I wrote Wearing Thin at the height of the pandemic and intended it to be the final Common Jack song.

After years of working tirelessly to build the project to where it was, I had a deal with a record label fall apart before the ink could even dry on the contract. It left me feeling like the music industry wasn’t just indifferent to my presence, but rather, rejecting me entirely. So I quit. And I meant to stay away for good.

But with time, I gained perspective and understood what really happened. You see, in my pursuit of a rigidly defined kind of success, I couldn’t see that I’d started incrementally compromising my vision for Common Jack. It happened in microscopic decisions at first, which snowballed into bigger decisions that sent me careening down a path to basically just making music to win industry approval. Label A&Rs, ill-defined potential fans, other songwriters I admired…..I was desperate for a thumbs up from everyone but the most important person: me.

So in hindsight, it’s obvious why my record deal imploded. It was built around somebody else. He looked like me. He was a pretty good writer like me. And he sort of sang like me. But his actions sprang from a fear of rejection instead of a deep desire to offer songs as gifts to the people he loved.

Yes, Wearing Thin is a Very Sad Song™. But listening now, I hear something else swirling inside the grief: the voice of someone who finally sees that chasing external validation is a form of surrendering his own power.