Fionn Regan – Hey Rabbit

I’ll go out on a limb and assume this isn’t the only MP3 blog slaking your daily thirst for new gods. To that end, I know it’s somewhat ridiculous of me to write an entry about Fionn Regan. Pick a blog and you’re sure to stumble over the piles of praise for the boy’s music. However, this entry isn’t about his music, but about what he symbolizes. Because if Fionn Regan can’t make it in the world, my cause, along with every closeted, would-be aspiring musician’s, is for naught.

“I lost a threat in the darkness of space.”

I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the way I stopped cheering for bands, or perhaps I should say I stopped being a cheerleader. I applauded their music, for sure, but I lost that sense of pride associated with having a band whose 12 stickers I put on my guitar case. Now it’s the occasional emblem, the free, glow in the dark Pelican button (the not so free, non-glowing Man Man button), but my sense of singular devotion has vanished.

And I know it happens to most of us. The irony, of course, is that it usually takes that spark, that teenage fawning for the Velvet Underground or De La Soul, to push us toward obsession and nightly Soulseeking. We wake up one day and find ourselves surrounded by mounds of brilliance and the mountains of tripe we’ve otherwise turned our figurative backs on. The beauty, however, is when we fashion those mounds into a castle. We build our homes and lose our God to lay our gods grain by grain, brick by brick; we wear crests and are born of houses/genres, not people.

I need to believe in Fionn, as should everyone with a modicum of musical appreciation and a veiled yearning to succeed at creative endeavors no matter the craft. I don’t think him the second coming of Nick Drake, but I’m finally rooting for someone again. I know I take my musicians for granted. It’s no skin off my yellow , country teeth if the world doesn’t know about the wo/men I flirt with nightly through a set of cheap speakers. With Fionn, though, I yearn desperately for his success.

For some time I’d thought the acoustic singer/songwriter a dying breed, not in quantity, but in achievement. Sure, there were Sam Beam’s and Jose Gonzalez’s, but I’d felt the times were changing. People wanted their musicians to have pizzazz. They didn’t want a random 20-something year old out of Wyoming wailing at the mountains about a broken heart.

But it’s easy to get lost in the DIY zeitgeist, and I think that’s where I’ve gone wrong with my own foray into music production. My catharsis became a glutton; I fed it my six string until my songs were all belly, not heart. And it seems that’s what people want, ultimately—a heart, a story, and a glimmer of regret—not a gut full of worms with a twang.

A few months ago I double clicked and heard a young man tell me to “Be good or be gone.” It was a demand, not a request, and remains one of the best truths I’ve ever heard, musically or otherwise.

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