Mar 25

lookin' back, lookin' forward

i was born in 1996 — the tail end of one millennium, the threshold of another. i've been thinking about what it means to come from that particular seam. old enough to remember a world before smartphones colonized every idle moment. young enough to have grown up on the internet, to have had my imagination shaped by it, to understand instinctively how it moves.

that liminal position shows up everywhere in my life. i make folk music on acoustic guitar. i publish philosophical essays on a static html blog.

i consume most of my information through youtube videos and instagram reels, like everyone else in america 2026. i write all my dreams in a dream journal i've kept for over a decade. i exist, comfortably and uncomfortably, in the overlap between old and new — not quite of either, shaped by both.

i think a lot of us born at the end of the nineties carry some version of this. we're the ones asked, without being asked, to be translators. to take what was true and beautiful about the world that made us, and find a way to bring it forward. not as nostalgia. as inheritance.

the times they are changin'. they always are. but there's a particular quality to the changing right now — a sense that something foundational is shifting in how human beings transmit meaning to one another — that feels like the thing i was born into, and born to reckon with.

the holy grandfathers

bob dylan and elton john are not, on the surface, obvious twins. but i've been thinking about them lately as representing the same 20th century storyteller archetype — what i'd call the holy fool of the singer-songwriter tradition. the mythological cool guy whose personal life is mostly rumor, whose legacy is in the transmissions, who wore so many masks that the mask and the face eventually became indistinguishable.

they both have biopics now. make of that what you will.

i bring them up not to analyze them but to locate myself in relation to them. they're both grandfathers of my artistic lineage. i feel their influence in the way i approach a song, in the way i think about the relationship between performance and truth, in the way i understand the artist as a vessel rather than a brand. but i also feel the ways in which their model no longer fits.

in the twentieth century, the veil between artist and audience was structural. it was enforced by industry, by geography, by the media apparatus itself. you heard bob dylan through the radio. you received elton john through the television. the transmission was one-directional, and the mystique was partly a function of that distance. you couldn't see behind the curtain because the curtain was built into the medium.

that curtain is gone now. and i think the artists who are doing the most interesting work in this moment are the ones who recognize that its removal isn't a loss — it's an invitation. tyler, the creator doesn't call himself tyler the rapper. he calls himself a creator. that's not branding. that's ontology. he's naming something real about what it means to make things in a time when the categories have dissolved.

the mask was always a tool for truth-telling. the venetian actors knew this. dylan knew this. but at some point, the mask becomes the prison. and i think the real work of the twenty-first-century artist is to dismantle it — not to be more performative, but to be more present. to use full presence as the medium itself.

the transmission problem

here's something i've been reckoning with myself about lately: writing is comfortable for me in a way that can tend toward hiding when left unchecked.

i am more articulate on the page than i am on camera. i can construct an argument in writing that i couldn't deliver in speech without losing the thread. the essay form suits the way i think — it builds, it circles back, it allows for the kind of precision that live speech doesn't. and i genuinely believe that long-form writing with a distinct voice is not dying, despite what the metrics might suggest. the middle is collapsing, not the form itself.

but comfort and hiding can look identical from the inside.

what the camera asks of me that the page doesn't is presence without a net. in writing, i can revise. i can cut the sentence that revealed too much. i can shape the vulnerability into something structured enough to feel safe. on camera at 2am, half-awake, dumbbell on the floor, i can't do any of that. what comes out is what's there. and that's terrifying in a way that i think is worth leaning into, because it's kind of liberating also.

because there's something that only live presence can do, and it isn't reach — though reach matters. it's the transmission of being. when you watch someone think out loud, you're not just receiving their ideas. you're receiving them. their hesitation. their aliveness. the way their eyes move when they're reaching for a word. that's a different kind of intimacy than anything writing can offer, and pretending otherwise is just another form of the veil. of course, every medium has its limitations, its hidden fourth walls to break out of, and the medium isn't really the point anyway.

the question i'm sitting with is how to tap into my unlimited, authentic presence, not as a strategy but as a genuine expansion. to let the essay be the root system and the video be the canopy. to let the written form be where the thinking gets refined, and the spoken form be where the person becomes visible. to let the song sing wherever i am.

perhaps that's the most honest thing i can say about any of this: i'm not convinced i'm the one creating any of it. the creation creates itself. i just try to let it be.

the television

a few weeks ago, i appeared on new mexico living, a morning show on krqe. i performed a song called "i am the lighthouse." it was my first major moment of public visibility as scorsby — the first time the transmission went out through a legacy broadcast medium, over the airwaves, into people's homes.

i felt a bit nervous, as i had never been on tv before. maybe that comes through, or maybe not. but of course, sitting at the studio table, live on air, you realize a few things.

there's an irony in that i want to name. television is not exactly the cutting edge. local morning television is, in some ways, about as legacy as it gets. and yet stepping into that studio felt like crossing a threshold that nothing i'd done online had prepared me for. something about the physicality of it — the lights, the crew, the understood compact between broadcaster and viewer — made it feel real in a way that posting to the internet, for all its reach, sometimes doesn't. it's a rushed format - you're asked questions quickly, and expected to "play a bit." i don't think there's any reason television has to be this way but that's what it seems to be right now.

maybe legacy media still carries weight precisely because it's rare now. because it signals a certain kind of "seriousness". or maybe it's just that i stood in a room with other people and sang, and the song went somewhere, and i couldn't take it back.

but that's life for ya. a constant walking through doors, and turning into something. because that's what all of this is. transmissions. through whatever medium is available. through the blog post and the morning video and the folk song and the tv appearance and whatever else i do. the form keeps changing. the signal stays the same.

legacy-driven, future-focused

the phrase that comes to me when i try to locate myself in all of this is: legacy-driven, future-focused.

legacy-driven doesn't mean backward-looking. it means rooted. it means i know where i come from — the folk tradition, the jungian interior work, the long-form essay, the acoustic guitar, the dream as primary text. these aren't things i'm trying to escape. they're the ground i stand on.

future-focused doesn't mean chasing relevance. it means willing to evolve the channel. willing to show up in new forms, not because the old forms failed but because the signal is bigger than any single medium. willing to be seen in real time, imperfectly, as the thing i've been trying to describe on the page.

what the twentieth century got right was the power of the vessel — the artist as a body through which something larger moves. what the twenty-first century is asking for is the destruction of the distance. not the vessel but the presence. not the mask but the face.

i am still learning to show mine.

but the camera is on. and that, for now, is enough.

wishing you peace, love and joy, everywhere, all the time.

— scorsby

P.S. i have a patreon now. i'm gonna start sharing some of my more off-the-cuff art there, while it's fresh in the stew. visit patreon.com/scorsby for more info. you can listen to a new song i wrote there called "lookin' back, lookin' forward", which is also the title of my new youtube video, accompanying this essay. fresh blessings :->