Towards Heiruspecsness
There are joys you only earn through time. Things you can’t hurry through, last pages you can’t skip to.
I’ve been in the band Heiruspecs since fall of 1997 when Chris ‘Felix’ Wilbourn and I stopped just putzing around in our high school music class and started putting together a band. I’m forty years old now and it’s been clear to me since when we second tried to break up in 2006 that this was going to be the most important professional thing I’ll do in my life. By important I mean important. I certainly don’t mean remunerative, it’s possible I’ll make more in a half year working at MPR then I’ll ever have made with Heiruspecs, but that shit truly doesn’t matter. What does matter is that for 24 years, with waning justification, Heiruspecs has been committed to each other and to our community.
Last night we played a show at the Turf Club in St. Paul. The show is called our “Holiday Classic” and it’s the only reliable thing on our live show calendar at this point. We couldn’t do it last year because of the state of the pandemic and so this year it feels particularly special. We had a young rapper named Juice Lord on the bill who Felix and I are both really supportive of. I have no idea how I’ll fair as a tastemaker of any sort, but the first time I heard Juice Lord rap I just immediately felt he had the skills to bring him some level of fame. There’s only so much advice you can dole out as 40 year old musicians with dayjobs who busted their ass to get 269 paid tickets into the Turf Club. Heiruspecs has reached some high levels at time in our careers, but our career isn’t a likely one most young musicians would copy and paste into their own future.
But here’s what I’ll tell you: we’ve earned it. We’ve earned the downsides. At a time in our career where I think the next level was ten really good songs away. . .we couldn’t get into the rehearsal space, we couldn’t walk out with something we were proud of, too much fighting, to many wandering eyes pushing us towards other projects as individuals. At a time in our career where I think another year of grinding very humbly might’ve brought us into a different level of income on the road, we couldn’t get back in the van. We’ve earned the lows. We’ve earned the highs. We made a song that still stands as one of the best of our catalog back in 2008, “We Want a New Flow”. We practically broke up after that rehearsal. I also think we broke the fight into two parts, taking it from our rehearsal space and moving it to Hamline and Thomas, where Muad’dib was working at a coffeeshop. I don’t remember everything we fought about but I remember Peter Leggett, our drummer, saying to Felix - “I’m a utility in this band, that’s all I am”. The larger fight I believe was about inspiration, ratio of created beats to full on songs and more. But I just remember thinking, “wow, we just made an incredible track and we can’t even get out of our own way today.”
I’ve been the leader of the band for the duration of the group. Felix is the front person, it’s not Heiruspecs without Felix, and it’s not Heiruspecs without any of us, but we’d all agree I do a lot of the running of the band. I’ve fucked up enormously. I fired my two best friends from the band in what I thought was the worse way possible, until I fired a keyboard player even more sloppily about three years later. I stumbled through it all. And now we own it in a way I don’t own anything else in my life. My 10,000 hours aren’t as a musician, they’re as a member of Heiruspecs. We step on stage at the Turf Club and I cash in the years I spent listening to music with Peter, the times we just spent in hotels being young men together, finding our way.
Now we’re old. We’re not kind of old, we’re not on the old side. We’re old. We have a fanbase, we have a profile. We know how limited it is but it seems like all of us are dead set upon preserving it, protecting it, advancing it and using it to make this a better scene for the people coming up. It’s important that Heiruspecs isn’t our whole life, it’s important that Heiruspecs is a warts-and-all project, we are relentlessly true to ourselves. That sometimes means we practiced too much and lost the heart of a song, sometimes that means we’ve practiced too little and lost the chart of a song. We struggle through it, but there’s a magic between us that you can’t dilute with time. We earned some sort of chemistry, some sort of 7th member that is the spirit we all poured in to this. When we navigate our next steps with music or business I feel like we are all certain there is a decision that Heiruspecs is supposed to come to, it’s our job as individuals to just carom it pinball style from our points of view and trust that the sum of all these strokes will be towards Heiruspecsness. And that’s our new motto: towards Heiruspecsness.