Here’s a taste of one of my current projects:

Audiences could tell when you were trying to bullshit them. The honesty and emotion were either there, in your heart, your voice, your performance, or they were not. It was always clear, to everyone, if a singer was feeling the song or not. You had to own it, wring it from your veins, bleed reality, splattering everyone with the gore of the core of your essence.

So I gave them the truth they sought. With every lyric, every verse, it was there, always. It was what got me fans, kept them waiting for more, buying album after album. If there was one thing I was any good at, it was telling it like it was.

Of course, that only applied to my music. Everything I couldn’t express in life, to friends and family—those closest to me—went to the public in the form of marketable product. In a very literal sense, I sold my soul. The pain, the hope, the love, the ache, the struggle—with carelessness it was cut from me by my own hand. Chopped into pieces, raw and pulsing, it was diced and rearranged by professionals, sifted through microphones to flow along wires and circuits.

I left it there and walked away.

I guess that made me a coward. There was no fight to keep it sacred. My heart was consumed by the masses and, at the end of the day, nothing was left.

When the filter of the music wasn’t there, I couldn’t look honesty in the eye. It slipped away, frightened by the fear.

When it really counted, I was a lying prick, just like everyone else.

Song of the Lonesome Cowboy is a M/M Romance by Lynn Kelling