The Tunnels

I grew up in Cicero, close enough to the city that the trains ran under everything we did. Our house rattled when the el went by, and nobody in my family heard it anymore except me. My mother cleaned offices in the Loop. She left before light and came home after dark, and the Blue Line carried her both directions. I understood the trains early as the thing that kept us fed. I never really unlearned that.

The guitar was my uncle Ray's. He moved to Texas the summer I turned nine and left it in our basement — a big dreadnought with a crack in the side that buzzed on the low E. It was too big for me. I played it anyway, sitting on the back steps, chords out of a library book, songs off my mother's radio station. Nobody taught me. That's not a brag; I'd have taken the lessons. There just wasn't money for a thing that didn't look like it went anywhere.

The singing came from church. Second Baptist on 59th Court, choir practice Thursday nights, my grandmother in the third pew whether I was any good or not. Gospel teaches you a thing no coach can: you sing to somebody, or it isn't singing. Every room I've played since — the platforms, the clubs, all of it — I'm still doing what I learned on Thursday nights. Find one face. Sing to that.

I was nineteen and I was short on rent. That's the whole origin story, if you want it without the lighting. I'd seen buskers at Washington and Dearborn my whole life, and one Tuesday in October I took Ray's guitar down the stairs and stood at the far end of the platform with the case open, and for twenty minutes I couldn't make a sound. People walked past me like I was a pillar. I almost went home twice.

What got me through it was the acoustics. I hit the first line of the first song — quietly, just to get it over with — and the tunnel handed it back to me bigger.

The tile holds your voice a half-second longer than the air does. It's the closest I've ever come to singing with myself.

Nobody looks at you at first. That's the deal down there, and honestly it's mercy — you get to be bad in public without an audience, because the audience is contractually pretending you don't exist. The first person who broke the contract was a woman in scrubs coming off a night shift. She stopped, listened to one whole verse, put a dollar in the case, and said "sing it again." I made eleven dollars that day. I went back the next morning, and then, more or less, every morning for nine years.

It was a Tuesday in March. A man in a Carhartt jacket asked if I knew "Simple Man" — said his father used to play it in the garage. I slowed it way down, the way I hear it, and somewhere in the second verse I stopped watching the platform, which I never do. I didn't see the phone. I never met the person holding it. To this day I don't know their name, and they changed my life more than anyone I've ever met.

The video went up that night. By Thursday my sister was calling me screaming. By Sunday it had more views than Cicero has people, times a hundred. I sat on a bench on the Jackson platform reading what strangers in other countries were saying about my voice, and I want to be honest about the feeling: it wasn't joy. It was fear with good posture. When a number gets that big, it stops meaning anything you can hold.

Here's what changed: managers called, labels called, a late-night booker called. Here's what didn't: the trains still came every four minutes. Rent was still due on the first. I still went down the next morning — same spot, same crack in the same guitar — because thirty million views doesn't sing, and I didn't trust any of it yet. The tunnels were the only part of the whole thing that stayed exactly the same size.

Before the internet found me, I had maybe forty fans, and I could tell you where every one of them stood. Gene, thirty-one years with the CTA, who listened from the same pillar every Friday and asked for one song — always Otis, always "These Arms of Mine," always with his lunch cooler at his feet. Dominga, a nurse at Rush, who caught the 6:40 and told me once that my voice was the line between her shift and her life. The kid with the trombone case who never spoke, just nodded like a colleague. That nod meant more to me than the thirty million.

The regulars invented the Request Line before I ever put a name on it. They'd ask for songs — for themselves, for wives, for people they'd lost — and I learned that a song somebody asked for lands different than a song you chose. You're not performing anymore. You're carrying something for someone. That's the whole job, it turns out. Everything on this site grew out of Gene's Friday song.

My first ticketed show was at Schubas in February, and I was more scared than my first day underground, because up there the contract is reversed: everybody looks at you. Two hundred people, warm and quiet and facing me on purpose. Halfway through "Loose Change" I realized the room was holding its breath the way the tile holds a note, and I thought — okay. This can be a tunnel too. Anywhere people let a song hang in the air a half-second longer than it has to, that's a tunnel.

Now there's an album. It's called Above Ground, because that's the joke and the fact of it — twelve songs written on platforms, recorded in a studio with a producer who kept asking me to sing further from the mic like a train was coming. It's out this fall. Some of it you've heard in the archive. Some of it nobody's heard but Gene.

And no — I'm not done busking. My Ventra card is in my jacket right now. The tunnels gave me a voice, an audience, a catalog, and a rule I don't intend to break: sing to somebody. If you want to know where I'll be tomorrow morning, check the Shows page. If you want to hear what nine years underground sounds like, it's all here.