From Hotcakes to Spoiled Girl, Carly Simon Steered Her Career and Persona over the Stormy Seas of Change

Welcome back to Saucy Schemes, my 3-part series on Carly Simon’s career and my lifelong affinity with her music! When last we left our heroine, she’d enjoyed unfettered career momentum over the course of her first three album cycles, despite the cynicism shared by a certain contingent of hipster NYC music critics who felt her privileged upbringing diminished her authenticity. Following her blast into the pop culture stratosphere, a result of her marriage to James Taylor, and the subsequent release of “You’re So Vain” and No Secrets, Carly emerged as a pop rock proxy for an audience of women who connected with her just as feminism’s second wave crested, broke, and washed over the rest of the decade. Rather than prioritize meeting public expectations with her music and her persona, Carly followed her artistic and personal intuition in shaping her life, her creative output, and her image. This confluence of factors set the stage for the unpredictable, often stormy years of her career through the 1970s and 1980s.

Misfit

The first Carly Simon album I came into possession of was Boys In the Trees. It was gifted to me by a family friend named Shauna, a beautiful high school girl who gave it to me to make up for having been mean to me earlier in the day. When I approached my mom and said, “Mom! Look what Shauna gave me!” she frowned, because at first glance she thought Carly was topless on the cover. At the time, the album was a bit hit and miss for me because many of the lyrics explored themes I could barely wrap my head around. But “You Belong to Me” and “You’re the One” became instant favorites, and they’ve remained so to this day.

Despite my inability to connect with some of the tracks, there was something in Carly’s voice that continued to speak to me, the way she had over the course of my mom’s Best of Carly Simon 8-track that I was so familiar with. I knew I had to find out more about this mysterious and alluring woman’s work.

From that point forward, I frequently talked my grandparents into driving me to Tower Records during weekend visits. One thing I’d do while there is browse through the Carly Simon section, carefully examining each album. She was famous for her provocative album covers, and I’d study them closely, along with the song titles, looking for recognizable hits and trying to get an idea of what each one might sound like.

After examining her albums for what must have felt like hours to my grandparents, I’d make my choice, purchase the album, and when I got home, I’d lose myself in the musical world she’d created for it. I discovered No Secrets, Anticipation, Hotcakes, and Playing Possum in this manner, all out of time with when they’d initially been released. My grandfather was scandalized on the first of these excursions by the cover of No Secrets, which was the first of her albums I purchased. “You can see her NIPPLES!” he scolded, just in case I hadn’t noticed.

By 1978, most middle school students were preoccupied with Andy Gibb, Leif Garret, and Shaun Cassidy (if they were girls), Kiss, Foreigner, and Van Halen (if they were boys), or some sort of mix and match if they were queer like me. Even though I was used to being out of step with my middle school cohort, my musical tastes were not, except for my aversion to Kiss and my affection for Carly. According to my peers, Carly Simon was irrelevant. Ancient history. Someone your mom, aunt, or grandma might listen to. Uneager to attract more unwanted attention than I was already prone to attracting, I kept my Carly Simon fanboy proclivities to myself.

Inside Out/Upside Down (Hotcakes, 1974)

Simon’s follow up to No Secrets was Hotcakes, released in January 1974, when the former was finishing its run in the lower reaches of the charts. Carly’s image on the Hotcakes album cover is a complete 180 from the chic, liberated glamazon captured on No Secrets.

On Hotcakes, the setting is monochromatic domesticity: Simon, bun clearly about to pop out of the oven, is seated at a kitchen table, wearing a Bohemian maternity dress and flashing a toothy grin. Everything but her hair is white. She’s positively beaming, and the warmth of her smile mitigates the undeniable visual impression that she’s boxed into a corner.

Though her feet aren’t visible on the album cover, to assume she’s barefoot as well as pregnant doesn’t require much of a stretch, especially given the existence of a delightful outtake from the session in which she’s standing before a vintage “Atomic Girl” sideshow banner (“Dangerous! Exciting! Educational! Thousands of Volts!”), her palms joined at her chest as if in prayer. She’s wearing the same floor-length dress, the same toothy grin, and she is, indeed, barefoot. Second wave feminism’s existence was, in part, a result of women rejecting the barefoot and pregnant trope (among others) of the 1950s and 60s, as dictated to them by the patriarchy. I can’t help but assume that Simon’s choice to inhabit this trope in the moment she did was deliberate.

The dichotomy between No Secrets and Hotcakes is not just symbolic or conveyed through her image. The LP’s first track, “Safe and Sound,” directly addresses the tension between the two versions of herself (the one beheld by the public eye, and the one she was constructing for herself). The song’s verses provide a laundry list of tongue in cheek examples that signify an unstable social order: Roman whores seeking a better way, Mexican toreadors turning gay, doped up Buckingham Palace guards, naked motorcycle gangs on Hollywood Boulevard.

In the song’s last verse, Carly sings “New York women want me sounding off like a suffragette.” This line finishes her list of bizarre circumstances evidencing the outside world’s insanity, and its placement at the end of the list is telling, as if she’s created the examples that precede it only so that she could arrive at this point. She comes off as dismissive and amused by the expectation, but she’s also acknowledging her status as a feminist proxy. Carly is anticipating the derision of feminists, many of whom already found her suspect as a feminist figure. She’s preemptively pushing back against the women who expect her to behave like a feminist, or more accurately, their idea of one.

If we can equate feminism with Carly exercising her agency as an adult woman, pursuing marriage and motherhood when she did was one of the most feminist things she could have done; she was making a choice to build the life she desired by way of marriage and motherhood. What she desired didn’t comport with how contemporary feminists were defining feminism, though. To many of them, Carly’s choice looked like two steps back.

Nevertheless, Hotcakes was a huge hit upon its release and enjoyed a warm critical reception. It peaked at №3 on the Billboard albums chart and went gold (sales of over 500K) just 11 days after its release. Its lead single, “Mockingbird,” an energetic duet between Simon and Taylor, peaked at №5 on the Billboard pop singles chart, and was certified Gold (sales of 1M+) by the RIAA. The album’s success indicated that audiences were willing to follow Carly down her traditional, domestic fairy tale path; they wanted to believe that falling in love, getting married, and starting a family was still a dream worth having. As long as she could successfully pull it off, they were with her.

Hotcakes was also the first indicator that Simon felt no obligation to map her life or artistic course based on what was expected of her. Her audience was going to have to chase her, rather than the other way around. The dichotomy between the personas projected on No Secrets and Hotcakes was enough to induce whiplash, especially given the time and context of their releases. And while the whip was definitely curled at this point, she hadn’t even cracked it yet!

Free Up Your Spirit (Playing Possum, 1975)

Playing Possum, released in April 1975, is remembered for its cover more than for its music, which is unfortunate because it’s a solid collection of tracks that hold up to 21st century scrutiny. The album is primarily a celebration of the body, physical intimacy, and Carly’s comfort with inhabiting her sexuality.

The album’s first single (“Attitude Dancing”) was a disco-flavored dance song that picked up sonically where the Hotcakes track “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” left off, with a horn section added and a more propulsive, danceable beat. “Attitude Dancing” was the only Top 40 single the album produced, peaking at №21, and while it’s a fun song to get up and boogie to, it isn’t representative of the album’s overall vibe, which was closer to the acoustic and piano-based ruminations of her previous work.

The controversy over the album’s cover was real, but Carly was in no danger of being canceled, and she shrewdly navigated the backlash. Simon appears to have known enough about playing the long game (something she’s never spoken of directly but has shrewdly demonstrated for decades) to safely assume any blowback she received over Playing Possum’s cover wouldn’t tank her career. And it didn’t.

Carly handled the controversy with finesse. An item in Time magazine’s 5/5/75 People section opined that Carly’s “folksy laments and ginghamy good looks were a staple of the early ’70s;” that she “shows some new angles” and has “switched to a skimpy chemise and earthier songs on her new record.” (btw I love how they refer to the early 70s-in 1975-as if they’re already the distant past). The Time piece quotes Simon alone, who calls Playing Possum “a body album,” and describes the vibe she and photographer Norman Sheef created during the shoot by playing funky music, which led to her performing a strip tease for him. In other words, the Time item is a promotional piece, placed in the nation’s dominant weekly news magazine at the time, which enjoyed a weekly circulation of over four million. Not quite evidence of a backlash.

In a cover profile for a May 1975 issue of Rolling Stone (no longer the counterculture rag it had once been, but still a harbinger of “hip capitalism”), Carly was the source of the claim that Sears (the Walmart of the 70s) refused to stock the album before it was even released. She also conducted part of the interview while browsing in a NYC erotic art gallery, casually telling the dealer about one piece, “Quite nice, but not erotic enough.” As Sheila Weller recounts in Girls Like Us, after passing on the too-tame erotic art piece, Carly defiantly stood her ground when asked about the album cover’s image, asserting there was a distinction to be made between being treated like a “piece of meat” by others and expressing her own carnality: “Being attractive sexually is not something which I feel guilty about or embarrassed by in any way. I feel that it’s great.”

Despite the feminist energy that fueled her early solo career trajectory, audiences were willing to embrace her detour into domesticity, as long as she reaffirmed the pre-feminist fairy tale version of the life trajectory she’d chosen by going the marriage route. Glowing, expectant mother-to-be and hot wife were both parts of the same fairy tale, and so far, she seemed to be pulling it off. Playing Possum was her third consecutive Top 10 album, peaking at №10 in June 1975, but the album had a relatively short shelf life, falling off the charts after just 17 weeks.

Even though her sexualized image on Playing Possum irked some feminists, no one could make the claim that Playing Possum wasn’t a hit. But her commercial momentum was on the downturn, which her label must have sensed. When they released The Best of Carly Simon in November 1975, they chose to include an album cut (“Night Owl”) and a B-side (“We Have No Secrets”) from No Secrets, rather than the 2nd and 3rd singles from Playing Possum (both of which charted), a choice that was most likely sales-driven, but didn’t show much confidence in her recent output.

Hotcakes and Playing Possum effectively captured the euphoric emotional and sexual aspects of her honeymoon phase with Taylor, but the ambivalence of the Playing Possum track “Slave” would come to act as a bridge to the darker side of marriage she’d explore in subsequent releases. In the song, she’s still lost in her love and infatuation for Taylor, but she’s starting to come out of her daze and contemplate an unnerving realization: I love how this feels, but it might not be good for me.

Leaving Out Your Heart (Another Passenger, 1976)

By 1976’s Another Passenger, the cracks in her marriage weren’t just beginning to show through her work, they were on full display, and the foundation was looking unstable. Just four of the album’s dozen tracks focus on things unrelated to marital strife. Most of the 8 tracks that do are performed as theatrical music vignettes, lending some credence to Carly’s dubious claim at the time that they were not autobiographical. “Half a Chance,” the hairline crack that opens the album, finds her timidly begging her partner to not check out on their marriage without trying to save it first. You need look no further than several of the other song titles (“It Keeps You Running,” “Fairweather Father,” “He Likes to Roll”) to give you an idea of where her head and emotions were during this period.

Simon’s denial that Another Passenger’s tracks had anything to do with her marriage is hard to swallow. She may have written those songs at a remove, and perhaps convinced herself she’d made their observations through characters she’d invented (her own imaginary proxies, if you will), but the issues they explore are clearly not only important to her, but lived in. Her confusion, her fear, and her anger are all on display. Her expectations of what being married to James Taylor would be like are shattering over the course of this album, and she’s still so caught up in it that she hasn’t seemed to realize yet that she’s watching them shatter.

Despite comparatively lukewarm sales (a chart peak of №29 and no top 40 singles), it was notably well-reviewed in the quarters that tended to dismiss her work, and her core fan base didn’t ignore her. But for Carly’s mainstream audience, the casual fans happy to come along for the ride, so long as she kept singing “Mockingbird” with James and didn’t make them think too hard about what it meant if this marriage thing didn’t work out, the songs about marital problems wouldn’t do. The honeymoon phase presented over the previous two album cycles should be followed by the nesting phase; the part where you dig in, raise your kids, and fill your home with the furniture and tchotchkes that will come to reaffirm the already-mapped-out phases of the life path you’ve chosen. All this marriage angst appeared to be off putting.

Shaken, Not Stirred (Boys In the Trees, 1978)

Carly rebounded in a very big way with the July 1977 release of the James Bond theme “Nobody Does It Better,” which became an international hit that peaked at №2 in the U.S. and remained there for three weeks. It couldn’t snatch the top spot out of the death grip Debby Boone had on it with her monster hit “You Light Up My Life,” which parked at №1 for 10 consecutive weeks. “Nobody Does It Better” became Carly’s longest-charting hit, spending 8 weeks in the Top 10 and remaining on the Hot 100 for twenty-five consecutive weeks. The song received a Grammy nom for Song of the Year at the 20th annual ceremony in 1978, Oscar and Golden Globe noms for Best Song, and Simon herself received her own Grammy nom for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female. Even though all the awards went to “You Light Up My Life,” (damn you, Debby Boone!), the single’s massive success thrust her back into the cultural zeitgeist in a way she hadn’t been since Hotcakes.

Enter Boys In the Trees and Carly as a sexy, East coast sophisticate for the disco era. The album cover sexualized her again, but the photographer this time was a woman, the photo not a spontaneous candid but staged and artistic. There was no controversy, no feminist pearl clutching over a sexualized female body this time out, even though the Danica leotard she’s wearing up top was airbrushed onto the photo (she was topless in the original image). The album won the Grammy for best album package at the 21st Annual Grammy Awards in 1979.

Carly flirted with disco on the album’s Top 10 hit “You Belong to Me,” and embraced it fully on the track “Tranquillo (Melt My Heart).” The rest of the tracks fit safely within the singer/songwriter wheelhouse her base and casual fans enjoyed most from her, even as she continued to expand the scope of her sound. “You Belong to Me” peaked at №6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned Carly a Grammy nom for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female (the award went to Anne Murray, for “You Needed Me”). Boys In the Trees was certified platinum just four months after its release, peaked at №10, and remained on the Billboard albums chart for 29 weeks.

In a June 1978 cover story for Rolling Stone, in which the author starts off by wishing he was Carly’s toddler son Benjamin because “all he has to do is cry and Carly Simon sticks her breast in his mouth,” (see how far we’ve come?) Simon gave her takes on morality (“Morality is what I can do and still live with myself.”) and sexual infidelity (“…I’ve never bought that open-marriage thing. I’ve never seen it work. But that doesn’t mean I believe in monogamy. Sleeping with someone else doesn’t necessarily constitute an infidelity.”).

These disco-era takes on marriage-related topics would fall out of favor at the dawn of the 80s, but in the late 70s they sounded sophisticated and pragmatic. At the same time, she spent much of the interview in her kitchen, cooking up a batch of deli-style comfort food, demonstrating that, despite her sophisticated airs and her ability to navigate contemporary sexual mores with aplomb, she was still just a grounded mama bear at heart.

This Cruel and Lovely Valley (Spy, 1979 to Spoiled Girl, 1985)

1979’s Spy marked the start of a commercially diminished period for Carly that lasted nearly a decade, but it was also a period in which she was the most creatively adventurous she’d ever been. It’s also worth noting that her persona became more consistent (if not fixed) moving forward, as an artist and a woman coping with the dissolution of her marriage, and later finding love in new relationships while discovering and exploring other aspects of life through her work.

Expectations for Spy were high, as it appears to have been designed to be Boys In the Trees Part 2 (Upbeat lead single? Check. Arif Mardin producing? Check. Disco song for the clubs? Check.). But it never caught fire on the charts. Despite an entertaining performance video for its lead single, “Vengeance,” wherein Carly hams it up like only she can, the album peaked at №45, remained on the charts for a mere 13 weeks, and was relegated to the indignity of the cut out bins in short order.

She moved from Elektra to Warner Bros. for a fresh creative start, resulting in 1980’s Come Upstairs, a foray into new wave pop that fared better than Spy, peaking at №36 and enjoying a 32-week chart run. The album produced the hit single “Jesse,” which was a stylistic throwback to her 70s work, but with country-flavored guitars added. It was certified gold by the RIAA (1M+ copies sold), peaked at №11, and remained on the Hot 100 for nearly six months.

Her standards album, 1981’s Torch, was the first of its kind by an American artist that decade, establishing a trend that wouldn’t catch on commercially until Linda Ronstadt’s What’s New a couple of years later. Her 1983 release Hello Big Man was considered a return to form on which she also dabbled in reggae with Sly and Robbie, but it stalled at №69 during its brief 17-week chart run.

1985’s Spoiled Girl, a glossy 80s synth-pop experiment that credited no less than 9 producers (including Don Was, Phil Ramone, and Arthur Baker), was an unmitigated critical and commercial disaster. Its poor reception (Rolling Stone deemed it “utterly inconsequential”) resulted in her new label Epic Records dropping her from its roster; Simon later stated that once sales figures came in, she couldn’t even get them to return her calls. As most Simon fans know, however, Spoiled Girl boasts some of the best hidden gems in her catalog.

It was a new era, though, right? Madonna and Janet Jackson had arrived, and while VH1 provided an outlet for pop stars of a certain age, most of them were forced to design and inhabit new lanes that the main stage no longer had room to accommodate. Several artists from the prior decade were struggling to maintain relevance before admitting defeat and accepting relegation to legacy act status. Other artists, such as Heart, Fleetwood Mac, Aerosmith, and Elton John stumbled commercially at the dawn of the 80s, but regained their momentum as the decade unfurled. Some even enjoyed commercial success that eclipsed their 70s output.

The perception of the general public (and the industry) of Carly as a 70s relic was going to be hard to shake. That whip in her hand appeared to have gone slack, what with all the musical genre-hopping she’d been throwing at the wall over the first half of the 80s, with nothing appearing to stick.

The question for her fans (including me because, despite Spoiled Girl, I never doubted her) wasn’t “Why?” (see what I did there?), but “When?” When was Carly Simon going to coil up that whip, spin it over her head, and crack it again like we knew she could, and would, do?

What would she be serving the next time she came around?

This is the second in a 3-part series called “Saucy Schemes” that explores Carly Simon’s career and my affinity with her music. You can read Part 1 here.

Carly Simon’s website offers access to the new album, Comes In Waves, including a “Behind the Songs” feature that offers images of draft lyric sheets, photos, and other ephemera. It also offers a first look inside the extensive multimedia archive she’s building.

Walter Neff’s Carly Simon-Album Covers blog celebrates Carly’s career through analysis of each of her album covers as representations of the evolution of her artistic expression and public persona.

My Spotify playlist Saucy Schemes-Carly Simon Vibes provides hours of Carly Simon listening enjoyment. My personal taste is the driver behind the playlist. Forgive me if I left out one of your favorites.

Visit my website for more of my writing and upcoming video content.

Cracking the Whip with Carly Simon was originally published in Rock n’ Heavy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was three years of age when I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Much like love, I do not necessarily believe I chose it; rather, it chose me.

My Mom had plans to see one of her closest friends. She picked me up from nursery school and asked if I wanted to go with her or go home and wait for my Dad and stay with him.

My Dad got home early now. No longer a detective working for the Philadelphia Police Department. He went back to school (for reasons I’ll explain some other time) and became a broker.

Ah…a broker in the 80s. They made epic movies about this time. No wonder my Father walked straight into the kitchen when he got home from work and grabbed the tums out of the kitchen cabinet even before he picked me up and whirled me around the living room and made me feel as if I could truly fly. My Father made me feel like I could do anything... anything that was important to me. My Father is the reason I am a songwriter.

For whatever reason, I did not give my ‘stock answer…’ “I want to go home and be with Daddy.” This particular day, I decided to go with my Mom and visit with her and her friend who had recently bought a new home.

She had really cool stuff. She had this one thing (I wish I had a picture of it) that was this square box, filled with sand, that sat on an end table. It had this sort of a steel point, attached to a wire, and depending on how gently you touched it, and in what direction…you would make something beautiful in the sand. No two designs could ever be the same. Much like moments. Very special moments that change the course of your whole entire life.

There were all sorts of cool things like that. My Mom wouldn’t think to have things like that, because the way her mind worked…sand = me running around with our dog = running into table = Sand on carpet = Mess. My Mom did not like mess. How she and my Father came together, rather stayed together... well, I heard stories about their first year of marriage. Had the TV show ‘The Odd Couple’ not come years before they married, I would swear someone stole the idea of that script simply from watching this beautiful insanity play out.

Back to all the cool things. Her friend was open and allowed me to explore. I loved to explore. I got to see her daughter’s bedroom. Her husband’s office. The kitchen also had cool things and the dining room had abstract art everywhere. I have never had a basement. To this day, I do not know what having an unfinished or finished basement is like. I never thought I was missing out on anything…little did I know my purpose was in a place I did not even know existed….

This is Gary…the one in that first article I had ever seen about anything regarding that demo…I still have it…somewhere in this mess…of sand…that my Mom would be very upset with me that I didn’t put it in a better place. My Mom taught me more than I could ever describe…I never saw the importance of some of the things she thought were vital until she was gone. So now, when I’m dusting, or just washing the dishes…I really hope, somehow, she is watching..but back to that day…

To my amazement, I saw a very large upright player piano. I couldn’t stop staring at it. But it had this opening inside, towards the middle/top of the piano. I did not know what would happen if I touched it. I didn’t want to hurt it. So I ran back upstairs and asked if I could play it? My Mom’s friend asked me ‘if I had ever played a piano before.’ I said “no…just my toy piano that my Grandmom bought me.’ She asked if I wanted to hear what a player piano sounded like? I really didn’t. But I wanted to be polite. But more than that…I figured, if she was going to let me play it, I should let her show me what it could do. And that toy piano..I gave it to my son. As you can see…he really wasn’t all that impressed. Do you know that Tom Waits song..’The Piano Has Been Drinking?’ That’s pretty much what I think of when I look at this picture.

It was pretty cool, I suppose. It looked like the wind was playing on the keys. But it did not move me. Not like the records and cassettes my parents and friends bought for me. Very much the same way I dislike technology. I have since the very beginning.. (My first memory, junior year in college, the professor asking everyone to come up, sign the paper with your email address so he could send us the syllabus.) Every single person got up. And there I was, sitting there, wondering what in the hell is an email address? Am I supposed to know what that is?) Yep. I sure was. And I didn’t. And it was not until after I was married did my ex husband teach me how to use a computer…

Finally I could play it. It was my turn and I knew I didn’t have a lot of time till we had to go home and have dinner. I very gently touched each note. Then started playing two notes at a time. Then three. Then I was playing with both of my hands. ‘Where have you been all my life?’

My three year old little mind could only think that it wouldn’t fit in our apartment at the time…but we were getting ready to buy our first home. And come hell or high water, if I had to keep my room looking perfect, scrub toilets…get a paper route…I was going to have one of these beautiful translators. That’s what the piano felt like, to me. I sat down, however I was feeling, whatever I was thinking, if I could not speak it (and I never had a problem conveying my feelings), but some things are confusing. Or sad. Or you just don’t know how to really explain it to anyone else…only my Father. He understood. Because that night I went home and explained it to him. Even though he wasn’t a musician. He made me a promise. My Father always kept his word. Just one of the many reasons that I loved him so….

The day my Father and I walked into the shop (sadly, just a few years ago was nearly destroyed by all the riots.

“Steinway Store and New Steinway Pianos Damaged in Philly Riots) Jacobs Music, an iconic Steinway Piano Store in Downtown Philadelphia, suffered extensive damage and piano destruction during looting in the early hours of June 1, 2020.”

My Father just happened to pass away May 31st. (Obviously not the same year…) That was also my son’s due date.

I made a b line to the white baby grand! Ha! First, I did not know this was identical to Lennon’s very famous piano. Did anyone watch the show ‘Mad About You’? One of my all time favorite shows. I think I’m still a little bit in love with Paul Reiser. I loved Woody Allen too..(until he married his ‘daughter..’ ) and then there’s George Carlin…and wouldn’t ya know it…not that I put all my stock in the mbti, however, I’ve studied it extensively as well as Carl Jung, and it most definitely resonates and I smiled one big smile when I first learned of his personality type…

George Carlin MBTI

George Carlin is most commonly typed as ENFP (Extraverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Perceiving). This suggests George Carlin is Passion-fueled, Visionary dreamer, Playful & youthful spirit and Creative rebel & rule-breaker. (I also found out at age three, I too am an ENFP).

However, where men are concerned, I really don’t have a ‘type.’

Yoko actually had a couple of cameos on the show…Paul was a big fan. Yoko wanted Paul to do a documentary on ‘Wind’ and he began to lose his mind, because how exactly can one do that? (Not lose your mind..that’s easy…) Though I don’t make documentaries…even in jest, Yoko is just a little bit ‘out there.’

My Dad shot me one of his many famous looks and I already knew what he was going to say…but I wanted to hear it anyway…”Not today kid. You’ve got good taste though. One day, and I guarantee…you won’t need my help or anyone else’s…you’ll buy this piano, all by yourself…we can’t afford this one. Not yet, anyway. May I make a suggestion? Black is more elegant…don’t you think?” Right again. *Sigh*

We finally chose together an upright brown wood Steinway console. It was tuned perfectly. I wasn’t used to that, and couldn’t understand why even the piano in my kindergarten music class with my most favorite teacher on earth didn’t always sound right in my head. It actually hurt my head. The one thing my Father couldn’t explain, my favorite teacher could…and she explained perfect pitch and how it’s a blessing and a curse.

I always found it so funny that her name was the complete opposite of her. The antithesis of what the name, rather the word implies. She couldn’t have been more authentic if she tried.

She most definitely heard from me. Senior year high-school..I got early acceptance, so I no longer really had to show up…at least for the classes I wasn’t interested in. Mrs. Bogusz wrote a letter on my behalf, asking if I could come just half a day and be an assistant teacher for the year.

Playing music…singing, playing any instrument, composing…that’s a cakewalk in comparison to teaching. Why attorneys are millionaires, and teachers get zilch…I’ll never understand. Other than being a parent, teachers are the unsung heroes of the world. At least the really good ones are.

That piano…my first piano, the greatest gift (that you can purchase) that I have ever been given. Because he believed in me. He did not give in to my every demand. Not even close. When you have a Father, who was in the infantry in the army, a cop, a detective no less…there was no bullshit allowed in my house. No fleeting distractions. Especially an expensive one. I didn't care about cable (though MTV was all the rage at this time, and of course I loved it, before bizarre reality shows took over). Why? Why does everyone have to mess with perfection? (If it ain't broke…for the love of God…Don't Fix It!)

I find myself still asking…is nothing sacred anymore? Nobody answers…

I lost my Father when I was fourteen years old. I was sent to therapy immediately. I told that doctor the exact same thing that I told the next one, and the next…’ I will go on. That is what he would have wanted. And I’m the last. (Not the very last Lerner on the face of the Earth…but in my family. Our lineage. ) I have no brothers to carry on our name. I am the only one left…to tell the story. Of all these people…these amazing, funny, bright, loyal, loving, hardworking people, but him…my Father. I will never be the same. I will have very happy times. And sad ones. And probably very hard ones, and he won’t be here to make it all better. I have to figure out a way to do it all on my own. But I will see him in every flower in spring. The first tulip. The only one we planted correctly. All the rest we planted upside down. (True story). One lone yellow tulip. It blooms every year. And I cry. And I laugh. And I feel him laughing too. I can still hear him laughing…My Father’s laugh was full of life. It was infectious. It was real.

I look for him in every person I meet. His character. Honesty. His Integrity. I have yet to find him. I thought I did. A few times. Those were my mistakes. Not just for wanting to find him again, but for sharing secrets I never should have uttered. For there are some who like to pretend. They listen closely. Not because they care. They’re taking notes. Like a court stenographer. And they tell you they are all the things that have been missing for a while. And you so badly want to believe it. Now, I say nothing. I may have just said a mouthful while writing down my story of those footsteps towards my purpose…trust me when I say, I haven’t even scratched the surface. But I’ll never be the same.

I said those exact words to my therapist just last week. And no, I’m not crazy. And I never needed to find something to numb me. And those anti depressants they never worked, so let’s find another plan…shall we? And we did. Well, I did. I went back to the beginning. And try as I might, rather they try. To diagnose something that they could never understand. You’ll find it in books, though. A very good example…Robert Browning. Elizabeth Browning. Very different type of love. Still love, nonetheless. Read the words..and guess what my Father called me? His nickname for me…and though he was an avid reader…I do not think Elizabeth Barrett Browning was on his list of books he had yet to read. He called me ‘Ba.’ And made up a song. To get me to sleep. He actually was the original songwriter in our family. It was short and to the point.

“Go to sleep, little baby…go to sleep my pie. You’re the best little Ba, that I ever did spy.”

Robert Browning called Elizabeth Barrett Browning "Ba" because it was a nickname she was known by in her family, according to a post on Blogger.com. She had a ring engraved with the letters that Browning deciphered as "Ba". He was initially surprised to learn the meaning of the letters and used the nickname in his letters to her.

And then there's Freud…”It is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.”

Still…I have my piano.

How did Einstein (one of my idols) feel about music exactly? Albert Einstein believed that music and science were both nourished by the same sort of longing. He saw music as a way to tap into emotions beyond words and formulas. He found joy and solace in music, using it as a ‘psychological safety valve’. He often thought in terms of music…images and intuitions, drawing directly from his experiences as a musician before converting them into logic, words, and mathematics.

I never liked math. I never went to class. It’s a wonder I graduated….yet, I learned to love it. When I learned how to listen. Stop being so stubborn.

Isn’t it amazing… we can convince ourselves so easily that we can not do something…why is it then…that it is so hard for so many to do the opposite? Just imagine that potential we all could tap into if we simply told ourselves that we can.

And all that love. That pain. That longing. All the stories go through it. Through my piano. And I am once again at peace. It saved me. Because one person believed in me and gave me that gift so I could utilize an even bigger one. And be happy. And make others happy. I have yet to meet a person who says…”Nah…I don't really dig music..”

Everything he told me I would do, I did it. So far. Everything he told me about this world, he was right. To quote Shakespeare…”Love All. Trust a Few. Do Wrong To None.”

Everything is connected. Everything. Call it God. The Universe. Energy. Intuition. Love. Music…it’s the universal language. Exactly like a smile. Isn’t it funny…We all smile in the same language.

‘Instant Karma’ was originally published in Rock n’ Heavy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Claudia G. Petersen

So this one’s about something that is more an aesthetic I chase than something I know intimately on a personal level - I’m going to introduce you to a li’l peek into a world you’ll very probably never knew existed - it’s a dream more than a topic which i command from personal experience: The kissa aesthetic listening room…

The first thing a proper jazz kissa takes from you is your right to treat music as wallpaper.

Not in an austere, monastic, phones-in-a-basket way. More like this: you walk in from a street designed to sell you things at speed; the door closes; the lamps are low; the records are already moving; two enormous loudspeakers stare from the far wall with the patient authority of furniture that knows more than you do. Someone places coffee on a coaster. Nobody asks what you do. Nobody puts on a playlist called late-night vibes. And then, almost offensively, you are expected to listen.

That is the trick. The Japanese jazz kissa - the listening café, bar, refuge, shrine, or beautifully overcommitted hi-fi parlour - looks like an aesthetic. In fact it is an argument: that attention is not free, and that recorded music deserves a room built around its consequences.

For most of us, this is a suspicious proposition. We own more music than any previous generation and hear less of it than ever.

A café built around scarcity

Kissa is a shortened form of kissaten, broadly meaning a tea- or coffee-drinking shop. A jazz kissa is something much more particular: a Japanese café or bar where recorded jazz is played through serious equipment for deliberate, communal listening. It is not a jazz club with bad sightlines and an £18 cocktail. It is not a coffee shop with a playlist fighting an espresso grinder. The record is the event; the drink is what gives your hands somewhere to go.

The culture began in pre-war Japan, Tokyo’s Blackbird is commonly cited as an early example, opening in 1929, and surged in the post-war decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, imported jazz records and sufficiently good domestic systems were beyond the reach of many ordinary listeners. A kissa owner could acquire the records, the amplifiers, the giant horn-loaded speakers and the knowledge; the customer could enter that world for the price of coffee.

This is the first twist I knew was worth stealing for a Medium article: the jazz kissa was not originally a luxury fantasy. It was cultural infrastructure.

It was a workaround for inequality. A communal answer to the question: what if the records are expensive, the systems are expensive, flats are small, and the music matters anyway? You did not need to own a wall of Blue Note originals or persuade a landlord that twin cabinets the size of refrigerators were “domestic.” You needed a seat, a quiet hour, and perhaps enough money for coffee.

In other words, the original listening bar was not built to separate the connoisseur from everyone else. It was built to let a student, a shift worker, a lonely obsessive, a future musician, or someone with a very good coat borrow the same impossible experience.

That egalitarian beginning has been quietly lost in translation.

The expensive-looking mistake

Today, “Japanese listening bar” has become shorthand for a particular international mood: walnut, amber glass, brushed brass, smoked mirrors, Japanese whisky, rare records displayed as if they have diplomatic immunity. New listening bars are appearing far beyond Japan - in London, Sydney, Oakland, Mexico City and Buenos Aires - while many older Japanese kissa are disappearing.

The export version is often gorgeous. It is also liable to misunderstand the assignment.

The easy formula goes like this:

• Buy a pair of vintage speakers with enough mythology to start arguments online.
• Put them where guests can photograph them.
• Source a turntable that looks industrious from three metres away.
• Add a shelf of records no one is allowed to touch.
• Illuminate the room as if an art dealer has just left.
• Charge enough for a Negroni to finance a small domestic amplifier.

And, crucially, make the music cool enough to confer personality but quiet enough not to inconvenience conversation.

That last bit is where the whole thing collapses.

A genuine jazz kissa is not primarily a design language. It is an environment engineered to protect a particular social act: attentive listening. The oversized system is not a flex. It is the physical mechanism by which a recording stops being an invisible accompaniment and becomes an inhabitable place. Sources describe jazz kissa as spaces for dedicated listening, often at conversation-killing volume, with large collections, dim interiors and carefully considered high-quality systems; some venues even used custom loudspeakers built for their rooms.

The speakers are not décor. They are the thesis.

And that is why they can look faintly absurd. Enormous Altec-style horns. Monolithic wooden cabinets. Tube amplifiers glowing like tiny industrial chapels. Cable runs with the gravitas of municipal plumbing. A component that could have paid for a reasonable holiday, specifically designed to do one thing: make the cymbal decay on a fifty-year-old recording feel like it is occurring in the air just above the table.

No sensible person begins with that sentence and ends with, “I’ll take two.”

Yet the kissa understands something modern luxury spaces frequently forget: the point of expensive equipment is not to look expensive. The point is to make an experience feel inevitable.

The room that makes music physical

Picture the scene at its best.

Outside: wet pavement, sodium light, the faint problem of the modern world continuing without you. Inside: dark timber, worn leather, a narrow counter, framed sleeves and yellowed jazz magazines occupying every spare inch of wall. There are no giant screens flashing at you. No sound-reactive LEDs attempting to give the room a software update. There may be a potted ficus with glossy, almost black leaves; a shelf full of records arranged by a logic known only to its custodian; an old rug that has absorbed decades of arguments about saxophone players.

The room does not look “minimal.” It looks accumulated.

This matters. A kissa interior should feel less like an interior design project and more like somebody’s long-term conviction made habitable. The best spaces have friction: dense shelves, imperfect wood, a chair that is too low in exactly the right way, glassware with weight, lamps that carve out islands of visibility rather than flooding the room. If there is a fireplace, it should be on. If there are cushions, they should look like they have survived a human life. If there are plants, they should be lush enough to suggest that someone has remembered to water them while maintaining a record collection of alarming seriousness.

Then the needle lands.

Not a polite little sound. Not music “in the background.” The bass occupies the floorboards. A double bass acquires wood, tension, fingers, a body. The room becomes subtly architectural: the left speaker, the right speaker, the wall behind them, the silence between tracks, the held breath before a solo resolves. You are not merely hearing a record. You are inside the decisions made when it was recorded.

That can be an oddly emotional thing to admit. We are trained to describe better sound in technical language - detail, imaging, transient response, low-end extension - because technical language prevents us from saying the more embarrassing truth: sometimes a good system makes you feel briefly returned to yourself.

The real luxury is enforced attention

The most subversive thing about the kissa is not that it is expensive.

It is that it does not optimise for you.

The owner chooses. The system is already there. The record has a side. You do not skip after 19 seconds because the opening failed to deliver enough immediate content. You do not check your messages during the bridge because the room, quietly but unmistakably, tells you that would be embarrassing. In some traditional kissa, loud conversation was actively discouraged; the culture’s defining premise is shared, focused listening rather than music as social lubricant.

This makes the jazz kissa feel almost politically perverse in an era built around preference menus.

Every other service says: choose your soundtrack, customise your beverage, personalise the algorithm, tell us your dietary requirements, confirm that you are still watching. The kissa says: sit down. This is the record. It has been selected by somebody who cared enough to build this room around it. Pay attention.

It turns out that surrendering a little control can feel extravagant.

The contemporary listening bar often sells rare whisky, elaborate interiors and imported design signals. Those things have their pleasures. But the deeper luxury is stranger and much harder to buy: an hour in which nothing needs your response. No productivity theatre. No branded “experience.” No compulsion to prove you are having a good time by documenting it before it ends.

You are simply allowed to be a person sitting in a chair while a great recording happens.

For anyone accustomed to working, scrolling, maintaining, comparing, optimising and generally being online in the same room as every part of their life, that begins to look almost indecently luxurious.

The fantasy system

Of course, there is a version of this dream with a price tag.

The full-fat kissa-at-home vision is not modest. It contains a proper listening room, or at least the right end of a living room, with serious loudspeakers placed well away from walls; robust amplification; a turntable, cartridge and phono stage that do not turn vinyl into a decorative liability; acoustic treatment subtle enough not to make the place resemble a podcast studio; good chairs; a record collection that has been lived with rather than merely acquired; and the freedom to play music at a level where its dynamic range can wake up.

Then there is the soft expenditure, which may be worse.

The perfect low lamp. The heavy curtain. The vintage sideboard. The Japanese coffee cups. The wool rug. The plants. The tiny but devastatingly good tray. The ashtray, even if nobody smokes, because apparently history needs props. The shelving. The art. The way you begin saying “I just want something simple” before spending two months learning about paper lanterns, 1970s Danish cabinetry and whether a particular teak finish will make your speaker veneers look too orange.

This is how a listening room becomes a lifestyle project, and how a lifestyle project becomes a mild financial event.

The unreachable version is seductive precisely because it is complete. It promises not only excellent sound but a different category of evening: fire lit, rain against glass, coffee going cold because a record has you pinned to the chair, the room in that peculiar hour when its shadows become richer than its objects. You are not just purchasing equipment. You are purchasing an excuse to stop.

And yes: access to the full version is privileged. Space is privilege. A tolerant household is privilege. Neighbours who will not interpret a bass clarinet as an act of aggression are privilege. High-quality audio is expensive, and the point at which the last few percentage points become audible can swallow money with the serene confidence of a black hole.

Pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

But the original kissa gives us a better answer than either consumer defeatism or audiophile cosplay.

We have kissa at home

You do not need a Tokyo lease, £20,000 of valve amplification, or speakers rescued from an abandoned cinema to make a listening space.

You need to decide that listening is allowed to be the main activity.

Start with the boringly powerful things:

• Put the speakers where they can work, not where they disappear. If possible, pull them clear of the front wall, create a roughly symmetrical listening position, and ensure neither is trapped behind a plant, cabinet or apologetic pile of life admin.
• Make one seat the obvious place to listen. A chair pointed at the system says something different from a sofa pointed at a television.
• Remove the visual tyranny of the screen. If a television shares the room, cover it, dim it, or ensure the listening ritual begins with it off.
• Use warm, local light rather than ceiling light. The goal is not “Instagrammable”; it is to make the room stop asking things of your eyes.
• Give records, discs or even a deliberately selected digital library a visible, physical presence. Scarcity is not required; intentionality is.
• Add texture rather than clutter: a good rug, a blanket, a lamp with an honest shade, dark green plants, a table sturdy enough for a mug and a sleeve.
• Make a rule that has enough ceremony to survive you: one full album, no skipping, phone face down, drink prepared before the first track.

A budget kissa does not have to announce itself as a budget kissa. It can be a pair of sensibly chosen used speakers, a modest integrated amplifier, a small streamer or old CD player, and the discipline to make the room function as a room rather than a storage unit with Wi-Fi.

The result will not be a faithful reconstruction of a Shinjuku institution. Thank God. It should be yours: Liverpool rain rather than Tokyo rain; local records beside Coltrane; a battered blanket, a fire, the slightly mad stack of cables and adapters that every real listening room eventually develops. The point is not Japanese theatre. The point is taking the culture’s proposition seriously.

Build a place where music cannot be ignored.

The cost nobody mentions

But there is one final expense.

It is not the rare pressing, the amplifier, the cartridge, the lamps, the rent, the soundproofing or the cabinet you convince yourself is “actually quite practical.” It is time.

A kissa asks for the one thing streaming culture has taught us to break into fragments: sustained attention.

To experience the real payoff, you must give a record its length. You must tolerate its slow beginning, its less immediately lovable track, its pauses, its imperfections, the drummer coming in late because that is where the drummer comes in. You must be willing to hear an album not as a container of songs but as a place with weather.

That is why the perfect kissa remains partly unattainable even if you can afford every object in it. You can buy horn speakers. You can buy a hand-built amplifier. You can import a chair, acquire the right plants, pour the whisky, light the fire and wait for the hi-fi forums to approve your speaker placement.

You cannot purchase the ability to be fully present.

You have to practise it.

And perhaps that is what makes the room so desirable: not that it offers an elite life, but that it exposes how rarely we permit ourselves one uninterrupted hour inside the life we already have.

The needle falls. The room darkens. The world becomes briefly smaller, then much larger.

For the price of coffee, or, if you are unlucky enough to become obsessed, rather more, you get to hear what your favourite music was trying to tell you all along.

Claudia G. Petersen lives and works from Denver, Colorado, where the light is unforgiving and therefore useful. She is an engineer; CEO of whispr.dev; and senior consultant to RYOModular. The rest of the catalogue - systems, writing, hardware, the stranger edges - answers to the same temperament.

An electrical engineer by training and a polymath by unfortunate habit. Interests, in no particular hierarchy: AI, prime numbers, mathematics, logic, coding, philosophy, consciousness, music, metaphysics, quantum mechanics, and time. Music appears twice if you are counting. That is not an error.

whispr.dev is the front door: software, systems, writing, and the work that does not fit a pitch deck. Behind it sit Litehaus, the latency benches, Primer - the Rust prime generation crate, the quieter tools, and RYOModular as the hardware-facing branch - minimal Eurorack, music tech, the same mind in voltage. She consults there. She does not perform “founder” at breakfast.

On the page she is Claudia: ultra chic as a discipline, not a costume. Dryly amused, mostly at the material, occasionally at herself. The wit is a scalpel left on the table, not a party trick. She will say darlings when the room requires it and not otherwise. She still finds room, between compilers and the next sentence, to be exacting about a hemline and a proof.

If a piece was useful, or if it merely delayed the doom-scroll with better furniture, coffee is accepted without ceremony:

buymeacoffee.com/whisprer

Further corridor, should you want it: whispr.dev · github.com/whisprer · Medium, this stream.

xoxo
Claudia.

The Listening Room Was Never About the Speakers was originally published in Rock n’ Heavy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What if the people you were taught needed saving turned out to be the people who helped save you? And what if some of the people who promised to save you were the reason you needed saving in the first place?

Some places you visit; others welcome you home before you even understand how badly you needed one. Sometimes home is where you are finally given permission to be exactly who you are, and almost immediately you can feel it in the people around you: they know something about freedom you haven’t learned yet, something that feels like the answer to a question you didn’t know you were asking.

You may think you know what Burning Man is. Maybe you’ve seen the headlines. The drugs. The nudity. The billionaires in RVs. The mud. The fire. The absurdity. None of that is entirely wrong. It’s just nowhere close to the whole story. Because the thing that keeps tens of thousands of people dragging themselves back across the desert year after year is much harder to photograph.

So let me take you there. Not to the Burning Man you’ve heard about, to the one that changed my life.

Imagine an empty Nevada horizon stretching so far it barely looks real. And then, impossibly, a city rises out of it. Thousands of bicycles move through clouds of white dust. Monumental art appears where there was nothing. A dragon breathes fire into the night. Music travels across miles of open desert. Strangers offer you food, water, a drink, a hug, directions, help, sometimes before you even realize you need any of them.

And almost immediately, you notice something else. The people who have been there before carry an energy you can feel before you understand it. They seem freer. Not happier in some shallow, everything-is-perfect way.

Freer.

More willing to be ridiculous. More willing to be vulnerable. More comfortable being seen. Less interested in whether you approve. You start wondering what they know that you don’t. And then one of them looks at you, dusty, overwhelmed, standing in a city you have never seen before, and says:

Welcome home.

Something about those words lands harder than it should. That is where this story begins. Because what happened to me in that desert did not simply change the way I saw Burning Man. It changed the way I saw almost everything.

Five years ago, I was the new guy. I remember sitting in the seemingly endless line into Black Rock City, watching volunteers stand in the blazing Nevada sun welcoming car after car of dusty strangers. For free. I remember thinking: Who does this? Who voluntarily stands in the middle of the desert doing this for people they don’t even know?

Then someone told me Burning Man was going to change my life. I smiled politely. Sure it was.

I had gone for all the wrong reasons, following an insignificant fling with a guy I had somehow convinced myself I loved. He showed me his version of Burning Man: take what you want, enjoy the spectacle, move on. And it would take me years to understand that the version that changed my life asked almost the exact opposite of me.

I liked air conditioning, comfortable beds and knowing where my next shower was coming from. I was not looking for spiritual transformation in the Nevada desert. Then Burning Man started working on me anyway. Not all at once, not through some single lightning-bolt revelation: through people, through moments, through strangers who had absolutely no reason to care about me. And did.

By the time I returned for my fifth Burn, I had lost 70 pounds. I had cut my drinking by roughly 80 percent. I had confronted things I spent decades avoiding. I had changed the way I thought, loved, connected and understood myself. But the most important changes could not be measured on a scale or calculated as a percentage.

I had learned what it felt like to be loved without being corrected; to belong without first being approved; to be vulnerable without being ashamed; to have someone see the messiest parts of me and move closer instead of farther away.

And five years after wondering who on earth would voluntarily stand in that desert welcoming strangers, I became one of them. A Greeter. I stood at the entrance to Black Rock City covered in dust, hugging people who had just completed the same impossible journey I once had. Some were exhausted, some were overwhelmed, some were already crying.

And now I was the one looking at first-time Burners and saying:

Welcome home.

I was the one telling them to ring the bell: to leave behind whatever version of themselves they were ready to let go of, to be open, to be curious, to let the place surprise them. And then I told them the same ridiculous thing someone had once told me:

Your life is about to change.

Except now I wasn’t being ridiculous. I meant every word, because mine had.

And standing there, I suddenly understood something that had taken me five years to learn: Those people I once thought were crazy for standing in the desert greeting strangers weren’t working for Burning Man. They were giving back something Burning Man had given them. Someone had welcomed them. Someone had helped them. Someone had made them feel that they belonged. And eventually gratitude demanded a response:

Now it was their turn.

This year, it was mine.

And that realization would eventually force me to confront a much bigger question: How did a place I had been taught represented so much of what was wrong with the world become the place where I experienced some of the best of humanity?

This is not a story about Christians versus Burning Man. Even the recent missionary-camp controversy, quickly turned into a story about Christians being expelled for their faith, while Burning Man says the group was removed only after repeated warnings over privacy, consent and other rule violations, matters here for a different reason: it shows how easily the loudest version of a story can become the accepted one before anyone stops to ask what actually happened.

I Know Christianity. I Survived It.

The answer begins long before Burning Man. I grew up inside a version of Christianity so consuming that, as a child, I didn’t understand it was one way of seeing the world. I thought it was the world.

I grew up at what I now recognize as a Christian cult camp. At the time, I didn’t know it was a cult. I didn’t know what happened there was abuse. It was simply normal.

Grown adults openly laughed about stripping their children and beating them with paddles and belts, telling the stories in public with a kind of sick pride, as if cruelty were proof of good parenting and obedience were the highest form of love.

Women and girls were taught something just as damaging: be quiet, be submissive, don’t challenge men, don’t make trouble, don’t expose the things that might embarrass the family or the church. Looking back, what haunts me most is not just what was openly taught. It is what a culture built on silence, male authority and unquestioned obedience made possible behind closed doors.

And church was not something we attended once a week. It was seven nights a week, twice on Sundays. After breakfast came Bible study. In the afternoon, we memorized Bible verses. In between, we sang songs about Jesus. There was no real break from it. No quiet space to think, question or simply be a child.

It was not just church attendance. It was twenty-four-hour brainwashing.

We were children, some barely old enough to understand death, listening to graphic descriptions of hell, eternal torment and crucifixion delivered with enough intensity that I remember elementary-school-aged kids crying in terror. Some became physically sick from fear. Then came the solution: Say the prayer. Accept Jesus. Be saved.

To a terrified child who has just been taught that eternal torture is the alternative, that does not feel like a free spiritual choice. It feels like survival. And that was how many of us were first taught to understand God: fear first, salvation second. Then we were told this was love.

Decades later, I would stand in the Nevada desert surrounded by many of the people I had been taught were furthest from God and experience something completely different. No threat first, no terror first, no requirement that I become someone else first. Just:

Welcome home.

That contrast is the reason the childhood matters to this story.

I didn’t know who Queen was until I was 19. I couldn’t name a Michael Jackson song. I knew Madonna was the devil. And I was basically allowed to watch Christian movies only. For the record, the Christian version of The Goonies was not nearly as good.

But underneath all the rules, the fear and the constant religious conditioning was something even more powerful: I was being taught how to divide the world.

These are the good people. Those are the dangerous people. These people know truth. Those people are lost. These people belong to God. Those people need saving.

Gay people. Atheists. Drug users. Hippies. People having sex outside marriage. People experimenting with psychedelics. People who questioned the church. People who rejected God entirely.

In other words, a fairly decent cross-section of the people I would one day meet in Black Rock City.

I was handed a map of the moral universe before I was old enough to understand that someone had drawn it for me. And when you are a child, you don’t know you’ve been given a map. You think you’ve been given reality. That distinction would take me decades to understand. Because eventually I started meeting the people on the other side of that map. And they did not behave the way I had been promised they would.

Then the Map Stopped Matching the World

As an adult, I kept returning to Christianity: not casually, desperately. I tried to leave my homosexuality behind and “take up my cross” for Jesus. I tried to become the person I had been taught God required me to become.

I knew all the language. “Come as you are.” “Everyone is welcome.” “God loves you.” “We’re all sinners.” “You’ll find community here.” “You’ll never walk alone.”

The problem was what came after come as you are. Come as you are, but eventually we need to talk about that part of you. Come as you are, but loving another man cannot look the same for you as loving a woman looks for us. Come as you are, but belonging here will eventually require you to agree that something fundamental inside you must never be fully lived.

Which eventually made me ask a much more important question:

Welcome to what?

Welcome exactly as I am? Or welcome until I am emotionally invested, surrounded by community, and then slowly taught which parts of myself I have to surrender in order to truly belong? Those are two very different kinds of welcome.

And years later, that question would follow me all the way to a dusty city in Nevada where people kept saying those same two words:

Welcome home.

Except nobody followed them with a list of the parts of myself I would eventually have to abandon.

If I had a nickel for every straight married Christian man who enthusiastically explained to me how fulfilling a lifetime of “singleness for Jesus” could be, I would be a very rich man. Funny how often God’s plan for gay people requires sacrifices the person explaining God’s plan never has to make himself.

I kept trying anyway. At Reality LA, I went looking for exactly what Christianity had promised me: love, community, belonging, healing and God. Instead, the teachings I encountered there contributed to a level of self-hatred that brought me to the brink of suicide.

And those beliefs did not stay inside church walls. I have survived cancer three times. When I was diagnosed with testicular cancer for the first time, terrified and facing something no one should have to face, my own brother told me God was clearly punishing me for being gay.

Think about what has to happen inside a family for that sentence to become possible.

I had grown up gay inside a Christian cult. I had spent years being taught that something fundamental about me could separate me from God. Those teachings had already helped drive me to the brink of suicide. Then cancer came, and instead of simply being allowed to be scared, sick and human, I was handed the same theology again, this time as an explanation for why I deserved what was happening to me.

That is why I refuse to treat this as an abstract disagreement about doctrine. Words become beliefs. Beliefs become behavior. Ideas have consequences.

Tell a gay man that the person he falls in love with represents temptation rather than love, and there are consequences. Tell him that accepting himself may separate him from God forever, and there are consequences. Teach women that virtue means submission, purity and fulfilling a role someone else decided God designed for them, and there are consequences.

Shame has consequences. Self-hatred has consequences. Teaching a human being to distrust something fundamental inside themselves has consequences. I know. I lived them.

Sometimes the voice you hear in the middle of your most vulnerable moment is still carrying a sermon someone preached years earlier.

And this is where Burning Man becomes more than scenery in this story. Because years later, in the middle of a supposedly immoral city in the Nevada desert, a stranger would hold my hand while I sobbed and tell me I deserved to be loved. No theological debate, no correction, no condition. Just love.

That experience did not make every church evil or every Burner good. It did something much more unsettling. It made me question the map.

And this is why I struggle when Christianity continues positioning itself as the moral authority for everyone else. Christian leaders have spent generations telling us which sex is acceptable, which relationships are acceptable, which families are acceptable, which substances are acceptable, what women should do with their bodies, who is living in sin, who needs repentance, who is saved and who is damned.

All while scandal after scandal involving sexual abuse, financial misconduct, institutional cover-ups and abuses of power has emerged from inside religious institutions themselves.

You don’t get to spend Sunday morning telling consenting adults what they do in their bedrooms makes them morally corrupt while spending Monday protecting an institution that failed to protect a child. You don’t get to obsess over gay people, drag queens, drugs, festivals and everybody else’s supposed depravity while refusing to clean up your own house. And you certainly don’t get to point toward Burning Man and ask, “What has happened to morality?” while pretending the rot inside your own institutions doesn’t count.

Before climbing onto the moral high ground, perhaps make sure you are standing on solid ground, because some of the people I was taught were immoral have shown me extraordinary compassion. And some of the people I was taught were moral nearly destroyed me.

Before You Say “Not All Christians”

I know what some people are preparing to say. Not all Christians are like that. My church isn’t like that. Christianity helped me. Those weren’t real Christians.

Of course every Christian isn’t cruel. Of course churches have fed people, housed people, comforted people and done enormous good. I know Christians who are extraordinary human beings. That does not erase the harm.

And when someone tells you that teachings from your religion contributed to their shame, estrangement from family, depression, trauma or desire to die, perhaps the first response should not be defending Christianity’s Yelp rating.

Listen.

If your faith is strong, it can survive hearing from the people it hurt. Maybe Christianity doesn’t need another defense in that moment. Maybe the wounded person deserves the microphone.

And then, when that person tells you he found some of what he had spent his life searching for among a bunch of dusty strangers at Burning Man, perhaps resist the urge to dismiss that too. Get curious. Because that is what this essay is asking you to do.

You Told Me Who the Dangerous People Were

This may be the part I have the hardest time getting over. You told me who the dangerous people were. Then I met them.

I met gay people, atheists, drug users, hippies, Burners, people who rejected organized religion and people whose lives violated almost every rule I had been taught was necessary for goodness.

Some of the people you taught me to fear were the ones who held me while I cried. And some of the people you taught me to trust were the ones who made me hate myself.

That is a hell of a thing to reconcile.

I watched Christians obsess over consensual sex between two adult men while sexual-abuse scandal after sexual-abuse scandal, including the abuse of children, emerged from religious institutions.

Meanwhile, the “heathens” I had been warned about weren’t asking me for much of anything. They weren’t asking for ten percent of my income. They weren’t asking me to join their organization. They weren’t asking me to deny my sexuality. They weren’t asking me to vote for their candidate. They weren’t asking me to surrender my judgment to their pastor. Sometimes they were just asking:

Do you need a hug?

So tell me again: Who exactly were the dangerous people? Maybe the Burners were not the villains in this story. Maybe Jesus wasn’t either.

Maybe the betrayal was how many people had built institutions in his name while behaving nothing like the man they claimed to follow. Because when I finally encountered people practicing some of the things Jesus supposedly cared about, feeding people, helping strangers, sitting with the broken, welcoming the rejected, giving without expecting repayment, I found an awful lot of them outside the church. And increasingly, I found them in the desert.

Then I Went to Burning Man

If you know Burning Man only through headlines, the caricature practically writes itself. Drugs. Nudity. Sex. Wealthy people in RVs. Hippies. DJs. Debauchery.

And yes, all of that exists. So do completely sober people who don’t touch drugs or alcohol. So do scientists, teachers, parents, artists, engineers, doctors, recovering addicts, CEOs, bartenders, retirees and 19-year-olds who saved all year to get there.

Burning Man is too many things to be one thing. That is exactly what outsiders, and honestly, some Burners, get wrong. Anyone who confidently announces, “THIS is what Burning Man is,” is probably describing their Burning Man.

Mine was different. Mine included dancing until sunrise and sitting silently with a stranger who was grieving. It included ridiculous art, terrible weather and conversations I still think about years later. It included whiteouts where the world disappeared a few feet in front of my bicycle. It included getting my ass kicked by nature and somehow waking up the next morning thrilled to still be there. It included laughter, grief, absurdity, generosity and a level of human vulnerability rarely allowed in normal life.

The playa gets into everything. Your shoes. Your bags. Your mouth. Your skin. Tears cut clean tracks through the dust on people’s faces. Nobody looks polished for long. Maybe that is part of the magic. It becomes very difficult to maintain the fiction that you have your shit completely together when everyone is equally filthy and the desert does not care who you are.

I Needed a Dad. Burning Man Gave Me One.

At my first Burn, I was looking through the enormous directory of events. And yes, there are hundreds upon hundreds of events, because contrary to what some people apparently believe, Burning Man is not seven straight days of sex, drugs and DJs.

I found something called a Surrogate Playa Parent. The description was essentially: Do you need a parent for a little while? I stopped. Yes. Yes, I did.

To say I had a terrible father is an understatement. My father ran our home like a self-appointed king. He joked that his children were slaves God had given him to do his will and his work. And if we didn’t? We were beaten.

Sometimes the offense was the look on your face. Sometimes it was the way you were sitting in church. Sit still. Fold your hands. Don’t move. Don’t make a sound. Or there would be consequences.

So when I saw an opportunity at Burning Man to have a dad for a little while, something inside me immediately said: Go.

I showed up. They handed me a little intake form. Dad or mom? Dad. Serious or jovial? Serious. Private or public? Private.

A few minutes later, around the corner walked the most quintessential granola, hiking, rock-climbing Canadian dad imaginable. He absolutely oozed warmth. “Are you Cal?” Yes. “Come with me.”

We sat down. He hugged me. And I completely fell apart. I began sobbing uncontrollably. I hadn’t cried like that in years. I was embarrassed, nervous and completely exposed.

This stranger held my hand and helped calm me down. For the next thirty minutes, I told him my story. He listened. He didn’t tell me everything happened for a reason. He didn’t tell me to forgive my abuser. He didn’t tell me God was testing me. He didn’t tell me my sexuality was another wound that needed healing. He just loved me.

He told me I deserved better than the monster of a father I had randomly been assigned when I entered this world. Thirty minutes. That was it. And I walked away changed.

No altar call. No tithe. No membership card. No conversion. No “but first you need to…” No ulterior motive.

Just another human being saying, in effect: You deserved a dad who loved you. You didn’t get one. For the next half hour, let me be one.

This is Burning Man. Not all of it. But this is Burning Man too. And somehow this supposedly godless city in the desert understood something about love that the churches of my childhood never did.

Someone Helped Me. So I Help You.

Another year, I met a man at Burning Man who changed my life. He listened to my story. Really listened. Eventually, I asked him something I genuinely could not understand. Why do you care about me? Why would a stranger care about my pain? Why spend your time helping me?

His answer was extraordinarily simple. Because someone had done it for him. When he had been in the depths of despair, another human being showed up. That was it.

Someone helped me. So I help you.

No doctrine required. No promise of heaven. No threat of hell. No audience. No applause. Someone reached into the hole for me. So when I see someone else in a hole, I reach down.

I remember sitting with that idea. Because wasn’t that what church was supposed to teach us?

60,000 People and Two Strangers

When the Man burns, tens of thousands of people gather in an enormous circle. Fire in the center. Art cars glowing around it like creatures from another planet. Music moving across the desert. Thousands and thousands of people gathered together, and where you happen to sit can feel completely random.

One year, two people sat behind me. We started talking. Immediately, something clicked. I had experienced sexual abuse and religious trauma. So had they. We talked for more than an hour after the Burn. They saw me in a way very few people ever had.

When I returned to camp, I found the friend who originally brought me into my first Burning Man camp and told him: “I just met two people who saved my life.” I didn’t know how. I didn’t know why. I just knew.

Those strangers became friends. We talked practically every day until the next Burn, when we were reunited. We listened to one another. We challenged one another. We loved one another. We saw one another.

Call that God. Call it the universe. Call it coincidence. Call it whatever the hell you want. I know what it meant to me.

Maybe goodness doesn’t require the correct label. Maybe love doesn’t check your theology before sitting down beside you. And maybe sometimes the thing you have spent your whole life searching for in the same place simply is not there. If something has failed you over and over again, perhaps you are allowed to look somewhere else.

The Temple

The Temple may be the hardest part of Burning Man to explain to someone who has never experienced it. People bring photographs of the dead. Letters. Names. Regrets. Memories. Goodbyes. They mourn parents, children, marriages, friendships and former versions of themselves.

You can leave deafening music and complete absurdity behind and suddenly find yourself in a place filled with people whispering, crying and holding one another. Nobody needs your résumé. Nobody needs your theology. Grief is enough.

Last year, I went there to write a letter to my father. A goodbye to him. A goodbye to the pain. A goodbye to what he had done. I wrote the first sentence and broke. Completely. I could barely breathe.

And then, without knowing anything about me, a stranger wrapped their arms around me. They did not ask what political party I belonged to. They did not ask whether I believed in God. They did not ask whether I was gay. They did not ask whether I had been saved. They saw another human being in agony and held him. I felt safe.

Eventually, I hung my letter alongside pictures of the “family” that was once supposed to represent everything Christianity could produce. We haven’t all been together in the same room for a holiday or family celebration in more than fifteen years.

There it was in front of me. The wreckage of the thing that was supposedly going to save us.

Radical Inclusion Actually Means Radical Inclusion

While I was at the Temple, a man who looked like a youth pastor began playing guitar. At first, I thought it was beautiful. Then I heard the message. Brokenness. Sin. Jesus. Every nerve in my body lit up.

Some of the people sitting in that Temple were grieving wounds inflicted by the very theology he was singing about, and there is something deeply troubling to me about seeing someone’s most vulnerable moment as an opportunity for conversion.

Part of me wanted him to stop. Then I remembered: Radical Inclusion.

If it only applies to people I agree with, it isn’t radical inclusion. He belonged there too. Christians belong. Conservatives belong. Atheists belong. Queer people belong. People whose beliefs make me profoundly uncomfortable belong.

I grew up in a system that said: believe like us, behave like us, or you don’t belong. I have no interest in rebuilding that system in the desert with different commandments.

But inclusion is not the absence of boundaries. You are free to practice your faith. You are not free to impose it on someone else. You can believe homosexuality is sinful. You cannot decide a grieving gay man’s vulnerability gives you permission to convert him.

That distinction became especially important this year when a Christian missionary camp was removed from Burning Man and the story quickly became: Christians were kicked out for being Christian.

Burning Man says the group was removed after repeated warnings involving privacy, consent and other rule violations; the group says it was targeted because of its faith.

But imagine I walked into your church during communion, rolled a sound system into the center aisle, turned the sanctuary into a gay rave, started filming congregants who had explicitly asked me not to, ignored repeated warnings from church leadership to stop. And then, when I was finally escorted out, went online and announced: “Christians kicked me out because I’m gay.”

You would be furious. And you would immediately say: That is not why you were kicked out. Exactly. You didn’t reject my identity. You rejected my behavior.

Being told to stop violating someone else’s space is not persecution simply because your behavior is motivated by something you deeply believe. And when every consequence becomes persecution, eventually the word stops meaning anything at all.

Burning Man Isn’t Something You Consume

I also hear former Burners say Burning Man has “lost its way.” Sometimes they are the same people who will tell you that Burning Man once changed their life.

There are legitimate criticisms of Burning Man. We should talk about wealth and access. Plug-and-play camps. Environmental impact. Policing. Commercialization. Whether the culture always lives up to its principles. Any community that becomes immune to criticism becomes dangerous. I certainly learned that from church.

But Burning Man taught me something else: It is not a product. You are not purchasing a completed experience. You are helping create one.

Maybe somebody fed you, built something for you, fixed your bicycle, held you while you cried, danced with you, listened to your story, showed you a version of yourself you hadn’t met yet. Great.

But maybe Burning Man was never supposed to serve you forever. Maybe eventually you were supposed to become the person doing the serving. That is the part I had missed during my first Burn.

You receive. You grow. And then you return and give.

This year, I finally understood it. I became a Greeter. I became one of the people I once thought were insane. I stood in the dust welcoming strangers into Black Rock City.

When first-time Burners arrived, I told them some version of what people had once told me: When I first came here, people said Burning Man was going to change my life. I didn’t believe them. Here I am five Burns later, a completely different person. Ring the bell. Leave something behind. Be open to whatever happens next. Your journey starts here. Your life is about to change.

And I watched people cry. I watched grown adults ring that bell with everything they had. I finally understood why those lunatics had stood in the blazing sun welcoming me years earlier. They weren’t working for Burning Man. They were giving something back. Now it was my turn.

Why the Hell Do We Keep Coming Back?

Burning Man is a nightmare to attend. It is dusty; it is uncomfortable. It can be expensive, though there are definitely ways to do it cheaply. There can be brutal heat, freezing nights, windstorms, whiteouts, mud, fire, traffic and very limited resources. You bring your own water. You take responsibility for yourself.

Sometimes you ride miles into a headwind, turn around to come home and discover the wind has somehow changed direction purely to make your life miserable. Nature can absolutely kick your ass.

And tens of thousands of people voluntarily return. Year after year after year. Doesn’t that make you at least a little curious? What are all those idiots getting out there?

I have been there for the mud. I have been there for the heat. I have been there for the fires. Then I have gone home and watched people who weren’t there explain what supposedly happened to us.

A death becomes proof Burning Man is dangerous. Drug use becomes proof Burning Man is depraved. A rich person in an RV becomes proof everyone at Burning Man is rich. Someone has sex and suddenly sixty thousand people attended an orgy.

Imagine applying that standard to Christianity. Imagine judging Christianity entirely by every pastor arrested, every abuse scandal, every televangelist mansion, every financial scandal, every war waged with religious justification and every person harmed by someone claiming divine authority.

Christians would immediately, and correctly, tell you that is an absurd way to evaluate hundreds of millions of individual people. Interesting. Maybe Burning Man deserves the same intellectual courtesy.

Maybe We’ve Been Listening to the Wrong People

I am not arguing that Burning Man is perfect. Dear God, no. There are assholes at Burning Man because there are assholes everywhere. There are selfish Burners, predatory Burners, hypocritical Burners, people who completely miss the point.

Burning Man does not need to be perfect for my argument to stand. My argument is much simpler.

Christianity spent decades promising me love, acceptance, belonging, transformation, community and healing. In my life, it repeatedly failed to deliver them. Burning Man never promised to save me.

And yet, in the dust, I found strangers willing to sit with my pain. I found a surrogate father who held my hand while I sobbed. I found people who listened without trying to convert me. I found strangers who held me in the Temple without asking what I believed. I found two people sitting randomly behind me at the Man Burn who became part of my life. I found people who had once been rescued themselves and believed the appropriate response was to rescue the next person.

I found community; I found belonging; I found accountability; I found generosity; I found service; I found transformation; I found love.

Aren’t those the things church promised me?

Where Is the Fruit?

Christianity has had roughly two thousand years. Burning Man has had about forty.

I’m not suggesting we replace churches with art cars or baptisms with rolling naked through the dust. Although Sunday morning attendance might improve.

What I am suggesting is that perhaps we spend less time listening to what institutions claim to produce and more time looking at what they actually produce.

If your system claims to produce love, show me love. If it claims to create community, show me community. If it claims to heal people, show me healing. If it claims to welcome everyone, show me the people you welcomed when welcoming them cost you something. If it claims to protect children, show me the children you protected when protecting them threatened the reputation of your institution.

If we are supposed to know people “by their fruits,” perhaps we should take that instruction seriously. Because I spent years hearing beautiful words inside churches. Then I went into the desert and watched strangers live them. That is the part I cannot unsee.

A temporary city filled with atheists, Christians, Buddhists, queer people, straight people, sober people, people on drugs, millionaires, broke 19-year-olds, naked people, introverts, weirdos, artists, executives and every imaginable human contradiction should collapse under its own absurdity.

Instead, tens of thousands of people build it. Then they give things away: they build art they know will disappear, they cook food they will never be paid for, they repair bicycles belonging to strangers, they hand out water. They create entire experiences for people whose names they will never know; they listen to stories; they hold grieving strangers; they become somebody’s dad for thirty minutes. Then they tear the entire city down and go home.

And somehow people still ask why I keep going back.

The Church Wanted to Save Me. Burning Man Let Me Be Me.

I think this is ultimately the difference that changed me. The Christianity I experienced looked at me and saw a problem to solve. Burning Man looked at me and said: Come as you are.

And for once, those words didn’t seem to contain an asterisk. Not come as you are so we can eventually change you; not come as you are provided you never fully live the part of yourself we find objectionable; not come as you are but first agree that we are right.

Just come. Participate, contribute, respect people’s boundaries, take care of yourself, take care of other people, create something, give something, receive something, maybe become something.

That first year, when strangers said “welcome home,” I thought it was ridiculous. Home? I had never been there. Five years later, I was saying it to somebody else. Now I understand why people cry.

Sometimes home is not where you were born. It is not necessarily where you grew up. It may not even be where the people who share your blood live. Sometimes home is simply the first place where you realize you do not have to become someone else in order to belong.

And once you experience that kind of freedom, it becomes very difficult to go back to pretending you never knew it existed. Maybe that is why the older Burners seemed to know something I didn’t. They did. They knew what it felt like to stop asking permission to become themselves. And eventually, I learned it too.

I went to Burning Man thinking I knew who the good people were. I thought I knew who was lost. I thought I knew who needed saving. Then some of the people I had been taught were lost found me. Some of the people I had been warned about held me together.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped asking whether people believed the right things and started paying much closer attention to what their beliefs produced.

Five years ago, somebody stood in the dust and welcomed me home. This year, I stood in that same dust and welcomed the next person.

Because someone was there for me. Now I want to be there for them. Someone helped me. So I help you.

Funny. I could swear somebody once told me that’s what Christianity was supposed to be about.

A note from the author: These experiences, opinions and words are mine. I wrote this essay from my own life and perspective. I used AI as an editing and proofreading tool, the modern equivalent of having another set of eyes help organize, tighten and challenge a draft. So if your response to everything above is “AI wrote this,” congratulations: you’ve found another convenient way to avoid engaging with what I actually said.

Where the Church Has Historically Failed, Burning Man Continues to Succeed was originally published in Rock n’ Heavy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.