It’s easy to get side tracked.

As a musician you want to be able to express yourself in a way that shines in both excellence as well as integrity. Maybe your musical journey can be traced back to those first piano lessons, struggling to isolate the left hand from the right, diligently following the staff, pounding out drills, forging awkward pinkies, pointers, and thumbs into fingers of iron. Maybe you fancy yourself a guitar player who is a cut above mere power chords and pentatonic cliches, leaning instead on the influences of Bach and Paganini, favoring the neo-classical approach of modes at the speed of light as opposed to blues-based nonsense. Maybe you crammed a 4-year music degree into 5, spent months part-writing in your dorm room rather than going out with your friends, and landed the part of “Judas” the summer your local theater put on Jesus Christ Superstar. You spent your entire life preparing yourself for musical greatness and one day taking your uncompromising art to the masses. Fast forward to your mid-30s, you’re playing ’80s and ’90s three-chord pop songs for a $3 a head at the door and all the free domestic bottles you can drink. It’s a universe away from where you envisioned yourself and you die a little bit more inside every time the latest radio-ready single reminds you that “success, success and not greatness, is the only god the entire world serves” (credit to Cameron Crowe).

And let’s say you press on, you don’t compromise, you don’t pay the rent, and you take a side job waiting tables but the money isn’t any good because you can’t work Saturday nights because that’s when you need to be on stage. You write songs, you form a band and maybe you’re pretty good but no one wants to book you because you won’t compromise your art and we all know this guy over here will take the gig for $300 bucks and his band plays “Don’t Stop Believing.” You meet a girl, have a couple kids and before you know it you’re selling your keyboard rig to pay for toddler ballet lessons. Few years go by and you get bit by the bug and you find yourself back out there, back out on that stage. Only this time your wife is on your back about the money you’re spending on gear and time away from the kids so you can’t afford to play for art, you play for money. So you compromise. You play silly little pop songs and you fill up the dance floors and you go home.

But here’s the thing, did you really compromise? Or did you become part of something bigger than yourself? You see, people have to dance, it’s in our DNA, it’s in our solar system, as we speak, planets are dancing around the sun, bees are dancing hoping to find a mate, certain cultures dance and rain falls to the earth. Little girls stand on their daddy’s feet and dance in kitchens and learn to trust and fathers dance with their daughters at weddings because that man wants one more chance to tell the world, “Hey, that’s my little girl.”

You’re not just a carnival barker, you’re not a used car salesman, you’re not merely a side show attraction. You’re the rain maker. You’re like Moses – you move the people from the desert to the Promised Land. And maybe in the end it wasn’t the complex arrangements or the higher form of the art that convinced Pharaoh to let the people go.

Maybe all it took was a silly little pop song.