Tiebreaker

Hello, friends! Rob here.

Last year, my son went through a big "I'll do it myseeellllfffffff" phase. He is not truly reading yet, but he is starting to commit some of his favorite books to memory. He knows them well enough to correct us (quite emphatically) when we miss a word, and occasionally he will “read” them by himself, reciting some facsimile of the text in a quiet tone just above a whisper. So it wasn't a big surprise one night late in the summer when we were doing bedtime and he made it clear that he did not want any help thumbing through his jumbo-sized copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. When this happens, I'll usually do stuff on my phone (I know; call Child Protective Services) and let my mind wander. On this particular occasion, I caught myself humming a song I’d fallen in love with that summer:

I was fresh off the run we did with The Head and the Heart, AKA The Tour Rob Won't Ever Stop Talking About, so it makes sense that I still had half of their catalog stuck in my head. Good songs strike on something deep and fundamental. They say things we’ve always known, or felt, but have never been able to put into words, giving shape to shapeless notions. Hearing a great song for the first time is less like making a new friend and more like remembering all the time you’ve shared with an old one.

This song does that for me: "I can't believe I almost went my whole life without you in it.” Hello, old friend.

One of the big plot lines in my house last year was that my wife and I were trying to have a second baby, while also trying to decide if we actually wanted a second baby. I know that's not normally the order in which one does those things, but at our age the clock is ticking and we can't really afford to spend our time deliberating. So we were working at it, while also giving each other the "are we really doing this?" look every time our toddler threw a fit because we poured the Cheerios into his bowl before the milk. Or after it. Depends on the day. I've learned to ask our beloved little tyrant how he wants it every morning.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has never acknowledged Stockholm Syndrome as an official diagnosis. Parents of toddlers know better.

That quarter-million-dollar question spent most of last year camped out on the periphery of my consciousness. There was no easy answer. Our first year with a newborn was really tough, but last year it started to feel like things were equalizing a little bit. We were happy. We were stable. Were we really ready to throw our lives back in the blender? We had a handle on life with one kid. Could we handle two?

Plus, newborns are a pain. They don't sleep. They emit bodily fluids along trajectories that refute the collective works of Newton, Euclid, and possibly even Shakespeare. They eat out of bottles. And then you have to clean the bottles. All seventy-five parts. Fucking bottles. Don't get me started on bottles.

My son flipped a page over. "On Monday he ate through one apple…”

I recalled all of the doubts I had ahead of my first kid: our life is pretty great as is. Are we ready for this level of disruption? Am I cut out to be a parent? I'm not great with kids. What if the child has bad vibes?

Here's one that scared me a lot:

Am I capable of loving something more than I love myself?

One time, a long time ago, we were up in New York for a show with Galactic, and George and I went to lunch at some hole-in-the-wall Asian restaurant with our dear friend and hitmaker Ben Ellman. (If you’re ever looking for a great hole-in-the-wall Asian restaurant, ask Ben Ellman.) This was just after Ben's daughter had been born, and I'll never forget what he said about it:

"It's kind of nice knowing I'm not the most important person in my life anymore."

Sometimes, when I look down from great, dizzying heights, I get a tingly feeling in the back of my knees. Hearing those words in that moment felt like standing on a diving board over the lip of the Grand Canyon. Ben's remark wasn't black humor or anything. He meant it. I could see how happy he was. But I was rounding the corner on the way out of my twenties. It had been a fast, hedonistic decade, free of obligations and responsibilities. What Ben was saying was true, but I wasn't ready to hear it.

Ten years after that, I had a kid of my own. It's a cliche to say that parenting changes you, but it really does. I didn't just fall in love with my own kid. I became a baby person. When I see a random baby out in the wild- at the airport, or in a restaurant, or at fight club- it’s like spotting a movie star. I will, no joke, text my wife "OMG I saw a baby😍"

But it's not just that. I'm full and happy in ways I never thought I could be. This love isn't just more of the love I know. It's a new love, an element altogether distinct from the burning passion of a marriage or the grounded dependability of close friends. It's the places I've discovered inside myself since becoming a parent: new chambers in my heart unfolding like lotus blossoms, all thanks to this skinny little goofball who walks everywhere on his tiptoes and makes up songs in the car and who once shotgun-blasted shit all over my arm and the wall behind it. I can't even remember being myself before all of this. I can't imagine how it felt to be that person, even though that person was me.

I turned my attention back to the boy and his book. He flipped the page over and rattled off the contents of the caterpillar's big Saturday meal: "one piece of chocolate cake, one ice cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese..."

I can't believe I almost went my whole life without you in it.

It would be extreme creative license to say that I made up my mind in this tidy little flash point of a moment. I’m still not sure I’ve made up my mind. We were trying to have another baby, but we weren't trying as hard as we possibly could have. In our trepidation, I think it was comforting to imagine that such a huge decision was at least partially out of our hands; our fates being written by universal forces unseen and unknowable. What I can say is that it helped me keep the fear in perspective. It brought me a bit closer to the ground. Am I ready to have another kid? Hell no. But I wasn't ready for the first one, either. And that turned out okay.

Those forces- whatever they are- made the call last fall.

We're having another boy. He's due at the beginning of July. Given our history, everyone agreed it would be prudent for me to clock out well in advance of the due date so I could be home. Next weekend at Let’s Go! Music Festival in Maryland will be my last show with the band until Red Rocks. Our good friend Brad Walker, who covered for me when I missed a handful of shows last summer, will be taking my place in the interim.

Ed was the first member of the band to have a kid. It was years before our 2020 baby boom. I remember when he was on leave we texted him to see how it was going, and he said "I'm in a cave of shit and tears." That's where I'll be. The Cave of Shit and Tears. I'm looking forward to it. I can’t wait to meet the new kid, and to see everything he has to show me.

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And now, presenting:

INSIGNIFICANT MOMENTS IN BAND HISTORY

This one time, a long time ago, we were playing the morning show for some network affiliate in Dallas. TV shows are always fun because the scene-behind-the-scene is so frenetic: you might see an animal wrangler waiting in the wings, or an actor, or some teens promoting a charity fun-run, or holy shit is that Rachel Dolezal? (This happened the first time we went on Today back in 2016.) Plus, you have all of the show's regular on- and off-screen personnel buzzing around doing Aaron Sorkin hallway dialogue. It's an electric circus.

On this particular morning show, one of the other guests was a chef from an Italian restaurant in the area. They did the classic TV cooking demonstration bit where they walk the host through the ingredients and steps and then pull out an already-finished version because this is live TV and we don't actually have twelve minutes to boil a pound of rigatoni or whatever. Because there was already a whole feast on hand, the hospitality folks dispensed with the typical bagel-and-donut spread and instead laid out the chef's big tray of finished cream sauce pasta next to the urns of coffee after the show.

Remember: it was maybe, maybe seven in the morning, which is kind of a weird time to eat a ladleful of noodles and melted cheese. So every time one of the talking haircuts from the TV station saw the spread, he'd kind of look it over, raise an eyebrow, and then say, "breakfast of champions right here" before spooning a helping onto his little paper plate. Hand to god, we saw at least four people do it. I don't think this story reveals anything particular about the human condition, but "breakfast of champions" now and forever lives on in the band's collective psyche as a result. This has been an insignificant moment in band history.