I've been down a music rathole in the last few days.

This all happened because I have acknowledged recently that I am depressed again. The losses from the trip to Albania have accumulated. The cold I've been fighting for three weeks is still around. The shoulder therapy is daily and exhausting. And on top of it all, work remains a meaningless yet somehow still irritating pile of shit.

So I started building out my music library, which is something I do on and off but mostly on when I am tired and bored but know I need to be awake and doing something on my computer. And while I was doing that, I came across a library entry for Dream Theater, and my brain was like well i should be listening to music while I build out my music library and the next thing I knew I was listening to their album Awake and wondering why it's the one that felt closest to my heart.

And it comes down to feel. There is a larger range of emotion on the album. In particular the song Space Dye Vest – it's a song with an endlessly flat feel to the singing, and stream-of-consciousness lyrics that force a neutral becoming between listener and composer. I recognize this feel of music and it creates an instant bond when injected. It feels to me like the composer is singing, with actual knowledge, of depression, that it's become so familiar a friend in his mind that he can refactor that state into music, in an authentic way that properly reproduces the state instead of simply repeating the label of it i.e. "the state"

And I realized: I've been depressed at least since I heard that song, because it's that depression alignment that created the instant magnetism.

But I also wondered: Could Kevin be anything like me, since it was the single song he had full control over on the album which most directly connected me to the band?

Some internet searching told me quickly: Kevin Moore could not the grueling pace and scrutiny of Dream Theater. He could see where that band was headed. And that place was going to be Constant Scrutiny, at the mercy of their hordes of ultra-music-nerd fans who have requirements to be forever creative and fast and perfect or else. Unspoken but inferred: He couldn't see continuing to hang around people like that all of the time, and, well, the rest of the band was like that. The rest of the band wanted to be perfect and technical and varied and put out an album every year or two like clockwork and do the interview rounds and the touring rounds and it would never ever ever stop.

Kevin Moore was also very private. There still isn't much online about him. He has even said on an interview that he values his privacy.

Which means I have this quality in alignment with Kevin Moore: I can work at pace for a brief time, but I cannot do it forever. He could see it coming early, and got out of the way. I did the same thing with certain past companies who wanted me to work at pace forever. It crushed me inside in a way that is hard to describe, but it wasn't just hours worked. It was more existential. If all I do is work, then I am work. There exists a squeezing of something vital and necessary inside when I have those thoughts. I wondered if Kevin had a similar sense of doom when calculating his future with a band whose ambitions were so intense.

And there is this other piece. I believe I simply have to do more work mentally than other people to get through my day. Which may be why some people working at "pace" seem okay whereas others, at the same pace, seem exhausted. The same pace costs people differently inside.

I have come to believe this is because I am hyper-vigilant due to my, uh, let's say "turbulent" upbringing to keep it light here and not delve into the depths, and being hyper-vigilant means that one is doing a lot of extra work behind the scenes – monitoring your spouse for any sign of irritation for example, because you can't help yourself, because when you were a kid if you didn't monitor your parent very carefully you could be in a lot of trouble if you did the wrong thing at the wrong time when the parent was in the wrong state, the wrong state, the wrong state.

The state of the parent is very important data, and branches out into examining and needing data on others: friends, family, co-workers, even nameless, adoring fans, if you happen to have any. Hyper-vigilant personalities perform a computationally expensive process: The poll for state too frequently. Polling takes a lot of energy.

And thus the expense of an hour of energy is, for me, the guy with hypervigilance, greater than it is for you, the bro at complete ease always because he had a great childhood. And it is because I have a gigantic polling process built into my internal system that I cannot turn off but always eats CPU. I am perhaps doing more work than most others, even when sharing an experience.

Anyway. Kevin's music since Dream Theater has been pretty good. It feels a little like catching up with an old friend who quit a MegaCorp job and instead is working at a successful but small company in their Accounting Department, and the job is adored, because it is Lower Stress. Their work is still amazing, but somehow the Lower Stress part comes across too. This probably makes no sense when applied to music but I can give this bit of extra support to whatever point I was trying to make: The average BPM of Kevin Moore's post DT albums has to be 50% lower than Dream Theaters, and with practically no time changes. And the music is often just as good.

But then I found that he went back to school to be a shrink because he couldn't break through again. Which depressed the fuck out of me. But he also apparently has said he loves being a shrink.

So I can only speculate. In other words any of the connections that I've drawn could very easily be wrong.

And I'm probably wrong about everything.