Falling Behind

There’s a phrase rhythm sections use for a specific kind of feel: playing behind the beat. Anyone who has stood next to a great drummer knows the sensation. The pulse stays exactly where it was, steady as ever, yet each note lands a hair after the spot a metronome would choose, and the whole band seems to settle into the groove rather than race it. Some of the music I love most lives in that sliver of time. It has taken me the better part of my life to notice how hard I’ve worked to keep my own days well ahead of it.

It’s November 2026, and I’ve just realised that this may well be the first year in roughly three decades of professional life as a musician in which I haven’t played a single concert yet. There’s a very tiny secret session I’m working on in Berlin later this month, so I might yet ruin that statistic on a technicality, but as things stand it’s rather unprecedented.

What makes it curious is that I haven’t exactly been sitting around twiddling my thumbs. There’s been a new album, an extraordinary amount of writing, a growing body of work in education and coaching, and several developments, professional and personal, that would have been hard to predict even a couple of years ago. In many ways I’ve been more immersed in the process of making things than I have been in a long time. And yet anyone assessing my year purely by the traditional markers of a performing musician’s career could be forgiven for assuming I’d taken a sabbatical.

So the phrase has followed me around for most of this year, though usually in its other, less flattering sense. On paper, 2026 was meant to be the year I caught up: a record finally ready to go out into the world, a business that has spent five years being built brick by brick (some of those bricks rather heavier than advertised), a teaching archive I’m proud of, and a podcast that has given me conversations I’d once only have dreamt of having. And still, for long stretches, I carried a low hum I suspect many of you know well, the sense that everyone else was moving faster, releasing more often and filling their calendars while I had somehow missed a memo.

Which brings me to a question I’ve been sitting with lately. When did we start confusing being visible with moving forward?

I should say why I keep returning to this subject at all. Some thirty years into life as a professional creative, I can’t think of a single peer, mentee, client or collaborator, in any capacity, who hasn’t said some version of it to me at one point or another: I feel like I’m falling behind. I’ve had the privilege of working with and for some of the most accomplished people in this industry, and I’ve heard it in those rooms too. Considering the pressure we’re working under, that’s hardly a surprise. When Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave surveyed more than 2,200 musicians for Help Musicians UK in 2016, 71 per cent reported anxiety or panic attacks and 68.5 per cent depression, figures suggesting that people who make music could be up to three times more likely to struggle with these than the general public.^[1] What I find telling is where their later research landed. Rather than finding musicians unusually fragile, it pointed towards the pursuit of a music career itself, with its precarity and its working conditions, as something that can wear down our wellbeing.

The business of being seen

I suspect most of us have experienced some variation of this. You open Instagram, LinkedIn or whichever platform has become your preferred daily source of professional inadequacy, and the evidence is everywhere. Someone is announcing a tour, someone else is launching a company, and a third person is celebrating an award, a collaboration or a breakthrough. Good for them, and I mean that sincerely.

Something rather interesting happens underneath our responses to these announcements, though, particularly during periods when our own progress isn’t so easily photographed. We begin comparing what’s visible of someone else’s life with what we know of our own, which makes for a remarkably uneven contest. We know every false start, unfinished project, financial calculation, awkward conversation and occasional bout of existential confusion that accompanies our own work. Of someone else’s, we generally see the announcement, which might represent years of invisible effort or three weeks of unusually good marketing. We have no way of knowing.

None of this is new, of course. Back in 1954 the social psychologist Leon Festinger proposed that when we lack objective standards for evaluating our abilities, we turn to other people as our measuring stick.^[2] What has changed is the sheer number of measuring sticks. A substantial body of research on social media now links upward comparison, the kind we make against people who seem further along, with lower psychological wellbeing, and passive scrolling appears especially likely to set it off.^[3] A musician’s ear is trained to compare, to hear the gap between what was played and what was meant. Turned towards a feed, that same faculty can become remarkably unkind.

And yet our nervous systems can respond as though we’ve just received reliable evidence that we’re falling behind. Behind whom, doing what, and according to which timetable? Those questions tend to receive far less attention than the feeling itself.

A record without a countdown

Some of that hum had facts behind it. Touring plans I’d been looking forward to fell through for reasons well beyond anyone’s control (war tends to do that). HMA asked more of me than I had budgeted for, and the question that kept me up at night turned out to be the plainest one of all, finding the people I’m meant to work with. Niching, pricing and all the other subjects the experts love to debate could wait their turn.

And then there was the album. Seen Heard Held came out on 16 October. It’s my eighth, released as EveryNowHere, made together with Sebastian Arno Sprenger and published by Warner Chappell Music. Some of these songs had been sitting dormant for a long while, the way songs do when life keeps finding more urgent things to do with your time. Hearing them finally take their place in a catalogue that will outlive any release cycle, is something I’m still taking in.

What I haven’t done is the thing the playbook says comes next. There has been no month of manufactured urgency and no tour announcement. When it came to marking the release, I find myself wanting something closer to the opposite of a concert, a gathering where people can sit with the record the way it was made to be heard. Members of my regular, tiny touring team happens to be all busy at the moment, which is reason enough on the practical side, though I’d be lying if I said it was the whole story.

Work that doesn’t look like work

One of the more unassuming aspects of creative professions is how much of the actual work remains invisible until it produces something that can be shared. An album arrives on a streaming platform, a book appears in a shop, a concert takes place, an exhibition opens. We recognise these as events, usually with a date, a location and something resembling a ‘measurable’ outcome. The process that leads to them rarely follows anything so orderly.

A conversation that changes the direction of a project. A collaboration that teaches you something important about the kind of people you want to work with. An afternoon spent revising a single paragraph. A decision to turn down an opportunity that looked terrific on paper. None of these makes particularly impressive material for a professional announcement, and some might not even qualify as achievements, yet any one of them can change the trajectory of everything that follows.

I’ve spent a considerable part of this year working on precisely this kind of infrastructure, both creative and personal. This autumn I completed an IFS-informed somatic coaching certification and a diploma in CBT, and I’m currently working my way through a neuropsychology course, all of it some thirty years into doing this work. Had you told my twenty-something self that I’d still be enrolling in courses at this stage, he would have taken it as proof that he’d failed to arrive. These days I see it as one of the more reliable signs that I haven’t stopped listening.

Something similar happened with HMA. I spent a good part of the year undoing things, walking away from business models and communities that looked impeccable from the outside and left me drained every time I engaged with them: the funnels, the countdown timers, the free webinar that turns out to be an hour-long pitch. I wore them long enough to be sure they weren’t mine. In their place, I put my prices on the mentoring page, plainly, so anyone visiting knows what working together involves before they ever book a call. I redid the Artist Mindmap still available as a complimentary resource, a small course that keeps returning to one sentence I ask people to say out loud in front of a mirror: I know why I am an artist. It’s a far simpler sentence to read than to say.

The more of this I do, the more I wonder whether our conventional vocabulary for productivity is equipped to describe what we’re actually doing. Developing an artistic practice involves a great deal more than producing more art. It includes developing the capacity to sustain the practice, and much of that has very little to do with one’s instrument, studio or credentials: learning where our time goes, telling an opportunity from an obligation, becoming more discerning about the environments in which we collaborate, and examining the assumptions that decide what we consider worthwhile in the first place. Sometimes the most consequential work is whatever changes our relationship with everything else, and that rarely leaves us with anything to point to.

Visibility does matter

Before this turns into another romantic argument for ignoring the world and doing your own thing, there’s an uncomfortable reality worth acknowledging. Visibility matters, a great deal in fact, particularly if you’re an independent artist, an entrepreneur or anyone whose livelihood depends on other people knowing your work exists. Concerts lead to relationships, releases create opportunities, and public engagement brings invitations, collaborations and income. Being absent from those spaces has very real consequences, and I have little interest in pretending otherwise.

Recognising that your value isn’t determined by your visibility can be liberating. Suggesting that visibility has no practical value can backfire. The more useful question, to my mind though, is whether we’ve become so preoccupied with being seen that we’ve lost the ability to distinguish meaningful ways of going about it, from the theatre of it all.

I don’t think that question belongs exclusively to artists anymore. Consider how much of contemporary professional life involves demonstrating that we’re busy, through announcements, updates, content calendars, networking events and carefully curated displays of momentum. Some of these serve entirely legitimate purposes. Others seem to exist largely because everybody else is doing them, and somewhere along the way taking part in the spectacle can start to feel like the price of permission to keep doing the actual work.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who has taught at the Universität der Künste here in Berlin, has a name for this. In The Burnout Society he describes a shift from a disciplinary society built on prohibition to an achievement society built on an unlimited sense of can.^[4] Nobody needs to force the achievement-subject to work, because it drives itself, competing with itself until it burns out, master and servant in one person. Reading some of his material for research on this post for the first time, I recognised more than a few creatives I know, myself included.

The timetable nobody agreed to

Behind implies a destination, and more specifically a shared one, along with some mutually agreed schedule for getting there. A musician who releases an album every eighteen months and tours relentlessly might be doing exactly what makes sense for their life. Another might spend five years developing a body of work and change direction several times along the way. A third might decide the entire structure of their professional life needs reconsidering.

Which of them is ahead? Without knowing what each is actually trying to accomplish, the question becomes almost absurd, and that’s before we account for the very real differences in resources, access, health, relationships and responsibilities that shape what’s possible for each of us.

The ancient Greeks had a helpful distinction here. Chronos was clock time, sequential and measurable, the time of calendars and release schedules. Kairos was the right or opportune moment, a qualitative sense of time that can’t be counted in minutes. Rather beautifully, scholars have traced the word back to archery and weaving, to the instant an arrow can be loosed with enough force to find its mark. Falling behind is entirely a chronos idea. Most of what actually matters in a creative life, the session where something finally clicks, the conversation that changes a project’s direction, the song that waits years for the right home, happens in kairos.

The belief I meet most often in the artists who find their way to me is some version of I’ll never be able to live off my music. I’ve come to suspect that underneath it, more often than not, sits the very fear this post is named after. The worry has less to do with the music than with the clock, the comparison, and the feeling that a window is closing while everyone else climbs through it. Comparison offers something uncertainty doesn’t, a familiar measuring stick, even when it makes no sense at all.

I suspect this is also why falling behind registers so physically. In 2016 a team at University College London had 45 people play a game in which turning over the wrong rock meant a mildly painful electric shock. Stress, tracked through self-report, pupil dilation and perspiration, peaked when the odds of a shock were around fifty-fifty, and was lowest when people knew a shock was certainly coming or certainly not.^[5] Not knowing proved more stressful than knowing something unpleasant was on its way. A creative career is a long exercise in not knowing whether the work will land, and a verdict, even a harsh one like I’m behind, can feel oddly more bearable than the uncertainty it replaces.

I had a lovely reminder of a different relationship with time this year. Sheila Chandra came back to Tapasya Loading for a third conversation, completing what I now think of as a trilogy. Her first appearance, back in 2020, was one of the first podcasts she’d done after years of silence. This time she was announcing what she calls possibly her last album. I can’t think of anyone less concerned with keeping up, and I can’t think of many artists whose work has stayed with both critics and fans, as long.

The uncomfortable possibility

There’s an important distinction here I don’t want to gloss over. Sometimes we really are avoiding something. Sometimes what we call preparation is procrastination, the project we’ve been developing for years needs to be finished, shared and exposed to the possibility that nobody will care, and an extended period of reflection becomes a rather sophisticated way of not making a decision. I’m familiar with those tendencies too, and it serves nobody to rebrand every stretch of inactivity as a profound season of personal growth.

So how do we tell the difference? Probably not by the number of people applauding, or by how often we manage to publish something, but by our relationship with the work itself. Are we having the difficult conversations or avoiding them? Are we learning something that changes how we practise, create and collaborate? Are we becoming more honest about what we want, including the possibility that some of what we’ve pursued for years no longer belongs in our lives? Are we making decisions, even when there’s nothing immediately to show for them? And, perhaps most uncomfortably, are we willing to discover that some of our cherished ambitions have been sustained less by curiosity than by a fear of what it might mean to stop? None of these are convenient questions, but I suspect they tell us considerably more about our direction than anybody else’s highlight reel.

And if we do discover we’ve been avoiding something, the instinct is usually to come down hard on ourselves, on the theory that a good scolding will get us moving. The research is less convinced. In a series of experiments published in 2012, the Berkeley psychologists Juliana Breines and Serena Chen found that people encouraged to meet a failure or weakness with self-compassion showed more motivation to improve than those encouraged simply to feel better about themselves. After failing a difficult test, they spent longer studying for the next one.^[6] Gentleness, it turns out, can be a rather practical form of discipline.

A different kind of progress

Last week I wrote about making peace part of the plan rather than treating it as something we’re entitled to once we’ve achieved enough. A related question has been surfacing for me since. What if progress sometimes has less to do with getting closer to something and more to do with becoming discerning about what deserves our effort in the first place? That hardly means abandoning ambition. If anything, it makes ambition more demanding, because instead of borrowing a definition of success from the people around us, we become responsible for developing our own, and then, more inconveniently still, for living by it.

There’s a verse in the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita that many children in India grow up hearing. Krishna tells Arjuna that his right lies in the action alone and never in its fruits, and then, in the same breath, warns him against attachment to inaction.^[7] People often hear only the first half and take it as permission to stop caring about outcomes. I hear it as a precise description of what lies within our jurisdiction. The work is ours. The timetable of its consequences rarely is.

Kenny Werner used to talk about playing a single note from what he called the space and allowing that note to be enough. For a long time I understood it as a lesson about the instrument. This year it has felt much more like a lesson about scheduling. A note played from the space can’t be rushed into existence, and I’m beginning to think the same holds for a record, a practice, a community and a life.

Martial artists seem to have arrived at the same place by a different road. Miyamoto Musashi, writing The Book of Five Rings around 1645, insisted that timing matters in dancing and in pipe and string music just as much as it does with the sword, and that it can’t be mastered without a great deal of practice. He also wrote of a timing to the warrior’s whole life, to thriving and declining alike.^[8] Coming from a swordsman, I find that a sobering thought: even the decline has its rhythm, and reading it correctly is part of the art.

Patanjali, whom I wrote about last week, offers one more piece of the puzzle. Right after introducing practice and non-attachment, the Yoga Sutras add that practice becomes firmly grounded only when it’s sustained for a long time, without interruption and with devotion.^[9] Dirgha kala, a long time. I find it rather touching that one of the foundational texts on stilling the mind thought it necessary to spell that out.

None of this means I’ve stopped caring about reach, or that I regard a year without concerts as some evolutionary advancement beyond needing them. I love the peculiar exchange that happens between musicians and an audience when something genuinely unexpected finds its way into the room, and I miss it. I want Seen Heard Held to find its listeners, and I want HMA to find the musicians and creatives it was built for.

Next year brings an HMA release with Rocco, whom I had the real pleasure of welcoming officially into the HMA family this month, along with more work I’m genuinely excited about. But I also recognise that something substantial has been happening away from the stage, something I don’t yet have a neat way of measuring, and I may not need one quite yet. If thirty years of this work have taught me anything, it’s that the relationship between preparation and performance is rarely linear. Sometimes months of work change shape in a single afternoon, and sometimes years of practice make themselves known in a moment nobody could have scheduled.

I’m not suggesting that everyone who feels left behind is secretly making extraordinary progress. Some of us need support, some need opportunity, some need rest, and some need to make a difficult decision we’ve been postponing. Some of us may simply need to admit that the conditions in which we’re trying to build a life have become far more demanding than the motivational slogans would have us believe. But before accepting the verdict that we’re falling behind, it might be worth asking one fairly elementary question: behind what, exactly?

A good drummer arrives at the backbeat a fraction later than the grid suggests and right on time for the music. I’d much rather arrive like that than turn up punctually at a destination I never consciously chose, only to discover I’d missed my own life along the way.

If you’re in Berlin later this month, there will be a chair for you at Cuore di Vetro. And keep an eye out for upcoming online events as well.