Why is the Music Industry Escaping to the Wilderness?

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“If you only knew the yearning to get into the mountains that fills me these days!…Music is wonderful — but the musical world is bunk! So much petty doings — so much pose and insincerity and distorted values…I find myself looking back on the Golden Days in Yosemite with supreme envy. I think I came closer to really living then than at any other time of my life, because I was closer to elemental things – was not so introspective, so damned sensitive, so infernally discriminative.”

Landscape photographer and pianist Ansel Adams wrote to his wife Virginia in 1927 to express his frustration with the society of musicians he found himself amongst. He sounds exasperated and drained from listening to endless pontificating, and even dissatisfied with music itself as an art form. “I am tired of moving my fingers up and down under smug rules of past ages and evoking series of tones that are supposed to represent emotion. 1/100,000,000 of them do!”

I left the music industry myself a few years ago, diving, some would say randomly, into the outdoor adventure industry. Over the years I’ve asked myself what the alchemy behind this decision was. It has been difficult to articulate to friends and family members who feel that my personality and goals must have done a complete and sudden 180. Yet, there is a curious connection between the music and outdoor industries. I am not the only defector to make this leap. After all, did Chris McCandless, Henry David Thoreau, and Jack Kerouac not have something of a punk rock mentality?

In 2019, massively successful musician Mike Posner embarked on an ambitious 2851 mile Walk Across America. I followed along with his journey as he got bitten by a rattlesnake and slowly morphed from a clean shaven pop star into a frazzled and weather-beaten character easily recognizable as a thru-hiker. When speaking to TIME Magazine about his journey, Posner explained, “I spent a lot of my life trying to make things as comfortable as possible. In the walk, I was trying to do the opposite…I had an inkling that there was more inside of me than I was letting out.” Like Adams, he found this hard to reconcile with his previous life. “After you go into the woods or desert and you come back to cities, you see how ugly a lot of the stuff we build is…Where I am now, in Hollywood, seems completely absurd.”

It’s no coincidence that so many artists retreat to secluded cabins in the woods in order to craft their next opus. It’s become a trope. There’s an entire mythos around the origin of Bon Iver’s debut album For Emma, Forever Ago, written in his father’s Wisconsin cabin in the dead of winter during an aimless quarter life crisis. During the COVID quarantine years, Taylor Swift wrote two albums with a heavy lyrical focus on the natural world. In Jeff Opperman’s “Taylor Swift is Singing Us Back to Nature”, he highlights that “Ms. Swift seems to be turning to nature for connection and solace.”

Shane Turner, who goes by the moniker Mountain Mansion, is a songwriter and fire tower lookout in the remote Canadian mountains. His last album was written in solitude from his post atop a peak. 

“For a while, going out to shows, concerts, and parties was what I lived for,” Turner says. “When being a musician became a full-time job, I started thinking differently about what I do for fun and recovery. Forcing myself to network even when I wasn’t social had me searching for solitude in my downtime. Playing shows where drinking seemed essential to the rock lifestyle encouraged me to find recovery days away from that environment. And spending most of my creative time in dark, decrepit jam spaces had me craving fresh air.”

I resonate with his story completely. Living in New York City and Los Angeles while working for talent agents and artist managers, I spent most of my nights out at shows until early morning hours, availing myself of free drink tickets and chain-smoking cigarettes. In my Boston days I was at basement shows, crammed together with a hundred other sweaty fanatics. It was everything I ever wanted at the time, a far cry from being stuck in uneventful Texan suburbs, but before long it caught up to me. My body could have taken a few more years of abuse, but my mind was desperate for something else. Perhaps I wanted to actually live the on-the-road outlaw life that my favorite songwriters wrote about, instead of just singing along. I wanted to walk the walk, and be the person the songs made me feel like I was.

In the music world, we are constantly turning over abstract, intangible ideas in our heads, navel-gazing into oblivion. Edward Abbey said it best in Desert Solitaire: “the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.”

In music we simulate emotion through sound, instead of eliciting it through experience. We speak in verse, and begin to think in it too. Our social circles become insular, and there is an unspoken code of conduct within communities and scenes. Music was present in ancient history, yet the culture around it today demands modernization and participation in the rituals of city life. It’s been proven that the arts have drifted further and further away from earth over the years. Outside contributor Daniel Person wrote that “Researchers surveyed song lyrics, books and movie scripts and found that words associated with nature have declined steadily since 1950”. 

It all begins to feel ungrounded, arbitrary, and lofty. Even technologically speaking, music itself lives in the cloud. I remember growing up I would use words like “authenticity” and “real” to describe music I liked, but in later years the entire paradigm around music couldn’t have felt less authentic. Where else do we look for authenticity? Where else can we find solace or enlightenment if not in art? Is art not man’s attempt to process or rival nature?

Turner says “I started hiking on days off. That led to trying to write more outdoors and searching for places where phytoncides could heal and trigger creativity. Eventually, I found nature more inspiring than anything the city had to offer and worked for a lifestyle change far from basements and downtown bars. That led me to a job in Forestry and a home in the wilderness. Most of the music I make and love to listen to could join me in the woods anyways.”

Adams wrote “how I long to get back to it all – to feel the contact of everyday, commonplace, material, primitive things – Rock – Water – Wood – and unanalyzed love and friendship (the only satisfactory kind).”

Posner says, “Without knowing it, we live our lives inside a tiny sandbox, forgetting that there’s a huge wide wonder world outside of that. Personally, I want to play on the monkey bars, go down the slide, leave the playground and see what else is out there.” He also wanted to challenge himself to become a better, more well-rounded person, someone who is capable. “When somebody says, who’s your hero? Who inspires you? I wanted to be able to look them in the eye and say, ‘Me.’ So I tried to go become that person.”

In the music world in particular, there is a lot of idolatry. I finally grew tired of admiring other people, looking up to artists and industry veterans as a blueprint for who I wanted to be. It’s self-denying, and why disrespect oneself when there are plenty of other people in the industry who will gladly disrespect you?

For many up-and-comers, accomplishing goals in the music industry is like attempting to summit a mountain. They dream of it from a young age, and are told at every turn that it’s a risky venture, that almost no-one “makes it”. As an intern on the industry side of things, you’re constantly reminded that if you’re not willing to do demeaning work for long hours for little pay, hundreds of people are waiting lined up behind you to swoop in and take your spot. When you’ve already accomplished something impossible just by being in the room, this premature sense of victory provides an opportunity to look around and think, “I’ve done something! But what is ‘something’? What have I actually achieved? Was there any honor in earning my seat at this table?” When the answer is inevitably unsatisfactory, it seems that a common response is to test one’s mettle in other ways.

In the realm of outdoor adventure, my success relies entirely on me…and the weather. If I make a goal to summit a mountain, I will ultimately summit the mountain based on my training and grit. No celebrated executive can stop me. The CEO of North Face will not stand in the trail to block my way. The mountain will not invent additional obstacles especially for me because I’m a woman, or because of my age, or because of my educational or financial background. The mountain presents itself the same way to me as it does for anyone else. A 2851 mile walk puts the same stress on a celebrity’s joints as it would put on mine or my friends.

I asked for comments from a few of my friends who also used to work in the music industry and have since transitioned to outdoor adventure. One of them was a sound technician for touring bands but ran off to complete the Pacific Crest Trail and get his skydiving license. One was in a band himself, and then became an entertainment lawyer, and is now a climber who helps produce documentaries. One worked in artist management but ended up completing the Appalachian Trail and now spends her time on ski lifts and mountain bikes. If I knew them, I might also ask John Joseph of the Cro-Mags, who became a triathlete and Ironman competitor, Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, who runs ultramarathons, or journalist Grayson Currin, a thru-hiker who is a contributor both to Outside Online and music publications like Pitchfork.

They all responded that there is absolutely some kind of connection between these two industries. On the one hand, more American young people in general are foregoing the typical expectations of capitalism and seeking work-life balance than previous generations. On the other hand, there is an undeniable trend of creative people making this choice, and making it in the very specific direction towards the wilderness. My friends agreed to send me their own thoughts about what may be driving music people to become outdoorspeople, confidently believing they could help me pinpoint the obvious commonality at the heart of this phenomenon. A few days passed and a couple of them wrote back to apologize for not gathering their thoughts yet, promising to send them soon. Days turned to weeks, and ultimately every one of them went silent. It turns out that perhaps the exact nature of the connection between music and the outdoors is more elusive than we initially thought. It’s certainly there, we know without hesitation, but what is its essence?

To the uninitiated, a drawing of notes on a staff could not begin to elicit an idea of what music truly sounds like. A painting of the sun could never hint at what its warmth feels like on the skin, no matter the talent of the artist. In much the same way, perhaps an article such as this can not hope to capture the intangible ties that bind music and outdoor enthusiasts. Perhaps both camps hold a similar worldview, or a similar depth of sensitivity, or a similar curiosity. Perhaps when we tire of looking inward, we look outward; or maybe the other way around.

Perhaps both interests appeal to rebels (or as cynics might call us, “lazy” or “privileged” people, who only simulate a dirtbag lifestyle). Or perhaps both are conduits through which we hope to express something inexpressible, something uncapturable. Abbey proposed, “Suppose we say that wilderness invokes nostalgia, a justified not merely sentimental nostalgia for the lost America our forefathers knew. The word suggests the past and the unknown, the womb of earth from which we all emerged. It means something lost and something still present, something remote and at the same time intimate, something buried in our blood and nerves, something beyond us and without limit.

Wilderness. The word itself is music.” 

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