So Near, So Far, No Cigar
But what lessons I learned! I remember talking with a friend during 2004, just after the realization of our dream of going to the USA to be rock stars slipped from out of our hands. I remember saying ‘I feel like a broken man’. Phew! If I knew at that point just how dis-empowering words like that actually are I would never have chosen them. That kind of talk doesn’t even enter my head anymore let alone exit my mouth!
We had signed a deal with a Hollywood-based music manager with some impressive credentials. We had even been through a several-month-long, ‘5-set’ game of contractual tennis via our lawyers. It was a serious contract and the excitement and the energy on the day we sat in that lawyers’s office and signed those contracts was crazy. We were going to be rock stars and it just felt unbelievable, which was probably the catalyst for what happened over the next couple of months. We heard less and less from our manager on the other side of the world and eventually he called it quits, we backed out of our contract and sat in a heap with no idea what to do or where to go next.
I felt totally deflated. There’s not really any more detail than that without going into a personal story and to be honest I don’t have the energy to bother with that anymore. It happened, it’s gone and I was to learn that the outcome of that little dance with fame and fortune was one of the best things that could have happened to me.
So summer 2004 was quite tough for me. I had quit my job and sold nearly everything I owned for this big quest to the USA and found myself jobless and with no plan and a little bit, but not that much money in the bank. I treated myself to beautiful Fender Custom Shop guitar (You’ve no doubt seen it in the videos and heard it on the recordings) and then one thing led to another and I found myself deciding to take a break from the music and going traveling. The destination I chose was South East Asia and I would be traveling for 3 months between November 2004 and February 2005.
You can read all about my travels in my South East Asia Travelog (currently being serialized until the end of 2009 with additional video clips that I never published before) and originally published at Leave the Office in November 2006. I don’t like to dwell on details and make a big thing out of the major event of that period, which was the Tsunami on December 26th. I survived it and I am more grateful than I can put into words for that. Some people were not as lucky as me and I just don’t feel like detailing my ‘adventure’ over the few days surrounding that event. I have made mention of other things that transpired, including writing a song fairly recently about it and I may tell the story in more detail one day.
The main thing though is that if it hadn’t have happened I wouldn’t be sharing my life with the woman I know I was destined to be with and I wouldn’t have my beautiful, delightful daughter, so there is a reminder for me to see the jewel in any adverse situation. I believe I have lost the right to complain about pretty much anything now after surviving that episode and what I have ended up getting out of it.
During my travels in Thailand my songwriting friend also flew out and we met up for Christmas and New Year. Of course the events that happened changed our plans quite drastically and I ended my trip a month early because we both decided we should get home and record a brand-new album. This album would be totally self-produced and magnificent. I got myself a job working shifts as soon as I returned to the UK and I spent every waking moment that I was not at work recording and mixing this album, traveling to my friend’s house with my recording gear to record his singing and the rest of the time enduring this shift work whilst all the while having this excited feeling about being a rock star again, mixed with the rather incompatible feeling of wanting to go back and live in Thailand with the woman I had felt such a connection with.
The energy I had surviving the tsunami carried me through to completing that 11-track album by mid may. I had started it in February. By the end of the year I had lost touch with the lovely woman in Thailand, moved to a new town and a new job, was feeling pretty unfulfilled again planning a trip to the USA to see a friend there who wanted to help us with our music and was totally behind what he said was a truly great album. I very breifly got to meet Huey Lewis too, which was cool!
Also by the end of 2005 the beautiful woman in Thailand had surprised me by getting back in touch and we were regularly talking, mostly on MSN messenger, during my time at work, which would have been so boring if it weren’t for that. So after some planning and another decision to go for it I was quitting my job again in February 2006 and heading off to San Francisco to be a rock star again and… well it didn’t happen!
I returned to the UK after a month in the USA and felt right back where I was nearly 2 years before in 2004. I spent a few months in limbo, not able to face the prospect of going straight back to another day job in the same old industry I had been back to so many times before and I was kept marginally sane by the contact with my lovely acquaintance in Thailand, who was starting to feel to me like a girlfriend. I woke up one morning that summer and decided I was going to Thailand again to see if there was any future with this woman or not. I couldn’t see the point in a long-distance relationship like this and I knew that she would want to find out, just like me if there any point in the two of us investing any more of our energy in what was starting to feel like a relationship.
I’ll never forget it. We both definitely knew, for sure that this was it for the both of us. We wanted to share our life together and I got this amazing feeling that I can only assume was the feeling of falling in love, for real, no mistaking love for infatuation. It was real. I came home feeling both desperately sad and excited that despite not knowing how I could do it, that I knew I was going to go back and live my life with the love of my life.
I had a very real vision for how I wanted my life to be. I was no longer fearful of such ideas as getting married, starting a family, even in a completely different country and culture to my own. How would I get back? Would I be able to? What would I do? When would I get there? The answers to those questions would have to come later and I would have to trust that they would come as long as I just started taking action, whatever action that was.
From Longing to Living:
Bill O'Leary
Derek Sivers
Maria Palma
