New Home 21

You start a band with your friends. You write some songs. You start to get some gigs. It’s all fun and good. Then the Department of Labor calls you and demands to see your payroll, which you don’t have, nor have you ever even imagined let alone considered, and you have your first mini (entrepreneurial) heart attack.

That happened to me.

Kind of reminds me of this old joke that goes (writer’s note: I didn’t say it was good or funny or even true, but I did say it’s a joke, don’t forget that please), “Marriage takes all the fun out of dating, and kids take all the fun out of marriage.”

I’ve always thought the artistic corollary to that was even more valuable: “Business takes all the fun out of creativity, and a business getting big takes all the fun out of business.”

The core ideas are similar, because they’re like my band story. It starts off as fun. Then it gets serious, and if you follow the serious rule book, eventually it turns into just another job and you miss having fun like when you started out.

Is it any surprise most creative people don’t end up in creative jobs? If you’re reading Cultish Creative, you probably get this feeling too. There’s something structurally amiss here, and us artistically-minded people need some help. Which is exactly the kind of structural mismatch Yancey Strickler is trying to solve (as if co-founding Kickstarter wasn’t enough).

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As a kid in the ‘80s, we’d occasionally open the front door or come home from school to find a surprise, weatherproof-wrapped tome, resting on our porch, not really all unlike the Amazon packages of today, and we would get so excited.

Dad taught us what to do. We’d pick it up and shout, “The new phonebook’s here! The new phonebook’s here!”

I miss that ritual. Not the least of which because as we got older, we’d add, “Millions of people look at this everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that MAKES people!”

And of course, the real killer line we grew into, that we’d trot out any time we our names written anywhere, including church bulletins, camp rosters, and year books, with additional bonus points up for grabs if you said it to anybody else finding their name in print (you know, to make sure you captured the true weight of the moment, in our family’s love language, aka said as sarcastically as possible), “I’m in print!” Then you pause, because you have to say this part maddeningly seriously, “Things are going to start happening to me now.”

We learned the moves, we learned the tones, we learned to study Steve Martin in “The Jerk” first from censored TV editions, then from VHS copies of censored TV editions, and later from Blockbuster-rented-and-dubbed uncensored VHS copies like it was a prayer at church we were expected to know or a social studies test we actually wanted to pass.

All that preamble is for me to admit I had an actual “The new phonebook’s here” moment last week, when Jared Dillian’s new book showed up in a non-descript package on my front porch, and I opened it like a little kid to see this:

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When I was piecing together a tape and then CD collection of Sly and the Family Stone years ago, I always wanted to know what happened between the first album and the second album. It’s the same band, it’s the same idea, and it’s even some of the same ideas – but, you can tell something flipped. Something is different. Something changed from the first album, when they were playing local shows and wanting national exposure when they got their record deal, to what came next.

Why was that?

It started as hobbyist curiosity. There wasn’t much of a way to find out. And then Ben Greenman’s co-written biography with Sly Stone, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin: A Memoir)” hit my desk and got the closest to solving the mystery for me, finally.

I need to do this with quotes. First, you have to know why the band came together the way it did:

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Sunday Music: Brian Wilson Received Music

Brian Wilson’s story reveals the cost and power of prophetic hypersensitivity in creative work. His ability to receive music rather than simply hear it – pulling over in tears when “Be My Baby” came on the radio, then transmuting that experience into “Don’t Worry Baby” – demonstrates how some artists operate as conduits for transcendent experiences. Wilson’s obsession with “Shortnin’ Bread” wasn’t madness but ritual, the kind of repetitive devotion that transforms simple songs into sacred communion. The deeper insight here is that creating transcendent art requires crossing the threshold between sanity and inspiration, accepting hypersensitivity as both blessing and burden.

Cycle UP

This framework challenges linear career thinking by revealing how the most fulfilling professional paths operate cyclically – student becomes teacher becomes student again, but from a new vantage point. The concept of “meta-learning” emerges when you cycle through roles, accumulating wisdom that compounds across iterations. Rather than climbing a ladder and never going back down, cyclical careers offer continuous evolution through repeated patterns of learning, teaching, and relearning. This approach transforms career transitions from scary departures into natural progressions where each cycle builds upon the last.

Why I’m Building a Creative Cult

The transition from clan-based societies to post-individual reality requires new forms of community that serve our fragmented digital selves. Just as the Catholic Church’s cousin marriage ban accidentally created modern society around 1000 AD, the internet is accidentally creating post-individual society where we need multiple communities for our multiple identities. Creative cults – intentional micro-communities built around shared aesthetics and values – become essential infrastructure for connection in an age of digital fragmentation. The key insight is embracing the “punk” philosophy of not scaling, instead creating spaces where specific parts of people can fully exist and connect.

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Do you know Ned Russin? He’s the creative force behind Title Fight and Glitterer, plus author of the novel “Horizontal Rust” – a mid-30s artist who spent years touring while honing a serious literary practice.

If not, allow me to introduce you. Ned represents small scene punk and hardcore’s evolution into new territories, moving from playing to four people in Wilkes-Barre dives to Webster Hall in New York City, all while working as a venue loader and developing as a fiction writer. I wanted to connect with him because he embodies something I value deeply: the ability to pursue multiple creative disciplines simultaneously without compromising the integrity of either.

Our conversation is LIVE now on the Just Press Record YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). Listen and you’ll hear about growing up in Pennsylvania’s DIY scene, the reality of modern touring economics, and how creative ideas complete themselves when you stay present to the process.

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