February 2026: "Research is MEsearch"
Hey y’all,
Here’s the Austin B. Sweeney newsletter coming in hot for the month of February. I put these out once a month to keep you updated on upcoming shows, what I’m listening to, general musings, lyric breakdowns, and much more! I hope this newsletter will provide value for you, if for no other reason than it may introduce you to music you haven’t heard before!
Let’s quit wasting time here and jump into it, here’s what I’ve been listening to in the last month:
Song: “Have It All” – Ben Danaher
Album: “Dreams to Dream” – Jake Owen
Artist: Father John Misty
My new EP, “WAGON” is available NOW everywhere you get your music.
I also just finished mixing and mastering a new live album, recorded at The Artichoke in Portland that I’ll be releasing in a couple months, so stay tuned for that!
Also, if you want to read any past newsletters, click here
I also made some behind-the-scenes videos for both “Some Things Never Change” and “Leaving Reno”
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Alright, 2026. We’re now into February, how’s everybody’s New Years resolutions coming along?
I’ll tell you mine. I don’t often make too many as I consider myself always a work-in-progress and I’m always fine-tuning and making improvements where I can during the year, so New Years resolutions are usually smaller things.
Here they are:
· Read one book per month (so far, so good.)
· Practice optimism, and avoid dwelling on past mistakes (my personal wiring tends towards pessimism)
· Release an album (which is in the works as I write this)
I’m sure y’all fall into one of two camps when it comes to resolutions.
There are the folks who see January 1st as “just another day” and think that New Years resolutions are dumb. There’s nothing wrong with this view, as it’s technically true, but I fall into the second camp.
The second camp truly does see January 1st as the beginning of something new and the burning off of all the buildup that we acquired in the previous year. Sure, as we look at our resolutions, you’ll often see themes throughout the years. It’s often items like exercising more, eating healthier, losing weight, saving money, personal growth, etc.
All good things to practice.
I’ll speak for myself on this issue, and I think many folks will relate, but I am very momentum-based in my ability to stick to something consistently. A good example would be my adventures in sobriety in the last few months of 2025. I don’t have much trouble abstaining from alcohol during the week, but man, once the weekend hits, a beer or a glass of whiskey starts to sound pretty damn tasty. Especially when I’m playing in bars all the time.
Getting through that first weekend without a drink isn’t painful, but it can be a little uncomfortable. The second weekend is pretty much the same as the first. By the third weekend though, I start to feel a little momentum. I feel the wind at my back. Things start to get easier to simply say “no thanks.” Before I knew it, I hit 100 days of sobriety and thought about alcohol less and less.
It’s worth noting that on day 103, Laura and I went to The Pelican in Pacific City. It’s our favorite beachside bar in Oregon where, in late December, we have our yearly “State of the Union” discussion about our lives – what’s working, what isn’t, what we’d like to accomplish in the coming year, etc. I had been going back-and-forth on whether we should have a beer. It’s our tradition, and I am nothing if not a sucker for tradition. I chose to have a beer.
A tall, frosty IPA. Good grief, it went down like honeydew vine water. Satisfying.
I chose to make that decision and didn’t feel any remorse about breaking my sober streak. A large part of that is because I chose to drink. I didn’t leave it up to how I felt that day, or put any big meaning on top of it. I simply wanted a beer to commemorate the year and to facilitate our State of the Union meeting.
After that, I chose to have another drink here-and-there for the final events that were closing out 2025. I had a couple at Laura’s folks house when we spent Christmas with them on December 30th, and then had two Church Musics (my favorite Arizona IPA) at a New Year’s Eve Party. Again, I chose to do that, and now I’m taking a break again for a little while.
This brings me back to my point about momentum. Once I got to that first weekend of 2026, I felt a little more craving for a drink than I had the previous three months.
When you’ve only got three days behind you, it’s way easier to break your streak because your streak is virtually non-existent. When you’ve got three months behind you, you’ve got the added motivation to keep your streak, which makes your decisions much easier.
This is why I fall very much into Camp 2 regarding New Years resolutions. There’s a built-in momentum of a new year. Everything that happened in the previous year is stuck in the previous year; you can consider yourself a clean slate. I’m not going to quote “New Year, New Me”, because something about that phrase gives me the heebie-jeebies. However, as a call-back to a previous newsletter and song of mine, a new year is a good opportunity to Be Here Now.
The Bible says something about how every day the world is made anew. Deal with the problems of the day, because the day in itself has enough problems and looking forward or backward simply steals your attention from the day-at-hand.
I view the New Year in the same way. Let’s forget our troubles, slip-ups, mistakes, and worries of the prior year. We’ve got a new year! What a perfect opportunity to refocus with a clean slate and a clear mind.
Just because you failed last year at your resolutions has ZERO bearing on your attempts to keep them this year. To step out of the moment for a second, maybe it’s worth sitting and writing down last year’s failed resolutions and deciphering where it went wrong. Maybe that can give you a roadmap through the inevitable rough patches that will hit this year and help you navigate them with better foresight.
I’m a major Jordan Peterson fan (he’s gotten a little too political for me lately, but I used to love his books and lectures) and he made a good point about making changes in life that help them stick. It has to do with the “minimum effective dose.”
To start with, he makes the point that you can’t hit a target if you don’t know what you’re aiming at. This would be our resolutions. If our resolutions are too vague or ill-defined, we can’t track progress. The ability to track progress is where much of life’s satisfaction can be experienced. When you look back, you may realize that many of life’s happiest moments are when we were working towards something that we deemed valuable. It’s the reason that famous rockstars with tour buses and sold-out shows look back fondly on their grind towards the top. They were still working towards what they have now. The satisfaction and happiness was in the pursuit.
So, we can’t hit the target if we don’t know what we’re aiming at. Therefore, how do we identify that target and go about hitting it?
This is where the “minimum effective dose” comes into play.
First, you need the ability to track your progress – by the way, I’m still trying to figure out how to track my resolution for practicing optimism, but the other two resolutions have an actual number on them. If you can track it, you can improve upon it.
After that it’s pretty simple. Start with the minimally effective dose. If you want to get to the gym more, start with a trackable number. Two, three, four days a week? That’s doable. So start with day 1. Alright, now you have made it into the gym. When you haven’t gone in a while, going to the gym can be a pretty daunting experience. Once you’ve gone even one time, the veneer of intimidation wears off pretty quickly.
Then you just go again, and again. Bring a notepad to track progress. All of a sudden, you get a little bit addicted to checking off another day in the gym. One week, somewhere down the line, you’ll realize that it’s Sunday and you still need one more day in the gym for that week, you’ve got the momentum, and you don’t want to break your streak. In 2025 – having not gone to the gym in a while – you would have absolutely skipped it (and easily, I might add), because you weren’t even going in the first place.
It’s 2026 however, and now you’ve got that momentum and trackable progress, so you get up, put on your shoes and go to the gym. By the time you walk out, you feel fantastic knowing that you kept that promise you made to yourself. Apply this principle to any resolution you want.
One final note that I think is helpful, I got this from the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. Part of the reason resolutions are tough to stick with is due to our identity.
We’ll use the gym analogy again, mostly because it’s easy. When we’re a non-gym person, skipping the gym is no big thing. We’re not gym people. Subconsciously we don’t identify as that being who we are. One of the easiest ways to become a gym person is by first identifying as a gym person.
You weren’t a gym person before? Well, now you are, and gym people go to the gym. If you can simply tell yourself repeatedly that you’re a gym person, you are slowly but surely crafting your identity as a gym-goer. Once you actually begin going to the gym with your resolution in mind, you have now proven to yourself and your subconscious that you go to the gym. As you continue going to the gym consistently (you’re a gym person, after all), your conscious and subconscious begin to align and you realize after a month, or six months, or a year, that you are, in fact, a gym person. Again, apply this principle to any resolution you want.
Start with the easiest possible step (the minimum effective dose) just to get momentum going. Learn to stay consistent with that, and then build upon it as you progress. There’s no rules, take as long as you want, just be consistent.
For the record, I am on the exact same path as all of you and just because I can write down all this information doesn’t mean that I’m any better at implementing it, or that I think that I am. As the old adage goes: “Research is MEsearch.”
I like to think of it this way: how lucky are we that we get to set New Years resolutions and work towards them? Every year we get the opportunity to pursue meaning and happiness. We as Americans are entitled to the pursuit of happiness, not the attainment of it. That line from the Declaration of Independence goes deep.
Good luck with 2026 everybody. Let’s make this a year for the books.
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Here are the shows that are coming up in the month of February (one show in OREGON this month for any of my PNW friends!). I might book another couple in AZ, so keep your eyes peeled on my socials.
· 2/1 – The Monastery (w/ Laura Hamlin), 3-7pm (Mesa, AZ)
· 2/6 – Old County Inn, 6-9pm (Pine, AZ)
· 2/7 – Old County Inn, 6-9pm (Pine, AZ)
· 2/13 – Valley Taproom, 7-10pm (Queen Creek, AZ)
· 2/14 – Saguaro Lake Ranch (ticketed), 5:30-8:30pm (Mesa, AZ)
· 2/15 – Mandy’s Wine Bar, 12-3pm (Maricopa, AZ)
· 2/19 – Spur Bar, 2:30-5:30pm (Payson, AZ)
· 2/21 – The Bypass, 7-9pm (Dayton, OR)
· 2/27 – Muks, 6-9pm (Payson, AZ)
· 2/28 – De La Cruz, 5-8pm (Gold Canyon, AZ)
Stoked to see y’all soon.
Austin
Listen now!
https://open.spotify.com/artist/433eTr5V5LEv1VtP1ejbkt?si=Jlzl5oz8RvulN-ocxrGqyg
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