The Stories We Tell Ourselves Matter

We all have multiple versions of the story we tell about who we are. We have the version we put on the internet. The version we tell our friends and family. The version on our résumé. The version of who we are at work. And then we have the version we tell ourselves about who we are. All of those versions are equally true. Just different parts of the same story edited in and out. But the funny thing is the version you tell yourself…that’s the worst version. It’s no more or less true than the version on your résumé. You just don’t believe that other version as much.

As a music editor, I manipulate a very specific part of the narrative for a living, the emotional journey. It’s not my job to worry about the words or the plot. It’s my job to pay close attention to what every moment feels like, and ultimately to try and control the way the audience feels.

That piano note that makes you feel sympathy for the victim, I can move it a few seconds earlier and make you feel sympathy for the killer. Subtle changes in timing, tone, and emphasis change how a story lands. And I’m here to tell you that the most important story you’re working on isn’t the one you tell your audience. It’s the one you tell yourself. And you’re probably editing it badly. I know, because I was too.

In the mid-2000s I was working on the TV show “Cold Case.” Every episode we would solve an old unsolved mystery from the past. It was a particularly fun job because when we flashed back to the year of the crime, we would use popular music from that year so I got to edit a lot of really fun songs from a lot of different eras, and that music was a big part of the show. Intermingled with that, the brilliant prolific composer Michael Levine was writing new themes every week because there were new characters and new timelines. It was a really complicated show with a lot of music.

I got up every day and I worked on that music all day long. At night I was done, my ears were tired. My brain was tired of thinking about music. I wasn’t making music anymore. I wasn’t really even listening to music anymore. Music had become work.

I was driving home from a “Cold Case” mixing session one day and when I turned on the car radio, a song I didn’t recognize came on. I had just gotten my first radio that showed you the name of the song and the artist on the display, so I glanced down and saw it was a Britney Spears song (I can’t remember which one). I had never heard that song before, but I recognized the title, and I knew it was a hit. I thought, “I’m going to listen to this and see what it is that people like about it, because it’s my job to know popular music.”

So I’m listening, trying to find something to like, and after about thirty seconds I thought, “OK, I get it. I’m getting bored now.” So I switched the station.

As soon as I switched the station, I hear the first lyric from Jackson Browne’s “The Pretender”:

“I’m gonna rent myself a house in the shade of the freeway…”

It was so perfectly timed that if one of my apprentice music editors had edited it into a scene like that, I would have rejected it as forced, unnatural, too perfect. I pushed the button and boom, Jackson Browne starts singing the first lyric.

At that moment when Britney Spears turned into Jackson Browne, it occurred to me what the difference was between them, and it wasn’t any of the things I had learned in music school. They both were singing in tune. They both were singing in time. They were both doing their jobs at the highest level, but I suddenly realized that they were doing different jobs.

It wasn’t about how, or even what they were singing. It was about why. Britney Spears was a pop star, a performer. She wants you to watch her dance and sing and put on a show. She has co-writers and producers and stylists and managers and dozens of other people behind her music. Sure, she was the face of it, but she was just a part of a big production machine put together to sell albums. And that is why she was singing.

But Jackson Browne is a story teller. What I suddenly noticed was that he was using many of the same subtle tools I was using to take you on an emotional journey. He had something he wanted me to think about, something he wanted me to feel and that was why he was singing.

The very next thought I had, after I realized the only difference that mattered was intent, was, “Oh my God…I’ve become Britney Spears.”

It occurred to me that I was doing music for money. Not even my own music. And all of the reasons I became a musician, all of the things I loved about it that drove me towards it, had nothing to do with what I was doing all day long.

It threw me into a pretty deep depression. I mean, I had actually done it. I had built a career working as a musician, making decent money using my musical skills all day every day. And all the while the knob of musical integrity turned down slowly and slowly and slowly until it clicked off, and I never noticed until that moment.

After a few days of wallowing and sadness, I sat at the piano and forced myself to write a song. And that’s when “Feel Lucky” was written. In one session. It just flowed out of me and it was like a switch had been flipped back on. My relationship to being a musician was restored, a relationship I didn’t even realize was in crisis.

And yet, it took me 20 years to put out an album and finally release that song.

I think about all the different phases of myself as a musician. The young kid in college playing in bands. The few years I told myself I was a film composer. All the years building a music editing career.

The week before I wrote that song, I was telling myself I’d made it. I’m a professional musician. Then I had a thought, something changed my narrative, and I was telling myself it’s all a lie. You’re not a musician.

Then I wrote a song and it changed my narrative and I told myself you’re back, you’ve got it all. And then it took me 20 years to put that song out because through that whole time while I was winning awards and climbing up in the industry, I didn’t really believe I was good enough. I always had a thousand reasons in my head why I wasn’t an artist worthy of having a solo career. It just took me 20 years to tell myself the story that I was ready.

The hard thing for me to accept is that the song I finally put out is exactly the same as the night I wrote it. Nothing changed about the song. What changed was my courage. What changed was the story I was telling myself.

What I’ve come to learn is that we all tell ourselves stories about who we are, and then we go about our lives living out those narratives. If you want to change your behaviors and you want to change your life, what you have to change is the story you tell yourself and you have to believe that new story as much as the one you believe right now.

It’s not easy to do. That’s why it’s important to understand what makes a story believable, what makes a story complete. You can’t lie to yourself. But you can tell yourself a different, just as true story about who you are and what you can do. You can accomplish way more than you’re telling yourself right now. You just have to learn how to be a better storyteller to yourself.

You can listen to “Feel Lucky” and the rest of my debut album Whole New Sun by Micha Meir (I use my middle name and not my last) wherever you stream music.