like exhausting more than anything.
00:04:14
Speaker
little cough and some drainage, but we're just like, yeah, exactly. How long have you been feeling it? Um, tested positive on Sunday, this past Sunday. And then, uh, we're, you know, counting down the days for like the five day window to be done. Yeah. And then we tested again last night and we were both still positive, which made sense because we were both still feeling like all. Yeah.
00:04:42
Speaker
But it's annoying. It's so crazy how it hits everybody different too.
00:04:47
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. There's a director that we're working with on a project right now, and he got it as well. And two weeks after testing negative, he's like no energy, needing to sleep several times throughout the day just to... Oh, exactly. No, exactly. I really rely on running every day to kind of just keep me stable and just haven't been able to do that and haven't wanted to do it, which is the worst.
00:05:16
Speaker
Yeah, dude, man. Well, thanks for doing this. Do you want to reschedule this? No, no, no, no, no. No, I feel, I feel good enough to have a good chat. Cool. Hey, let me, can I quickly run and get a glass of water? Yeah. Yeah. Sure. All right. Cool. Be right back. Yo.
Life in Austin & Home Studio Adventures
00:05:36
Speaker
Where are you right now? Are you at home? Yeah, I'm at home. Just in our little guest room studio here. It's kind of all we've had since we moved down here two years ago. I had a spot in Chicago and I was, I think I got a little spoiled, which is having a separate spot that was just made for music making. But this has been a suite. It's been sweet to kind of be around like close for when our, you know, Winslow's small and
00:06:04
Speaker
Just could be close. Yeah, yeah. Sure. So you're in, are you right in Austin? Yeah, like just south of downtown in a little neighborhood called Barton Hills. Sweet. And so, I mean, it's been like quite a long time since we've really talked. I think maybe that podcast performance. Creative muscle. Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah.
00:06:26
Speaker
So what are you doing now? Yeah, man. So I pretty much just write and produce at home. Yeah, I've worked with a few different artists the past year. If I need to do bigger projects, I usually go to Nashville to kind of track drums or a singer. But we moved down to Austin to work on a movie. We worked with this director Terrence Malick over
00:07:04
Speaker
It came out right when I was getting into filmmaking. Sick. Me and my buddies watched that so many times. Oh man. We got to work on A Hidden Life over 2017-2018 remotely when we were still in Chicago. Then when that came out, he invited Valerie and I to work on the next one. We were having Winslow around that time and needed to move out of our apartment in Chicago. We just made the move to Austin. That was March 2020. We worked on that film for about a year.
00:07:15
Speaker
this director.
Focusing on Personal Music & Touring Plans
00:07:34
Speaker
our job ended and just been living here since then, kind of writing and producing music. And are you working on your own stuff mostly or are you producing a lot of other people?
00:07:47
Speaker
Right now, I'm doing a lot of my own stuff. Last year, I worked on three records for other people and that was good. But this year, I'm trying to clear the slate just to finish my next record. I think I saw it on your site. You have one coming out pretty soon here, right?
00:08:05
Speaker
Well, that's yeah, that's what I'm working on. That's what I'm trying to make happen. I think I'm close, but it's like the last 10, 20% is always kind of the, for me, it's always the hardest. You know, it's easy to just like throw paint, throw paint. And then when you start editing, it's like, that's what kind of the magic happens and slower progress, but it's better.
00:08:26
Speaker
and then probably hit the road in May and then probably touring a lot more this year. So hoping to release that and then tour on it a bit. Are you going to go across the US or other places? Probably just across the US, yeah. There's an artist named Taya, actually, who is releasing a solo record that I produced, made it with her, and she invited me to go on tour with her, both as like,
00:08:55
Speaker
MD in her band, but then also as a opener when you do that kind of thing I mean that life changes a little bit when you have a Little one in tow. How do you how do you manage all that? We honestly haven't
00:09:08
Speaker
done it yet. Right now, she's just been coming with us and the goal would be to have her come with us. Living that road life. She left some good stories. I know. We'll see. I'm not totally looking forward to just being gone, but I think it'll be fun if we can make it work for us. Well, dude, I mean, one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you is because when I was in high school,
00:09:35
Speaker
That's when I started getting into music and playing music and really sort of that dream sort of happened for me. And the goal was to become like some kind of rock star who could tour the world and be loved by fans everywhere. Oh, the dream. Oh, the dream. Yeah, the dream. And, you know, that didn't happen. But that's okay. But the... It was good. You got a lot better deal out of it. Yeah. But I...
00:10:05
Speaker
you know, when I came down to Chicago, I met you like, I don't know, a couple years after that, I was still kind of playing music, but I was kind of like, it was sort of phasing out of my life as an identity for me and kind of something that I did. Certainly, I didn't do it professionally anymore. And
00:10:26
Speaker
But anyways, when I met you and heard your music and you and Val and the band, I think your band was called Milano back then. It was like genuinely the first time where I met somebody in real life where I was like, holy shit, this guy has what it takes actually.
00:10:47
Speaker
to do that, to live that life. And coming from small town Canada, I had never really met anybody like that before.
00:11:00
Speaker
That was like my first impression of you. And since then, you've just been making music steady at your craft, steady at the spirituality behind it. So I'm super curious where you grew up, how you grew up, what your family life was like. Well, thanks for saying all those sweet things. And it's fun to have this chat.
Musical Roots: From Texas to Chicago
00:11:18
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like you are kind of a staple in Chicago in my mind. We didn't cross paths too much, but we met shortly after Val and I got married.
00:11:29
Speaker
We had some good mutual friends. I grew up an only child. My parents are both immigrants. My dad's from Cuba. My mom's from Argentina. I was born in California and then shortly thereafter moved to Houston, Texas where I lived till I was 12. Houston was really just playing soccer, riding bikes, not much music in my life at that point.
00:11:59
Speaker
But my dad has also always been a pastor of small churches, small Hispanic churches. And summer before seventh grade, my dad got a job way up north in a suburb of Chicago called Wheaton. And we moved up there.
00:12:17
Speaker
And right a few weeks after we moved, I went on a trip with my new church. And on that trip, there was a youth pastor who was leading it who would lead songs in his guitar at night. And that was really the first time I remember music having kind of a pull and an impact on me. I don't remember why.
00:12:40
Speaker
But there was something to my 12 year old brain and heart that just like, it just like lit me on fire. It was like, I know, you know, I had moved away from my friends from the life that I knew from all my family. And that was probably all gasoline.
00:12:56
Speaker
on my heart and when he sang these songs, just no PA, just like 12 kids around in a circle, just classic, he's on a Taylor guitar. It just lit me on fire. I didn't know then that it was God, but I believe now that it was, that there was something spiritual happening to that. But it was also music. It was like, whoa, I can't believe that music could do this to me.
00:13:22
Speaker
So I just ran after music. I got some chord charts, came back from that trip. My mom had a guitar from when she was a little girl, just like a little Yamaha acoustic, and I picked up a chord book from Guitar Center and started teaching myself chords with these church songs with the little letters on top.
00:13:41
Speaker
Pretty much all I did, man, I was an only child and just kind of taught myself guitar and didn't have any friends that summer. Did you have like an artsy bent to you kind of up until that point? Not at all. No, I was just soccer all the way, basketball, baseball, just like really, really energetic kid, my mom describes, like just jumping off the walls all the time.
00:14:03
Speaker
boys are a little bit like that. So I definitely fit that bill. Just always outside, always on my bike. I was super into skateboarding, which I guess is quasi, I think about late 90s skaters. It was kind of an aesthetic as much as it was a hobby. But no, not really artsy at all. But I got super into music and I picked up guitar pretty quick and just started playing in church. And then it was in high school that I
00:14:33
Speaker
Met some friends my freshman year and they were just like me kind of really into music at that point it was you know I I launched into guitar and then just launched into bands anytime I got that feeling from a band or a song I would
00:14:49
Speaker
search him down, beg my parents to get me the CD at Sam Goody until they would. Then freshman year, I just met my people. I'm sure you have same stories you find. You find the friends that you all love the same music, and then you become inseparable. That was me and my friends. They all played a little bit of guitar, a little bit of bass, a little bit of drums, so we started a band.
00:15:19
Speaker
in high school and Basically just did nothing but listen to music and play music And started listening to cooler bands and I had my I think it was really cool that I grew up in a town in Wheaton Which is a town with a college called Wheaton College. Yeah, so a lot of the people that were my teachers and that were my
00:15:41
Speaker
youth leaders, they were all Christians with Christians who read broadly and Christians with cool tastes in music. Something about that town at that time, I remember it was my sophomore youth leader who showed me Radiohead the first time.
00:16:01
Speaker
So it was okay to listen to non-Christian music. Totally. And they were showing us good books and novels and it was kind of like cool to be like smart and into artsy things. So I think that's kind of even where my love for reading and my love for plays and just sort of like experiencing really the spiritual life through art was kind of
00:16:24
Speaker
i don't know just kind of grown up into it which i i find now is pretty is pretty tremendous because so many people's religious experience growing up was was not that was a little bit more stifling and there definitely was like legalism and fundamentalism you know growing up and yeah
00:16:40
Speaker
But for me, when music hit
Spiritual Journey & Artistic Influences
00:16:43
Speaker
my life, it was more in this context of these older, cooler kids or leaders who were into things that actually were cool. And even the girls I was liking were into cool bands and showing me things.
00:16:58
Speaker
And then with piano, I was in choir in high school. So I started getting introduced to all this like classical music and I took a study hall and went into one of the practice rooms and just kind of played piano an hour a day for a whole year, my junior year of high school. And that's where I learned piano. So you were just self-taught in that?
00:17:17
Speaker
Just self taught. Yeah. I would, I would, uh, go to the library and get some CDs of like classical music, put on the headphones and kind of listen to 10 seconds of a Chopin Nocturne and then press pause and try to figure it out. And then listen to the next 10 seconds. I can always play by ear pretty well, probably because I learned guitar on my own, but that became a real help to me. And being an only child, I think you sort of learn how to teach yourself stuff because you spend a lot of time by yourself doing stuff.
00:17:44
Speaker
Did you stay connected with that youth leader? So I didn't stay connected, but I was actually on tour in my late 20s, five, six years ago now, and he had moved and I heard somebody that also was in that youth group was like, oh, you're never going to believe that Matt Stoll, he's at this church. And we were both like, no way, like,
00:18:09
Speaker
And he had stopped being a youth pastor. I think he was selling insurance or I don't know what he was doing. He just, it was like a short stint of like doing some ministry stuff and then he kind of switched careers. But he kind of came up to me after the concert and was like, you probably not gonna remember me, but and I was just like,
00:18:28
Speaker
Dude, man, you are the reason. I'm even here. Wow. I could tell it was pretty impactful for him because he just thought, I was a youth pastor for two, three years and it's kind of a detour in my life and now I do this other stuff. Yeah, that's crazy. It was cool to see even just seeing it on his face like, whoa, because it really is him. It's like burning my mind, just this guy on an acoustic and just goes to show you never know when you're going to have an impact on somebody.
00:18:56
Speaker
Yeah, no doubt, especially that age group. It doesn't always seem like you're able to connect. Exactly, but they really are paying attention to middle schoolers. Growing up in the church as you did, what was the spirituality that was
00:19:12
Speaker
in your home my parents are both super super devout you know i that's another thing i'm very grateful for is there's a lot of wacky things that i i think i grew up i was laughing with my dad this last halloween because i sent him a picture of my daughter in a Tigger outfit and he's like
00:19:30
Speaker
Man we were so we were so off about not letting you wear costumes and go trick-or-treating It really was was a harmless thing and we had a good laugh about it. You know, I don't have any yeah wounds from that or anything but in my mind I always felt like my dad really loved God and
00:19:49
Speaker
My mom really loved God and they really, really, you know, when you're a pastor of a small church that's majority immigrants, part of your, your job's a little different than maybe a pastor of like middle to upper middle class Christians, you know, because immigrants need a lot of help and they need a lot of care. And it's not just like spiritual teaching on Sunday morning. It's, uh,
00:20:13
Speaker
It's practical. You're doing life with people. And I just saw my parents do a lot of stuff that wasn't on their job description. They just were like shepherds of people who were poor and who were new to the country. And I think that's had a big effect on me, both in my understanding of what a pastor is and what I think ministry is, but even just what a
00:20:36
Speaker
what a Christian ought to be. Yeah, somebody who really lives their life at 100%, I guess authenticity, has a set of convictions and then lives by them to the full. I mean, to this day, when my dad's even just praying for the meal, he's so passionate and just cares about every word that he says. And the older I get, the more that
00:21:01
Speaker
becomes important to me so that was kind of the the atmosphere but I grew you know practically it was Hispanic churches are always like it's always the Hispanic Church of a larger English church so I grew up you know going to just the evangelical Bible churches okay and my parents really wanted me to speak English because they struggled with English because they came when they were my dad when he was 12 my mom when she was like
00:21:28
Speaker
six or seven and they struggle with the language. So they really wanted me to, you know, not have that struggle. And so I was always in like English youth group and just very much kind of assimilated into the majority culture at the church. A lot of the wacky things that I think evangelicalism is, people are bringing up now, I kind of grew up around. What you do now, I think you describe your music as Monday morning devotional music.
Devotional Music: Exploring Personal Faith
00:21:54
Speaker
It's very inherently spiritual.
00:21:57
Speaker
But it's almost like it's created for the private moment rather than like the corporate. Yeah. How did you come to find that as like what you were interested in exploring with your music? I think that was probably something that is a function of my personality. I'm a pretty introverted person. And in college, I had kind of a bad breakup early on and discovered that, discovered prayer as kind of a resource for consolation and comfort.
00:22:26
Speaker
and discovered just how how rich it was to you know read the Bible and just be quiet for long stretches of time that was kind of my college experience was kind of exploring a lot of that quiet interior time so I think my spirituality and my really love for
00:22:45
Speaker
really the Christian life that I'm trying to even continue to develop now and trying to help people with now was kind of started then because I for whatever reason I never could relate emotionally or spiritually to the super ecstatic and kind of enthusiastic corporate worship thing. I've come to see the value of it. I've had some really cool experiences
00:23:14
Speaker
in that too but my natural tendency isn't really to like really love that and so I always felt a little estranged in church when it was like that kind of the big happy clappy songs or the super passionate everyone's like blowing the roof off as a kid and as a teenager that just never felt like yeah I never felt like I could relate to it yeah I wonder if it comes back to that authenticity piece how authenticity was modeled for you and your as you were growing up the thing that I
00:23:44
Speaker
have a hard time with is it sort of feels like, okay, this is what we're supposed to do now. And not necessarily reflective of where I'm at or the moment that I'm in. Totally. And it doesn't even really seem to care about that, yeah.
00:23:59
Speaker
Totally man and you know and I think a lot of people can be authentic and and do that like Mm-hmm. It's just it's just a matter of like usually the introverts aren't the one Aren't the ones right who can write songs that are like that, you know And so it's like it's the extroverts who write their songs and the extroverts pick the songs and then the extroverts are running churches and I
00:24:20
Speaker
I mean I don't know I haven't thought too much about it but I think there's a lot of us who who just feel that kind of we're a little bit more enriched by the interior pursuit of God rather than the exterior
00:24:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's just a different purpose to it. I feel like, you know, then then like, what maybe some of those rah rah songs are written for. Totally. Yeah, no, there is definitely a different purpose. You know, with my last record Keeper of Days, I really tried to, I started an experiment in Chicago where I would come into my studio.
00:24:53
Speaker
Just my little room that I rented downtown above a pizza place that I put a bunch of sound treatment in and made my studio. I would show up and this is before we had kids and when I had time, lots of extra time. You know what it's like. I would show up and I just sort of the practice of
00:25:13
Speaker
Kind of just being quiet being silent like just literally before I turned anything on just sitting on a couch in that room and kind of breathing and noticing my breath and looking out the window and And those times kind of became bigger and bigger and longer and longer and then I would kind of roll those times into working on the record and
00:25:35
Speaker
You know, I wasn't intending on that kind of being a theme in the record, but it ended up, I think, being a theme of the record. It ended up being something that I think it does that for people, I think, the last record. I've heard just so many people say there is like a there's like a quieting effect to it, which is awesome. Yeah. And I think if people it's not like a background music, like when you're grilling out with friends necessarily, you know, it's a little bit more like
00:26:03
Speaker
No. Which probably is why, you know, it doesn't have like billions of streams because music, that's background music is just a lot more people listen to it. Yeah, I think I texted you, but when I was listening to the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill and then that episode that your song came on.
00:26:22
Speaker
Man, it just hit that episode perfectly. And then I went back and kind of went through a bunch of your music again at that point. And I was exactly what you're saying. I was like trying to work at the same time. And I'm like, man, these lyrics
00:26:39
Speaker
These lyrics are requiring way too much of me to have this on the background. The lyrics just really do ask questions of the listener, which I think are really profound. With your earlier music stuff, you did seem to be going more along the route of rock band, not this
00:26:58
Speaker
kind of reflective devotional type music. And how did you take that turn and kind of decide like, no, this is what I want to do actually, this kind of music? You know, man, I think it was just a matter of experimentation.
00:27:15
Speaker
I love rock music and I love the really enthusiastic, I love being in a band. I love Milano, that band that we were in. It was just with our best friends and my wife and her sister. We just had a lot of fun making crazy music, loud music, long songs. We just had a lot of fun with it and there wasn't really any rhyme or reason to that. I think also in my mind, in high school I was in a rock band.
00:27:44
Speaker
And I thought, well, the only way you make music is by just being in a band. I'm not a solo guy. In my mind, solo artists, I just didn't conceive of myself as a solo artist. I always thought, oh, I'm more of a band guy. My favorite artists were bands except for Sufjan and Bob Dylan. But I thought, well, my lyrics aren't as good as Bob Dylan. And I don't think I'm as creative as Sufjan. I think I'm probably more of like, maybe I'll start a band.
00:28:14
Speaker
You know, strokes or I don't know. I just saw myself a little bit more as as a band guy. Yeah. And and when you're in a band, I guess with the exception of like Sigur Ros, you know, there's not a lot of bands that have kind of quiet, songy, contemplative music. And I think musically, too, I was still learning the power of subtlety and the power of being paced. Everything was maximalist in kind of that era and
00:28:44
Speaker
Yeah, it was so funny. It wasn't until my mid-20s that I realized, I'm actually kind of a chill dude by nature. I love that kind of music, but sometimes I feel like I remember we were doing a small little tour and I was so tired and I thought to myself, we were in Ohio and it was before a show. I was so tired and I thought to myself,
00:29:09
Speaker
my gosh, now I have to muster this energy to do this show and to be this front man. It was then that it first clicked, I'm like, maybe I should do a style that's a little bit more like my personality. That was the first time I remember having the thought, maybe the maximalist thing isn't quite the center of my creative self. I still at some point would, I still would love to be in a band again and make loud music.
00:29:36
Speaker
But I think it's gonna be more of like a I dip into that and then because I think the center of what I do now is is a little bit more clear to me and a lot of people don't have that don't have that knowledge about my Stuff before like my solo stuff. Yeah that you you have that whole context so that's I've known literally no one's ever asked me that question, but it's like I
00:29:59
Speaker
So good. Yeah, man. I've been, I've been to a few of those Milano shows. Oh yeah. Dude, that was so good. I like, I remember where I worked. Right on Western? Like, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I had Western in Belmont. Western in Belmont. I remember that. Like a little editing studio in there.
00:30:17
Speaker
It was like a gaming lounge. Me and the guys who owned it were buddies. In the mornings before the lounge opened, we always just blasted music. I'm like, guys, you got to hear this album. That thing was on regular rotation for a while. We loved it. It's amazing. How are you making the decisions about what you're doing now in terms of what you're working on, what you're creating? Are you balancing between
00:30:44
Speaker
your own projects, your own goals with what you wanna do with your stuff versus like- Yeah, money and yeah. Yeah. So yeah, the center of what I'm doing is my own writing and just my own records. That's kind of what I feel like my long-term vocation and calling is, as I understand it now.
00:31:00
Speaker
So everything kind of revolves around that in my life. My last record, Keeper of Days, was kind of afforded me, literally afforded me and my family to be able to focus on that, just like
00:31:17
Speaker
We were doing a lot of touring before and that was kind of the main source of income. But with Keeper of Days, it came out right at the beginning of the pandemic and enough people listened to it that we were able to kind of live off that. And then I was working on the movie and between those things, it was like,
00:31:36
Speaker
My life became more like in the chair versus like on the road and then when that record came out I started getting a lot more requests to produce for other artists because I self-produced my last record Yeah, so that was really cool. Then it was like, oh man, I could I could still be making music, you know and working on working on great music that I believe in so last year I worked on a few records and I
00:32:00
Speaker
But I realized that it's the same source for me. If I'm working on somebody else's record, I'm just giving it all I have and I'm not holding anything back for my own stuff. It's like a limited well. There's not endless amount of creativity and energy and time. I was hoping to be a lot further with my record by the end of last year than I was. When this year came around, my wife and I had a conversation. I think I got to say no to some things that are on the table just to really finish my next album.
00:32:28
Speaker
Because that's the center of what I feel called to do. And really, it's the center. It's what we make the most money off of. That's kind of how I choose now. I'm trying to be wise with time. Do you feel like you're living your dream right now? Or do you feel like you're kind of waiting for it still?
00:32:48
Speaker
Oh, I feel like I'm living my dream. I totally do. I feel sheepish even acknowledging that, but I definitely feel like, holy cow, what a gift to be able to...
00:33:02
Speaker
you know, make music and write songs and a work hard making something that I think is cool and interesting and to do it with purpose. You know, I feel like the songs are meaningful for people and kind of carve out a space for them to kind of be with God in a very intimate place. And I would love if I was going to expand out to, you know, to continue to help people with that, like
00:33:30
Speaker
to really see the beauty in their life and in their life with God and to love holiness, to love goodness for its own sake and whether that's through retreats or... I don't know. That's the thing that I think makes me most excited
00:33:59
Speaker
I mean, I love music and to me it's fun. It's just like I enjoy writing. I enjoy everything about it. The preamps, just every annoying thing. I love it. But the thing that I think gives me so much joy is how somehow art can be more than the sum of its parts.
Living the Dream: Family & Art
00:34:22
Speaker
I think it was W.H. Auden who said, art is a physical activity with non-physical impact or something. It's a very mundane task. This is all what you do, what I do, painters. It's a very physical thing, but then the result is more than the sum of its parts, and that's just crazy. It just feels like magic.
00:34:48
Speaker
So if there's other ways to kind of do that, whether it's through art or through experience, helping people get away, that's probably where this goes. But right now, I'm happy as a clam. So you're living the dream, but is it what you thought it would be?
00:35:05
Speaker
Hmm Definitely not. No, definitely not I think adulthood is a process of realizing that what you wanted wasn't actually what you wanted I think that's whether you're an artist or not. That just feels like yeah, that feels like the grace of adulthood You know, you never thought that
00:35:22
Speaker
waking up early with a two-year-old would be the thing that brings you the most joy in an existential sense, but it is. Being a dad is infinitely more fulfilling and meaningful and joy-producing than
00:35:38
Speaker
any other role i've ever had i had no idea i would have never known that i'm like what why do we have kids like a million years ago this is the best thing ever like i want 15 you know that yeah and so same thing with music um like you said i was same thing i just kind of discovered music and then high school wanted to be a rock star and thought that was the end all be all traveling the world in a tour bus and you know just
00:36:03
Speaker
Man, just all these cool British rock stars I just admired. Now when I think of that, I just, I run in the other direction. I want nothing more than a mundane normal life where I can just go about my business with my family doing the thing that I love. I mean, that's, this is what feels like the dream to me, the sort of nine to five artist thing. It's a process of realizing that, right?
00:36:28
Speaker
Yeah. But did you have to experience that first or did you have to put the other thing down, the old dream down first before you could embrace this one? I think I did have a few experiences where I was touring, where I was gone all the time, enough. It wasn't anything. It wasn't like MTV Cribs or whatever, where it's like buses and jets and
00:36:52
Speaker
But I had enough time being away that I felt like, okay, this is cool, but it's not what I thought it was. Then definitely when you have a family, it introduces constraints that makes you really have to put some things down.
00:37:14
Speaker
Definitely had to put some things down. I mean I definitely had to put down my idea that I was gonna be traveling and I just can't be as I can't do as much. I mean single people just have way more free time and people without kids have way more free time and And that's still very very very hard. I mean I
00:37:32
Speaker
my wife and I both weekly, I mean daily sometimes we have these, and especially now that we're locked down with, we all have COVID and we're, we just can't go out. We can't do anything. We're just like, this is just, you can't be productive and it's just very hard, you know? So that's definitely something that you have to kind of negotiate in your life. I think if you're going to do the family thing and the
00:38:01
Speaker
I guess I don't know enough. Maybe everybody feels that way. Everybody with a family feels like they can't work as much because they have a family. So they have to let down some, they have to put down some idea of their own productivity for the sake of their families. It's probably everybody.
00:38:20
Speaker
Well, I think there's plenty of people who maybe should do that, but they don't. True, fair enough. Family and relationship, pay the price. That's true. And especially in my industry, I just, I did know a lot of people who were a little bit further down the road who sacrificed their kids first 10 years of their life. They missed it because they were on the road and I knew I never wanted to be that. I knew,
00:38:47
Speaker
Um, I just was like, that just feels cruel. You know, even if I didn't have like the idea that fatherhood was going to be as awesome as it was, I knew like why I don't want to be a bad, I don't want to be gone. I want to be around. My wife and I talk about it a lot as well, because like this, like filmmaking, you got to go where the stories are. You got to go, you know, it is time. Even the stuff that's not, that's not, that's local is like,
00:39:15
Speaker
you kind of got it while you're doing it. You, in order to do it well, you sort of have to give all your time, all your, cause you got to shoot when the light's best and you got to get there two hours before to get, you know, to get set, like all that kind of stuff. And yeah, it's like, it's a constant, constant equation in your mind of how much you're sacrificing and what's it worth, you know, in the big picture. A thing that is a constant theme for me in my vocation, the thing that I do is the,
00:39:45
Speaker
battle of self-doubt and that monkey on your back that, or at least on my back, that is constantly making it difficult, like cutting, pulling the rug out from under my feet or whatever. Do you, is that in your art and do you experience that and how do you deal with it? I mean, yeah, I definitely experienced that. I threatened to quit.
00:40:12
Speaker
at least 100 times a year, I feel like. I think what I'm grateful for now is I've had enough runway with my own work and with my own career to know that I might be an imposter a little bit, but I'm not 100% an imposter. I know a little bit about what I'm doing with something.
00:40:38
Speaker
And so that kind of bedrock of confidence I think does come with time, which is something that only time can give you. Like only just not giving up for amount of years, you will get better.
00:40:50
Speaker
I think somebody told me that early on and I'm glad they did because I always believed like sometimes it's just a war of who can last the longest like in art you know who kind of keeps going and keeps working at it keeps trying and then you know my wife is very encouraging I have close friends who are very encouraging
00:41:09
Speaker
But it never goes away entirely. I think the self-doubt because what we're trying to do is Something somewhat emotional, you know, it's it's like an emotional impact and if you don't feel that impact from what you're doing Sometimes it can feel like well, I suck, you know, I
00:41:27
Speaker
and not having any award to my name, or any kind of accolade. Although I think people who have that will probably tell you, even with that, you feel like, well, my best work is behind me. Or I tricked everybody. Or I tricked everybody. Exactly. So I think it's really just a matter of just hand to the grindstone, because the fact is,
00:41:51
Speaker
At some point, our best work might be behind us and that's okay too. It's funny, the more I... It really helped when we had my daughter because it's like my identity, the weight of my identity kind of shifted from being like, I'm an artist or I'm a writer or I'm a songwriter or I'm a whatever to like, I'm a dad.
00:42:14
Speaker
And at some point, my daughter's not going to need me as much as she does now. That's going to introduce its own set of complications and things to work through. But I think with Christianity, there's this idea of your identity being kind of spiritual and your value being intrinsic in the fact that you're an image of God and the fact that you have a soul and the fact that you're going to live forever, the fact that you're like,
00:42:44
Speaker
you are somebody else's poem, you know, the word in Ephesians, poema, you are created, you're his workmanship, you're his poem. So I think that's just something that especially as artists should speak to us, you know, we've
00:43:03
Speaker
somebody cared enough for us about us to have us exist and to really make us with all the unique idiosyncrasies of who we are and that that's something that we can kind of both rest in and the more we do it has this kind of I think you know I really believe now that like
00:43:21
Speaker
I believe it so much more now than I did then that like God kind of likes me and God kind of knows and loves me. And also I believe that like I'm being made into something pretty awesome. Like not in an arrogant way, but like I think God is working on me as a Christian. These are just things that I believe and those beliefs kind of
00:43:46
Speaker
you know, take root and I think have the potential to grow us into being really humble and selfless and wild artists. And so I think, yeah, that's kind of what I'm hoping, at least. In my experience, that's what I see as being the most valuable and impactful. And what I'm hoping continues to take root is that, like, I'm valuable to God, you know, I'm valuable to
00:44:11
Speaker
and really believing that. Because it is crazy also to think about it like, oh my gosh, in two generations. I don't know who my great-great grandparents were. I don't know who they were. They weren't famous people. What did they do? I have no idea. We're going to be forgotten in terms of all the people we're trying to impress now, the people I'm hoping listen to my music.
00:44:33
Speaker
But I think we're going to be alive in the eyes and in the mind and in the reality of God. I hope that my work kind of resonates in that realm and in that plane of reality. Yeah. It's a perspective that sort of allows you to play a different game if you're no longer trying to get your value from what you produce, from what other people think about what you produce. You already have found value.
00:45:03
Speaker
then you can sort of approach everything you do a lot differently. Okay, two things real quick. What was it like working with Terrence Malick on those movies, man? He was cool, man. Did you work with him directly?
00:45:17
Speaker
Yeah, and with people on the team who have become dear friends, it was a lot of trying things out. It's a very experimental process, so we recorded for A Hidden Life hundreds, and I mean hundreds of different pieces.
00:45:38
Speaker
Like to picture or he just is like, I want something kind of like this. Yep. Kind of like that. Occasionally it was to picture. Occasionally it was like, you know, sit me down with a scene in the office and I'd kind of work with my MIDI keyboard on something. But what really ended up being fruitful was like.
00:45:55
Speaker
he would send us pieces to come up with versions of, like shadows of classical pieces, smaller versions of classical pieces. And then just do it again, do it again. What about this? What if it was, what if you inverted the melody? What if you tried it with the viola instead of a violin? What if, just what if, what if, what if, what if? And so I learned like really just to love the process and love the experimentation and in my own work, I do that now a lot too.
Creative Collaboration with Terrence Malick
00:46:25
Speaker
Spaghetti at the wall, just see what sticks, see what happens. Don't get too married too soon to something. How did that even, it was like a mutual connection? Yep, one of my best friends was working for him and kind of introduced us, made the connection.
00:46:38
Speaker
Is there any, any more movie stuff that you're going to, um, not now. I mean, no, we worked on this next one called a way of the wind and they're still working on it and editing it. And it's fun to kind of be. Adjacent kind of around that community. Is there in the weeds making it and seeing little clips here and there and, uh, it's going to be amazing. That's awesome. Okay.
Living Authentically: Faith & Meaning
00:47:01
Speaker
And, um, so just, just, uh, last thing here is I just, just for you.
00:47:07
Speaker
What is living a life that has meaning, that matters, that is a life well lived?
00:47:17
Speaker
It really means to me living before God, before people. And I think in that place, you find the thing you're meant to do, whether it's art, whatever your job is, it's like you can do that, like we talked about before, before people, you can do it before God. And I think the world is helped by people living before God. The people that have made the biggest impact haven't
00:47:44
Speaker
been living to try to impress their community or their world. They've been living to try to please the God who's kind of pleased with them already. And in that, they start orphanages and make great art and lead countries with integrity and come up with products that help people.
00:48:08
Speaker
I think that's what a meaningful life is. And ultimately, you're not concerned with the masses, you're concerned with kind of the micro, like your neighbor, right? Love your neighbor as yourself. Yeah, it's wild that a family is, there's so much meaning just in a family unit. So much impact that can be made, so much beauty and joy and the whole palette of life's treasures and the whole just like everything available to you joy wise and happiness wise.
00:48:36
Speaker
is available to you with people, you know, anything better than sitting with your friends around a fire, enjoying yourself or partner that you love, kid that you made together. I mean, I think the micro is really where meaning is found, not so much in the macro. That's great.
00:48:58
Speaker
Well, thanks, man. I really appreciate it. I cannot wait to hear your new album when it comes out and looking forward to seeing what you do next. Thanks, man. Thanks for listening and for your encouragement. Yeah, of course. All right, man. We'll feel better. I hope you all feel better. Say hi to Val for me. Thank you, man. Say hi to Mo. Yeah. Yeah, we'll do. All right, dude. All right, brother. Talk to you later. Peace. Thanks, man.
Upcoming Album & Tour Announcements
00:49:31
Speaker
You can learn more about John and his music and everything he's up to by visiting his site johngaramusic.com. The link to his site is also in the episode description. I recommend checking out his music. He has a new album coming out in May of this year with singles releasing prior to that. He has some tour dates on his site and I definitely recommend checking him out if he's coming your way.
00:49:56
Speaker
All right, that was episode seven episode seven still going Next week, I think will be a bit of a different kind of week. I'm gonna try something new so hopefully hopefully we're able to do it but until then thanks for being here and See you next week for episode eight