Last night I placed a small Bluetooth speaker on the top cupboard shelf in the kitchen, hit play on my iPhone, then set off to do the dishes. The only thing strange about this scenario was the musician I chose. He’s somebody I never put on.
“Who are we listening to?” asked August, my eleven-year-old.
“Your dad,” my wife said.
My family isn’t used to listening to Aaron Espe the singer-songwriter, especially when I’m around. I don’t like hearing my own voice. It feels like seeing my self-view on Zoom or FaceTime. Distracting at best. At worst it makes me anxious and self-loathing.
But before every album release I do some version of dogfooding. The term comes from the literal image of a dog food company CEO eating the dog food to prove his confidence. Whether that specific stunt actually happened is debated. But the metaphor stuck as a business concept. Leaders and employees use their own product to show they believe in it—and improve it. After all, if my family doesn’t like my album, why should I expect anyone else to?
The clinking of plates and silverware over running water was too loud. I took the speaker down from the shelf and put it on the table. Magnus (five) reached up, grabbed the device, then rambled off.
Is my target audience busy-bodied kindergarteners? I thought to myself.
But Magnus lost interest after a song or two, discarding the Bluetooth speaker not unlike the way he discards his boogers. The speaker now lay on the floor near the bathroom threshold.
I’ll be honest—the bathroom threshold is not where I wanted my songs to debut. It’s such a fine and precarious line between the living room and where the living go to rid themselves of waste. I tried not to take it as a bad omen when I heard the toilet flush.
If Magnus’s response to my album was disinterest, Silas, my fourteen-year-old son’s, was self-interest. A worrier, he questioned the album’s marketability—thus his parents’ bank account status—thus his Christmas wishlist and other wishlists, like eating out more often.
“Do you have any advice?” I half-joked.
“Release singles,” he said, “and you need to write faster songs.”
He’s not wrong. His advice is the same sentiment publishers and record labels have been giving me for years. What can I say? I’m drawn to the ballad. My internal beats per minute is that of a long walk on the beach or a Sunday morning daydream.
Things were looking grim.
Seven songs into my album and two out of five family members had already voted “meh.” My proverbial dog food was getting close to being pulled from the shelf.
But not long after, as I finished the dishes and wiped the counters, it occurred to me that the rest of my family hadn’t made a peep in a while. I watched as Heidi flipped over Solitaire cards at the dining table. Lorentz (eight), beside her on the bench, observed quietly. August had retired to the living room chair. His feet dangled over the arm of the loveseat as he read his Kindle. Even Magnus, by this point, was back in the living room playing with toys.
And gently underscoring this scene of a quiet evening was my album-in-progress. Nobody really saying or doing anything.
Do I wish one of my children had chimed in with a precocious comment? Perhaps something like, “You nailed it, Dad! Both my heart and mind. Brilliant work. I’ll be thinking of these songs for the rest of my life.”
Maybe.
But at the very least, for all of what they didn’t say, their silence seemed to tell me, I like this dog food.
Love,
Aaron