I can’t get next to you, I don’t really try
That’s why I wrote this song, that’s why I cry

I recently had the pleasure of being a guest on my good friend Sean McCoy’s podcast called The Come to the Table Podcast.  I’ve listened to hundreds of podcasts over the last 10-12 years, but this was my first time being a guest.  It was humbling that he wanted to have me as a guest and I was honored.

Sean’s podcast is about finding “a place we can have civil, open and loving conversations around the issues that impact us the most. Silence, ignorance and division are not the answers.”  It is largely influenced by his strong Christian faith, but his entire show is about talking with people from all backgrounds, religions, culture, and viewpoints in the hopes that people can stop and really listen to what others have to say about topics that may be either uncomfortable or unfamiliar.  I cannot tell you how proud I am of my friend for going on this journey.  He is the perfect person for this.

The episode I’m featured in is called “Sound & Vision“.  Sean uses my affinity and knowledge (I fooled him) of music, movies, the arts, and creativity to dive deeper into freedom of expression and responsibility.  At the risk of shameless self-promotion, I think we had a pretty good conversation.  We certainly didn’t solve anything, but we forced each other to think and that’s the whole point of his show.

There’s a lot Sean and I don’t have in common.  He’s a country boy from Houston who loves Jesus Christ, listens to Christian music, and proclaims to not care about sports anymore.  I’m a (largely) suburban kid from New York who is more into Buddhism, just finished listening to Tangerine Dream, and watched the Super Bowl in an Eagles bar in San Diego, of all places.  There is one thing we’ve had in common since we met in 1995 — an open mind.  I think he was fascinated with me because I was so different from him and the feeling was mutual.

A quick story about that — I spent three days in Houston with Sean in 1999.  I was driving from San Diego to a school in Pensacola, FL and Sean offered to fly out to San Diego to drive with me as I had to pass through Houston.  I’m not sure what he was thinking, but he and I drove my little Ford Escort halfway across the country, stopped in Vegas, saw the Grand Canyon, and tried to catch up to two people having sex in the front seat of their car while they passed us driving up a huge hill on I-40 outside of Albuquerque.  I tried so hard to get that Escort to go faster to catch up to them, but it wasn’t meant to be.  Alas, those two completed their fornicating before we could give them a thumbs up.  When in Houston, Sean took me to the rodeo at the Astrodome.  The fucking Astrodome!!  The Eighth Wonder of the World!!!  Kelly Leak and the Bad News Bears beat the Houston Toros in that very stadium and here I was watching bulls get their nut sacks ripped off by a guy with a rope while 60,000 people in tight jeans, colorful shirts, and cowboys hats cheered on.  I, in my Adidas long-sleeve shirt, khaki pants, and Timberlands, never felt more out of place in my life.  The night ended with an Alan Jackson concert.  Of course it did.

Open minds, combined with our intelligence being on the same wavelength, helped form a lifelong friendship that I value tremendously to this day.  Sean talked about not knowing one CD of mine when he opened my collection.  I’d say “Cry” by Money Mark was in there.  It was a favorite of mine.  He and the others may not have known this song before, but they all knew it well by the time I left.  We made up an elaborate air-synth routine to the beginning of the song that never gets old.  And it was those moments, however fleeting — and regardless of where he and I, and everyone else came from or what our beliefs were — that always resonate the most with me.  We were, and still are, just a bunch of guys who enjoyed each other’s company.