To Grit with Grace, Episode 5 — Lowman Family: No Success Like Failure
Episode Transcript
Hello, I’m Randy Kaufman, and this is “To Grit with Grace,” stories of perseverance to jumpstart your month.
Dustin Lowman wasn’t always my marketing manager. In 2015, he moved to Nashville, TN, to turn his passion for songwriting into a career.
Things didn’t go completely as planned for the 22-year-old. Struggling in an industry town, Dustin faced trials of confidence and identity he never thought he’d face. But his parents were behind him every step of the way. In a first for the show, this episode features Dustin, his mother Diane, and his father Donald.
Diane and Donald divorced well over a decade ago, but they’re united in their love for their sons. Their support should be a model for every parental pair whose children dream big.
Dustin
I began songwriting when I was 14 or 15. Like a lot of people who are creatively inclined, I didn’t have the sort of high school where I was going to parties and going on dates and hanging out with big groups of people. I had a couple of close friends, and then outside of that, not very much. When left to my own devices, I’d go to my room, close the door, and write music.
I wrote two or three songs per week throughout the latter two or three years of high school — just got so obsessed by the mechanics of it, and the emotional elixir of it. By the end of it, this had become my thing.
Kept it up through college, kept up the same habits. My social world expanded a bit, as I think a lot of people’s do in college. I met other musicians, I met other songwriters. This had become my thing in high school, this had continued to be my thing in college, and only deepened, and the external validation of it only grew. By the end of college, I figured, “Perfect. I thought I knew who I was, it turned out to be true, and now that I’ve completed the years of schooling that I was expected to, I’ll go do what I actually wanna do, and be a musician.”
So after college, I moved back home to Connecticut and spent about a month recording an album of nine songs — the creme of the crop, as I saw it. Taught myself how to record, recorded this album, and felt in a broader way like this was the pinnacle of my life. This was the climax. I had endured 22 years of mostly loneliness, then finally a little social involvement, but all of it was for this piece of work that I’d made. This was it.
I can recall sitting in my dad’s attic and working on this music and working on publicizing it, and realizing, “Okay, now it’s time to go do it.”
Diane
When Dustin told me that he was planning to move to Nashville, the image I had in my mind was a fire hydrant in Madrid.
When I was 16, my parents sent me there for the summer. I remember standing on a street in Madrid, looking at a fire hydrant, looking at the concrete, and being almost overwhelmed that this was a Spanish fire hydrant, and this was Spanish concrete, and I was standing on a sidewalk in Spain looking at a fire hydrant that was Spanish.
As controlling as my father was — and I’ll talk about that in a minute — he also wanted for me to see the world. He knew inherently that seeing the world, as cliche as that sounds, gives you a perspective that’s invaluable. And I know that he pushed me out the door to live in Madrid, to work on a container ship when I was 19. My mother pushed me out the door to live in Los Angeles when I was about 23. I remember saying, “What if I fail? What if it’s awful?” She said, “You’ll come home.”
So I thought about those experiences when he said that. I also thought about how my father, who always pushed me to see the world, also controlled my world. He decided that my goal, my dream of being an English literature professor was not a viable career option. As a first-generation of Greek immigrants, he viewed business as the only way to succeed. He convinced me that majoring in economics, getting an MBA, and going into business were the things to do, and I did them.
Dustin, as he said, was socially…maybe “inept” is cruel, but certainly not highly developed. He had had a really rough patch in college — emotionally, physically, mentally — and so for him to say, “I wanna go to another city and give my dream a try,” it delighted me.
Donald
The first inkling I had that I wanted to support Dustin if he wanted to pursue a music career was actually an evening we went to a place in Westport called The Dressing Room. They had a house band, and they would occasionally have guest artists that would join, or do something onstage. Dustin got up as, I think he was 16 years old at the time. He was very nervous before he went up, and he wasn’t sure if he was going to get called to come up. Then he did get called.
It was interesting to watch his face. Just the joy that you could see from everything he was experiencing, both in expressing himself, but also seeing the expression from the audience coming back. I though, “If Dustin ever wants to pursue something like this in his career, I would do anything I could to help support that endeavor.”
I had originally wanted to be a professional golfer. At the age of 15 when I watched Arnold Palmer on TV, I said, “That’s what I wanna do.”
I played, I practiced, I got good at it. But the professional at our golf club in England said, “He doesn’t have enough talent to be a professional golfer,” and my father said, “Therefore you’re not gonna be a professional golfer.” He didn’t want to support me pursuing that. That felt disappointing to me. And years later, when I beat Jack Nicklaus by four shots on a golf course he designed, that joy was offset by the realization that I hadn’t pursued a dream that I would’ve liked to have pursued.
So, I had reached the conclusion as a parent that I want to support my kids in whatever endeavor they want to pursue if it’s something they’re passionate about, if it’s something they clearly have talent doing, and if it’s something that brings them joy.
Dustin
So I moved to Nashville.
Moved to Franklin and then, immediately upon getting to Franklin (which is a suburb of Nashville), started going to open mics in Nashville just about every night. My uncle and aunt lived about 40 minutes outside of Nashville. I would drive in, and it was this long trip on the highway, and the one I’d go to frequently was at the Douglas Corner Cafe on the west side of Nashville.
The Douglas Corner Cafe was — like, an okay place, it was sort of a crappy bar, but it was an okay crappy bar. On Tuesday nights was the open mic, and the place was just — there were probably 60 singer-songwriters of my ilk there to play this open mic. So you have to get there at 6, and you’re required to stay until it started at 7, and then you’er required to stay until your slot. So you would just sit there, drinking beer, talking to people, trying to meet people, watching people play.
The quality of performers at open mics is essentially a bell curve where most of the people are okay. You know, good enough, not extraordinary and not abysmal. Some people, you’ll see a handful a night who are pretty good. You look at them and say, “They have enough ability to where if they land in the right place, they could make this into more than a hobby.” And then, an equal number of people, they just don’t have it, whatever you need to have to succeed in that world. It’s not gonna happen, and that’s what your instinct tells you.
So you watch them play, and you think that to yourself, and you have that private realization of, “This person doesn’t have it.” But then you also realize, okay, I’m at the same rung of the ladder as these people, and if I can so apparently see that they’re this unqualified to have this career, what’s to say I’m not miss-appraising myself in the same way?
There’s nobody that goes around at open mics like this and gives people stamps of potential, if you will. There’s no filtration system. Everybody has the same opportunity, everybody has the same time, and there’s no evaluation process to move up a rung of the ladder. All ladder-ascent is completely accidental, fortuitous — it’s not systematized.
I did several dozen of these and had this inner questioning at each one. I’d think I did a good job, I’d meet a few people and think, “I guess I’ve done a good job,” but there’s no pat on the back. There’s nothing to give you the guarantee that you did, so you’d wonder.
After three-six months of that, I moved out of my uncle and aunt’s place and into Nashville proper, into this small house in East Nashville. I had a lovely roommate, and felt like I had moved up a rung of the ladder. I did conceive of the experience as a ladder that needed climbing, and that felt like I had moved up a rung.
I thought, likewise, I can now stop playing open mics, and I can start playing “real shows.”
There was this place in East Nashville called the Five Spot. It had this long bar, and they would have seven or eight acts play each night, and I would go and just introduce myself to people at the bar. Strike up conversations and see who was there that I could talk to who could do something for me. I almost hate to say it, but you evaluate people on the grounds of, “Can you get me higher on the ladder?”
It started to grow. I met other musicians, I met producers, I met songwriters, I met venue bookers, I met all kinds of people who had some kind of stake in the Nashville world and who had one little thing they could offer that made them valuable. I found a couple of places that I could play small sets at. I invited some of the people I’d met at open mics, so I had kind of a crowd that was there. And once a month or so, in the early months of 2016, I started to play “real shows.”
That felt good. That felt like I’d ascended a rung of the ladder. I met this guy, Chris, who I’m still friends with, who I would write songs with, and who would produce some of my songs later. I looked at that, and I thought, “Great, that’s another rung of the ladder ascended. Now I have a group.”
Diane
When I visited him, the few times in Nashville, he was I thought actually doing wonderfully. I remember going to Mad Valley Lodge with him, the home of one of the friends that he’d made. I sat on the floor with people who I never would’ve met or been exposed to and could see the joy he was getting at being part of this community.
We went to the Grand Ole Opry, and all I remember thinking to myself was, “No matter what happens here, this is a huge success.”
Dustin
A couple months of that went by, where it was the same cycle of activities — maybe playing one show a month, maybe hanging out with people once or twice a month, and feeling involved once or twice a month. But when that pattern wore on for a while, it turned from exhilaration into boredom.
There would be these long, long stretches of time where I would have nothing to do, and I’d be waiting for my show which was a month later. I had all this time to sit and think, “Am I doing this right?”
I would work in restaurants during the day. My body would get exhausted, and I’d have no energy left for writing, or networking, or any of the creative things I was supposedly there to be doing. So the thrill of ascending a rung of the ladder, once you plateaued, it turned into boredom, and it turned into angst, and it turned into self-doubt and self-reproach. Feeling like, a couple of months ago, you had a minor success, and now, once again, you’re failing.
As it got into the middle and later months of 2016, the prevailing assessment of my life was that this is beginning to not work. It’s too long since your last success, none of the milestones you’ve set out for yourself are coming to fruition, there was no way to assuredly say “You’re doing it right” or “You’re doing it wrong,” so I defaulted to “You’re doing it wrong.”
Donald
It was interesting to visit Dustin while he was in Nashville. I went to a couple of open mics with him. In the open mics, it was clear that Dustin had superior talent. I don’t know the music industry well, but my sense is that success is kind of random. It’s not based purely on an assessment of talent. There are a lot of other factors that go into determining whether one is successful or not.
Dustin
As 2017 rolled around, I started to record another album with my friend Chris. This one was different. The earlier one, in 2015, at the time it felt like the climax of my life — the pinnacle of my creative life, the ideal document for everything that I ever wanted to express about myself. It hadn’t catapulted me into stardom, so I started to look at that as a failure. Recording this next album, I thought, if this one doesn’t do it, it’s over.
Chris and I would record in his bedroom. He would set up mics — he was a producer, so he knew how to put everything together. Picture two guys, you know, in a room, gazing into a computer screen, moving tracks around, re-recording them. Chris, on this one song, recorded 40 takes at least of this guitar solo, and we painstakingly analyzed each take to find the best moments from each, stitching together this mosaic of a guitar solo.
And then — at the end of it — I just didn’t know what to do with it. I care so deeply about the creation process, and then when it came to publicizing, I had no idea what to do. I didn’t look for a promotional partner to help me with it, and it just didn’t go anywhere.
Because of that — because 2016 had turned into 2017, and this cycle of working in restaurants and tiring myself out and playing maybe one show a month, maybe no shows a month, maybe no shows for two-three months, not doing the things I imagined I’d be doing, and having recorded this second piece of work and it not producing anything — I really hit this wall inside myself where I thought, “You have, like, really, fully, inarguably failed here. You haven’t done anything you wanted to do, you haven’t achieved anything you set out to do. The reasons you’re here aren’t good reasons. Finally, that’s the verdict, and so you have to not be here.”
I had started when I was 14 thinking, “This is what you are. You’re a creative person, you’re a lyric-writing person, you’re a singing person.” Finally, when it came time to make it external, to make it who I was in the adult world, it so crashed and burned. So in addition to leaving the geographic region, it was leaving the identity. I felt like I was walking away from the identity — that you thought you knew who you were, and you were wrong.
Back in my dad’s house, and felt like I was back to square one, except that when I was at square one I had the wrong idea, so I wasn’t at square one, I was at square zero. That self-pitying idea lasted for about half the year.
I had a lot of people, my parents chief among them, outside of myself who I would share my version of the story with — that version being: “Boy, I really screwed this up, I was wrong about who I was,” blah blah blah blah blah. And they would say…
Diane
I thought it was nothing but a success — including the fact that he came to the conclusion on his own that it was time for the experiment to end. I think if Donald or I had said, “Dustin it’s time to close up shop and bring your guitars home,” that would’ve been heinous on our part.
To me, it made me hugely proud of him.
Donald
It was not a failure in the least, because he was 22 years old. At the age of 22, I don’t know what you were doing, but I was managing a restaurant that I had no interest in actually managing. But I was learning a lot about life in the course of that. I was learning a lot about interacting with people. I was maturing. I was growing.
In all candor, I thought Dustin would reach the conclusion he reached at some point. I didn’t know when that would happen, but I was not at all surprised that he reached the conclusion that he did. We all take different paths. It’s not a failure in the least.
Dustin
Once the emotional seismic incident had passed, and the aftershocks were over, then I could look at it objectively, and say, “That’s more reasonable.” My version was based in pain, and based in pain that ultimately ended.
The way I conceived of it was, in Nashville, millions of songwriters go, year after year, trying to jam themselves in the front door of this industry which itself is shrinking. It’s like in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, the scene where they’re trying to cram themselves through the tiny door. Millions and millions of full-sized human beings trying to jam themselves through this mouse-hole.
And so I figured, there’s got to be some kind of side door here into the creative realm, the sphere of professional creativity, there must be some kind of way I can get away from the matting crowd in the front door, and find some side door that admits fewer people. You may have to bore a hole yourself, but there’s no way it’s gonna work that other way, I have to generate a system some other way, some sort of me-specific way, to enter this creative realm.
To abbreviate the next two years, I began writing professionally. I did a marketing internship made possible by Randy, and I started writing for other people. I started writing in the voices of other people.
Writing for someone other than me was this insane revelation. It was easier. It didn’t have the same spiritual onus that writing for myself does. It was doable. Once you would send them the piece, and they would say, “Yes, I like this,” then you had an external stamp. Then you had somebody saying, “Yes, this is good,” whereas before, everything I’d ever done musically, you never had anyone saying it. Or you did, but it wasn’t meaningful.
Here, it was meaningful. It at very least gave you that inner gratification of “I’ve done a good job,” and it also gave you some fiscal gratification. I could get paid for it. The first job I ever did writing, ever ever ever, I made exponentially more than I ever made in two years of being in Nashville. I don’t know if I even made $300 playing music in Nashville. Over the next couple years of cultivating that, writing professionally in addition to purely artistically, it began to snowball, and I could see, I’ve begun to find a trail through the woods. In Nashville, I was hacking away at endless overgrowth, and never finding a path. Here, a path was beginning to elucidate itself.
Four years now after leaving Nashville, feeling like I was just wrong and inept, I own my own creative writing business, I have a rotating cast of clients who come from all walks of life and who have all different needs, but all of which boil down to finding the narrative that’s meaningful to them.
When I have those quiet moments in between jobs and in between social events and family events, and I look down at the mirror of myself, the thing I see looking back at me is a thing that knows what it’s doing.
Randy
Thanks very much to the whole Lowman trio for telling their stories. And of course, thank you all for listening.
Those were Dustin’s songs soundtracking the episode. If you like what you heard, you can find them all on Spotify. We’ll be back next month with another speaker’s tale of struggle and perseverance. Till then, with grit, with grace, with growth, and with so much gratitude.
Songs in this episode:
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