Collections of dreams on a hard drive

Hard won lessons in dream chasing & an honest look at a long creative career

Hey Rabbit Fam,

As of this morning at 12 AM, “Collections”, a single, is out now and you can listen to it anywhere you listen to music.

These lyrics, as with a lot of my earlier songs, are honest, and quite angsty. I used songs as my dairy. My therapy.

"I've got collections of dreams on my hard drive. They don't mean nothing to anyone but me. It's a lonely world. I've reached to the stars, but they've never reached back to me. I'm tired of my heart, falling on hard ground. Can someone reach out. Can someone respond. Because my heart is full of songs and dreams that nobody takes the time to see. I'm tired. Chasing dreams is exhausting. I'm tired.I'm tired of trying.

I felt it then. I really did. I’d spent an absurd amount of energy trying to make the “become a creator full-time” needle move from 2012 - 2014 and I hadn’t seen much movement. I had no idea what I was doing, and, at the time, neither did the rest of the internet.

I look back on it, and honestly, I still agree with the sentiment. There are some days when you’re battling in the trenches trying to make something good, something you believe in, and then you see some influencer who hits the NYT bestseller list by publishing their grocery list and you ask yourself, “Why am I even trying?” There are days when you get frustrated that you can’t even find the time or energy to sit down and create something. Days where have to fight to accept that you might never be what you want to be or achieve what you want to achieve, and that’s okay because you have so much already.

But I was missing something I had to learn the long and hard way about creative work. It’s way more exhausting when you are creating for an outcome, aka what releasing or creating something will give you that you, likely, have no control over.

For a long time, for me, creativity represented the opportunity of progress. If I create X, then Y could happen. If I release this and get X, then I can do Y. This only led to burnout and disappointment. Nothing ever happened the way I wanted it to and I always wound up disappointed in what actually happened. It was my expectations, that burnt me out. Not my creativity.

Almost ten years later, my creative career isn’t as different as I’d hoped it’d be from then. I’m still struggling to sell books. My “platform” is around the same size. But what’s changed is me, and this song is a reminder for me of how far I’ve come. It’s also a reminder of what happens when you make a god out of the destination versus just loving and hanging in the journey. So, while I now have even more dreams on a hard drive than I did when I wrote it, I’m falling back in love with the making because the making itself is lovely, and I really want to keep feeling like that’s more valuable than some fantastic outcome.

It’s a solid song. The simple banjo line in the chorus is my favorite. Banjo as texture, not as main instrument, is something I want to keep doing when I get back to making music.

I’d love it if you listened to Collections on Spotify. Save it to your playlists. Share it. Use it as a sound in your reels and TikToks. Share it and all that other stuff people ask you to do all the time. If nothing else, just call your Mom and tell her I came out with a new song because you probably need to call her anyway.

Thanks for your support after all these years,

Dave