June 2026: "Do It for the Story"
Hey y’all,
Here’s the Austin B. Sweeney newsletter coming in hot for the month of June. 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: “If I Had a Boat” – Lyle Lovett
Album: “The Great Divide” – Noah Kahan
Artist: KBong & Johnny Cosmic
I’ve got a new live album, “BE HERE NOW (Live in the PNW)”, recorded at The Artichoke in Portland, OR and it’s OUT NOW, everywhere you get your music! Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
If you’d like to support me monetarily, you can purchase the album – and any of my albums - here
Also, if you want to read any past newsletters, click here
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“DO IT FOR THE STORY”
Moving sucks.
You ever moved?
The feeling of being unmoored and realizing how scattered all your things are, is stressful. Realizing how much work will have to be done before you can simply have a normal Tuesday again is daunting. Laura and I are getting to experience that unique feeling as we speak. We have just arrived in Oregon and there’s a lot of work to be done before we are settled.
We are still living in our fifth-wheel camper, “The Bandwagon”, and to be honest, we’re pretty much over it. The excitement has worn off. We have loved being in it for almost two years, and it has afforded us the ability to live, work, and travel in a way that we may never experience again. We almost certainly won’t, actually, because now we have a baby boy on the way.
Also, now that we’ve drawn up plans for the house that we’re going to build and move into, it just throws our current living situation into harsh contrast. We’re no longer living in the camper indefinitely and enjoying the freedom that #camperlife entails. We’re now just counting the days until we have a dishwasher. A washing machine. A proper shower. All the amenities that are so often taken for granted when you have a house that doesn’t shake when you’re walking through it.
That’s not to say that we’re struggling or that we dislike our camper or anything. We’re simply ready for a house. We’ve never lived together in a proper house. It’s been the camper this whole time. We just celebrated our one-year anniversary. A year ago, we were getting married and preparing to head out on our country-wide honeymoon/tour.
Now? We’ve got a baby boy on the way, and we’re ready to move ourselves into a house that doesn’t currently exist. So, we’re having a lot of anxious fun in this liminal space.
This brings me to my point for this month’s newsletter. I don’t even have these ideas fully fleshed out, so we’re going to go on this conceptual adventure together.
The words we use shape our reality.
That’s the concept. Now, let’s unpack it.
I’m already sorry that I used the term “unpack” to describe exploring a concept, but bear with me.
I’ve mentioned it in previous newsletters, particularly my newsletter about the “Feng Shui of the Mind,” but the way we perceive life is entirely dependent on our self-concept and our assumptions about ourselves and the world.
If we wake up expecting to have a good day, we typically stand a better chance of experiencing one.
If we wake up dreading the pile of work that needs to be done, well, we’re probably going to interpret the day as an endless slog of frustration.
This is where the concept of “reframing” comes into play.
This is intertwined with the therapeutic modality of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
“CBT,” as it’s known on the streets.
Basically, the entire concept comes down to recognizing how you naturally react to everyday situations and learning to craft better natural responses.
How you choose to perceive a situation can determine your enjoyment.
Let’s say that you’ve got a vacation coming up. To be able to enjoy that vacation, you’re going to have to do a tremendous amount of work beforehand, which will then allow you to enjoy a guilt-free margarita on the beach. However, the fact that you’ve got an enjoyable endpoint to all that work means that doing all that work is in service of future-you. It’s exciting. You’re whistling as you work and checking things off your to-do list and imagining yourself on some far-flung tropical island without a care in the world. Every task you complete gets you one task closer to vacation. It’s energizing.
Now, contrast that with the same amount of work, but no vacation.
Now, it’s just work.
The work itself didn’t change, but your perception of it and how it relates to you is drastically different. Did your stomach sink a little bit when this imagined vacation got cancelled? Mine did.
We can do the same thing every day when it comes to crafting our perception of the day-at-hand. The unlived day before us is full of potential, and we have the opportunity to make of it what we will. That’s why I mentioned how our words shape our reality. I’ll give you a few examples. You can say:
“I’ll worry about that later.”
OR
“I’ll take care of that later.”
“We’ve got a problem.”
OR
“We’ve got a puzzle to solve.”
“I don’t know anybody at the party.”
OR
“What a great opportunity to exercise my social skills.”
“I feel overwhelmed, and I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to pull this off.”
OR
“Boy, this is a tough one. But I’ve solved every issue in my life that has led up to this one, and if my past track record is any indicator, I’m going to figure this one out too.”
Can’t you feel how different the vibe is between the two potential responses to different situations? One feels daunting and/or hopeless, while the other acknowledges that an issue needs to be dealt with, but proposes that you have the raw talent to deal with it without losing your head. It reminds you that you’ve got this.
It takes you from a low-agency fear stance and places you in a high-agency competency stance.
I don’t think I need to point out that this is what I’m dealing with as I write this. I had planned to write about something completely different for this month, but this issue has been weighing on me. I’ve found that if I write all this stuff out, it helps me sort it better. I take it out of my head – where it swirls around semi-subconsciously but feels heavy – and I transfer all of it to the page. It’s helpful.
So, we live in the camper. We have a baby coming. Laura (and I) do not want to bring a baby into this world by way of #camperlife. While many people have done it before us, we would like to have the baby in a house. That house doesn’t exist yet. We have a little less than four months before the due date. Currently we’re still working on permits for that house. Nothing beyond that has been lined up yet.
Stressful right?
Here’s how I’m choosing to reframe it. First of all, the worst-case scenario can be dealt with. If the baby arrives before the house is finished, then that’s how it goes. It’s not like we’re going to be unable to deal with it. It might be frustrating and less-than-ideal, but we’re still talking about a situation that culminates with our son entering this world. That’s still a reason to celebrate.
However, I’m not giving much credence to the worst-case scenario. There’s no reason to put that out into the universe. It’s good to have contingency plans, but once you have one, it’s better to assume that you’re not going to need it.
Things ARE going to work out, after all.
Second, and more importantly, aren’t these the stories that we cherish most? The stories where the situation felt unattainable and yet we figured our way through? Most of my favorite stories to retell contain at least one “all is lost” moment, and end with a “and then we figured it out” moment.
Parents always seem to have stories for their kids about a time before the kid came along that points out how they were in dire straits – especially if you’re Mark Knopfler – but they figured it out.
Sorry, that was a terrible joke. I’m working on my dad jokes. I need to be ready when the boy comes along.
Every good farm story I have from growing up was not enjoyable to live through, but fun to retell.
When The Bandwagon had a tire blow out and a leaf spring snap while Laura and I were on our honeymoon, it sucked. We were due to be in the Florida Keys the very next day, and instead, we were stuck for 5 hours on the side of I-10 in Milton, FL, with trucks flying by at 70mph while we were sitting in a cloud full of bugs on the edge of a swamp. After calling around to different local shops, we were told that there was no one that could fix it. But finally, a local boat shop said they “had a guy” that could at least take a look at it. He pulled up in his old truck, hours later, pulling a trailer with a welding rig on the back. He eventually got it put together well enough for us to limp into town on 3 tires and an old spare. We had to spend an extra night in Milton while we waited for all the repairs to be completed.
We could’ve been angry. We could’ve mourned our lost day in the Florida Keys. We could’ve been a lot of things. But we weren’t.
Anytime something goes drastically wrong and plans must be changed, I always remember that if nothing else, it’ll make for a good story. It’s a skill I learned on the farm, where something is going wrong every single day. In my family, we’ve missed vacations, holidays, birthdays, sports, flights, and countless summer nights, because something happened on the farm that needed to be taken care of.
I learned to adjust my expectations.
I also learned to expect the unexpected.
All plans should be taken with a grain of salt.
When Laura and I were sitting on the side of the road, I kept mentioning to her that if nothing else, this would be a funny detour in our honeymoon story. To Laura’s credit, she was also enjoying our silly little misfortune. We both recognized that it was wasted energy to despair over our situation.
There’s an old Buddhist saying about two arrows.
“Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.”
The teaching is broken down into two distinct concepts:
· The First Arrow (unavoidable pain): This represents reality – the physical and emotional difficulties of life that are completely out of our control. Things like illness, losing a loved one, blowing out a tire on the side of I-10 in Milton, FL on your honeymoon when you were one day away from a tropical paradise, etc. These are just common examples.
· The Second Arrow (optional suffering): This represents our emotional and mental reaction to the first arrow. This is where you have the option of indulging in self-blame, anger, panic, anxiety spirals, “What ifs”, etc.
The scenario is the same either way, but you always have the option of making it worse.
Therefore, once Laura and I had resigned ourselves to the fact that we were going to get a good honeymoon story out of our unfortunate situation, everything that came after making that mental shift became a funny addition to the already (kind of) funny situation. And you know what? We made the best of it.
We decided – while the trailer was in the shop – to make the one-hour drive to Pensacola, where we listened to Jimmy Buffett and drank frozen cocktails at a beach bar, and let our dog, Millie, splash around in the ocean. What was originally a lost day, became an extra day at the beach. Not only that, but we were able to move our reservation in the Keys back one day and got to stay the full two weeks anyway. Win-win.
Therefore, I see our dilemma with our move and our currently nonexistent house as just another situation in a long line of situations where we can reframe our predicament and recognize that there’s a ton of opportunity in what feels like an unfortunate and stressful situation.
No matter what happens, at the end of the day, we’re going to have a son in a few months, and anything that happens between then and now is part of a great – and most likely funny – story that we’ll get to tell him someday. The desperation of living in a camper and working our asses off to make sure that he’s born in a proper home puts stakes on the story, and what’s a good story without stakes?
I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do know that I have the opportunity to choose to make it an enjoyable experience and not an anxious one, so that’s what I’m going to choose to do.
I know you all have stories of your own and likely ten different things that might be stressing you out as you read this. We all feel like life could probably be going smoother than it is, and yet, it never happens that way. That’s what makes the ride interesting.
If nothing else, it’s worth considering the way that you speak to yourself when less-than-desirable situations crop up in your life.
Why dread a problem when you could, instead, treat it as solving a puzzle?
The more that goes wrong just means the stronger the story becomes. And at the end of the day and at the end of our lives, what do we have? Stories.
That’s what makes life worth remembering. The stories of victory, defeat, mishaps, tense situations, misadventures, and how we navigated our way down the proverbial mountain when the storm blew in and all hope seemed lost. Those are the stories we can lean on.
It’s not the situations themselves, but how we react to them, that define us.
And that, my friends, is why ghosts sit around and tell human stories.
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Here are the shows that are coming up in the month of June. They’re all in Oregon this month, and I’d love to see y’all out at a show!
· 6/5 – 19 Acres Cider Co., 5-8pm (Sherwood, OR)
· 6/6 – Blind Pig, 7-9:30pm (Carlton, OR)
· 6/11 – Calapooia Brewing, 7-8:30pm (Albany, OR)
· 6/12 – Chehalem Valley Brewing, 5:30-8:30pm (Newberg, OR)
· 6/13 – Rogue Pub, 7-10pm (North Plains, OR)
· 6/14 – Old Market Pub – ticketed, 7pm (Portland, OR)
o This is going to be a great show, and tickets are only $15, so I’d love to see y’all out at this one! Tickets are not available online, but are available at the door.
· 6/19 – Dry Town Tap Station, 7:30-9:30 (Monmouth, OR)
· 6/20 – Domaine Willamette, 6-8pm (Dayton, OR)
· 6/21 (Father’s Day) – TopWire Hop Project, 2-4pm (Woodburn, OR)
· 6/24 – Dirt Road Brewing, 6-8pm (Philomath, OR)
· 6/29 – Corner 14, 5-8pm (Oregon City, OR)
Stoked to see y’all soon.
Austin
Listen now!
https://open.spotify.com/artist/433eTr5V5LEv1VtP1ejbkt?si=Jlzl5oz8RvulN-ocxrGqyg
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