The Twenty-Three Artists on the Other Side of the Page

The notebook page I've written about — the one headed List of Influences — has two columns.

I've already written about the right-hand one: my mother, my aunt, my brother, a family in New Mexico, a childhood pitching coach, my chiropractor. The people who actually got me here.

The left-hand column is twenty-three musicians, and I gave four of them stars.

The starred four

Talib Kweli ★ Nas ★ Jack Johnson ★ Citizen Cope ★

I don't remember deciding the stars meant anything. Twenty years on, that grouping tells me something specific.

Two of the best pure lyricists in hip-hop, and two artists whose whole mode is a man and a guitar saying something quietly. That's the split I was living in — the part of me that wanted to compete and the part that had to sit alone in a room and rebuild a hip.

Citizen Cope getting a star is the one that surprises me least and would surprise everyone else most. He's not a household name. If you've spent time genuinely alone with something you couldn't fix, you know why he's on there.

The rest of the column

Gang Starr. Sublime. G. Love. Ben Harper. Incubus. 311. David Gray. Mos Def. Led Zeppelin. John Mayer. Amos Lee. Tupac. Common. Kanye West. Method Man. Jadakiss. Jay-Z. Brett Dennen. Pink Floyd.

Two things stand out reading it back.

The hip-hop is almost all lyricists. Talib, Nas, Mos Def, Common, Jadakiss, Method Man, Gang Starr. That's not a list assembled by someone who wants a beat to work out to. That's someone who wanted to hear people say things well.

And the rest is almost entirely acoustic and slow. Jack Johnson, Amos Lee, Brett Dennen, David Gray, Ben Harper, G. Love.

Those are two completely different rooms. I was in both of them constantly.

What music actually did

Here's the honest answer to a question nobody asks about rehab.

I've written a lot about the hip replacement — the surgery at nineteen, the two universities that wouldn't clear me, teaching myself to throw again. I've described yoga and a book called Core Performance and the twelve Mondays I rode my bike to a coach's office.

What I've never mentioned is that almost all of that happened with headphones on.

Rehab is not dramatic. It is a small number of unglamorous movements, done alone, hundreds of times, in a room where nobody can see whether you did them properly. There is no crowd. There is no coach. Nothing about it feels like sport.

Music is what made it survivable. Not motivational music — I've never once been moved by a song that was trying to motivate me. Lyricists, because they gave my head something to do while my body did something boring. And quiet acoustic records, because some days the point was to stay calm enough to keep going tomorrow.

Years later I wrote in a blog post that music is necessary, and put a song at the bottom. I'd forgotten I'd been saying that since I was twenty.

The part for the person still in it

If you're rehabbing something right now — a hip, a shoulder, a knee — you already know the enemy isn't pain. It's tedium. It's the fourth month, in a room, doing the same six movements with nobody watching.

Nobody prepares you for how boring the comeback is.

I don't have a prescription. I have a twenty-year-old's list in a notebook, and it says: find something that makes the room bearable, and take it seriously enough to write down.

Mine was twenty-three artists and four stars.