20Something: Charlie

“There’s never been a single point in my life where I’ve ever wanted to be a superstar,”

Charlie steps into my apartment the same way he always does: pulling off his over-the-ear headphones. He’s kept his music going through the walk beneath my lobby’s vaulted ceilings, the six-floor elevator ride, and the short jaunt between the doors of the elevator and my corner unit apartment. In other words, his music is on until the absolute last minute. Such is life for Charlie.

As we both prepare to start the interview – me gathering my notebooks and pens and glasses, Charlie settling into an armchair, crossing a Samba-clad foot over one knee, and helping himself to a phone charger – the Bears silently battle the Titans on my muted TV. We’ve found ourselves in these same positions – one of us on the couch, one of us in an armchair, both of us fretting over our outfits – on many a Saturday morning over the past two summers. It’s become our pre-farmers market routine, the warm-up before we head down my block to stroll, coffees in hand, through throngs of people and rows of tents. Sometimes we stop and chat with friends, sometimes it’s just us. Today’s a just-us day, but it’s a Sunday, and there’s a recording device between us. “Do you need a refresher on what this series is about?” He does not. 

I let him narrate his own life story, not because I’m uncertain about any part of it, but because I want to hear it in his own words. If I were to recount it, it would be from an older sister’s perspective, and I’m trying to remain objective here. Alas, within 30 seconds, I’ve interrupted him. He’s just told me that he’s majoring in Political Science, when as far as I’m aware, he’s been creating his own major in Music Business. I correct him accordingly, as if he simply needed a reminder. No, he tells me, it’s been Poli Sci for a while. No, I counter, it hasn’t, because at our family Passover seder in April I distinctly remember a lively debate between him and our grandpa about whether or not it would be worth it for him to switch to Poli Sci, and by that logic we can assume he had not yet declared it. Obviously, with my superior Older Sister Memory, I am correct. But he maintains that this has been his declared major for a while, and that Music Business has only ever been his minor, so I magnanimously let it go. With that said, if you expect the remainder of this profile to be a completely objective account, let me admit up front that my objectivity here is shaky at best. 

I begin to scribble away in my notes as Charlie elevator-pitches himself to my recording. If I, at 26, am in the afternoon of my twenties, Charlie is at the earliest stages of dawn, the sky just tinged with pink. That is to say, he’s 20, which according to him is “kinda weird.” He’s a sophomore at DePaul University, a decision that he made rather hastily while acting on the advice of an older colleague who told him he’d never grow if he stayed in his comfort zone. At the time, he’d mostly been considering in-state schools that would keep him close to his friends and our parents, and while this path was tempting, he admits that it wouldn’t have been much of a reach outside his bubble. The aforementioned advice struck a nerve on a Wednesday. On Friday, he flew out to tour DePaul’s campus and by Monday, he had committed to the school. “I think I just chose DePaul because it seemed like a good enough step outside my comfort zone where I would grow, but not scary enough where I wouldn’t have the support system and backbone of a family. If that makes sense.”

It does, because I went through a similar college decision process, I remind him. I committed to the University of Utah on the day before the deadline, simply because it was the only school that would offer me the caliber of ballet training that I wanted, while allowing me to double major. Nothing else really stood out to me about it. He tells me he remembers this, and regales me with an anecdote from my own college years where apparently, only a few days into my freshman year, I called home and declared to our family that I had decided to transfer to Northwestern. (I actually made this declaration not once, but several times over the course of my first semester.) In the end I stuck with my original choice, but I can only hope it brings Charlie some solace to know that I, too, began college on a shaky foot. All of this is to say that many of us are swept into our 20s on the coattails of uncertainty. Maybe we should give ourselves some credit for riding it out, gracefully or not. I digress.

“Are you liking DePaul so far?” I ask.

A long pause.

He settles on: “I like my life in Chicago.”

Part of what makes life in Chicago so enjoyable for him is his budding career. Over the past few months, I’ve watched Charlie throw himself into the professional world, eager to start making a name for himself. He spent the past summer interning at AEG, learning the ins and outs of concert promotion and talent buying. Sometimes listening to him talk about work makes me yearn for the days when all the fresh possibility of post-grad life was just beyond my fingertips, and each day held a new lesson that left me thinking, I could really see myself doing this.

“So, what makes a successful talent buyer?” I ask. In my mind, the talent buyers are the people in the movies with power suits and slim black sunglasses eternally glued to their face and cell phones that never stop ringing because they’re always negotiating some deal so that one day they can yell triumphantly, “We got Beyoncé!” Apparently, I’m a little off the mark: “What really makes them successful are their people skills,” he explains. “You have to kind of be a social chameleon.” He admits that the technical skills of talent buying are actually relatively easy – it’s mostly sending offers to artists’ teams along the lines of: “this artist will make this sum of money minus this cost. And then when you settle the show, you basically just do that subtraction.” So the prerequisite skills are… PEMDAS? 

Not quite, he says. “What makes the talent buyer stand out and have longevity in their career is their ability to adapt to each venue and team that they talk to, because everyone is very, very hot-headed and everyone is very opinionated. Opiniona– is that a word?”

“Mhm. Yeah. Opinionated,” I confirm.

“Opinionated. Like, for example…” and here he launches into a story about some high ranking member of the company he interned for who has a penchant for yelling, “like, all the time in the office.” Apparently, he has a “sweet side” that comes out when he deals with certain artist managers, and a not-so-sweet side that comes out with others. Charlie cuts himself off – “I’m kind of rambling.” (He is.) But he concludes that the mark of a successful talent buyer is to be able to practice some social code-switching. “You have to know people really well, you have to understand body language… it’s not really a music industry, it’s more of just a people industry… It’s completely reliant on relationships.”

I want to pry more into the technical aspects of the job because it’s clearly not the suited, sunglass-clad persona I’d envisioned. “Are the talent buyers the ones that are curating the list of shows for a venue, or is that someone else on the team?” I ask.

It usually goes like this: the talent buyer’s assistant will send them samples from an artist who they think would do well for a particular venue. The talent buyer will listen to the samples and make the call to move forward, at which point they’ll make contact with the artist’s team. Charlie adds that in terms of who initiates this cycle, it’s about an even split between the assistants finding talent, the buyer themself finding talent, and the talent pitching themself to the venue. 

“Does the vibe of the venue come into play at all, or does it have more to do with size?” I press. “I guess what I’m getting at is, like, is there strategy there?”

Size matters! 

But then again, so do the genre of the artist and the vibe of the crowd they attract. And here again, another anecdote from his internship about the time psych-rock band Khruangbin played Red Rocks, and why their shows (which consisted of 3 hours of the sock-clad guitarists taking giant slow motion steps around the stage while the 10,000 person crowd nodded and swayed and sometimes jumped along) were booked at an amphitheater in the middle of nature for two nights and an auditorium on the side of the highway the next night. He says the band leaned much more into the psychedelic aspect, and less of the rock aspect, at the second venue. “[Booking them at two venues] was a weird one because it was just a timing thing,” he concludes. “The rationale was just hitting different audiences.”

It’s clear from the way he answers each of my questions that being an authority on this subject excites him. Beyond just the appeal of having a grown-up job, he loves music and never misses an opportunity to talk about it. Working on the business side of things is the latest way he’s let music consume his life, but it’s far from the first, nor will it be the last; growing up, both of us were subjected to mandatory violin lessons from the age of 5. “Honestly, I kind of hated it,” he admits. “I was always more concerned with the end product and… having this beautiful piece come out of my violin than doing, like, the technical work.” (Read: practicing for an hour a day SUCKS.) He hit a point where he had to choose whether to continue, and really dedicate himself to the craft, or to move on. So on he moved. “When I moved on from violin I kind of had this gaping hole in my life… It was like a lack of music. So I kind of replaced that by just putting on my headphones and listening to a bunch of different music.”

“Did you ever consider making music?”

He answers more quickly and surely than he’s answered any of my other questions so far: No. 

“I’m too scared to be an artist,” he says, rather sardonically. I ask why, because I’m a bit surprised by his answer. “I think, like, I would not like that much attention. Because that’s attention where you don’t have any room to be yourself.” He is, of course, referring to pop star status here, but apparently it’s enough to deter him from making music altogether. “There’s never been a single point in my life where I’ve ever wanted to be a superstar,” he states matter-of-factly. Duly noted, let the powers that be withhold their stardom. He goes on: “I think there’s something kind of cool about working behind the scenes and seeing the product.” On this point, I agree with him – throughout my ballet career (knew I’d manage to sneak it in here somehow), I found the moments backstage just as thrilling as the moments onstage. The difference between us is that I also cherished my moments in the spotlight. Once a diva, always a diva I guess. 

* * * *

He’s slid a silver ring off of his finger and has been spinning and catching it against my glass coffee table for the past five minutes in a way that seems specifically designed to annoy an older sister who does not want her coffee table scratched. I stop talking for a moment, direct my most withering stare at the spinning ring, and, behold, he stops. Must be that sibling telepathy or whatever. “You’re not even a twenty-something,” I point out. “You’re twenty.” I ask him about his thought process as he navigates such a transitional phase. In recalling my own early twenties, there was much angst and uncertainty about where my life was headed. Granted, I was coming to terms with the fact that, despite what I’d spent the last several years of my life planning for, I no longer wanted a career in ballet and subsequently needed to find a new ambition ASAP. Charlie, on the other hand, has never confined himself to one singular career ambition and thus, seems less paralyzed by the freedom of having infinite options. 

He admits that his mind changes rapidly. It’s one of those things that our family lovingly pokes fun at, while also wondering when he’ll just make up his mind already. When he started college last year, he thought he wanted to major in kinesiology and go into something like sports medicine. That was a short-lived aspiration before the allure of the music industry took hold. Even his current interest in talent buying could “be a very temporary thing… I fully expect my mind to change in the next couple of years, because it does all the time” There’s a high likelihood that something else will pique his interest in the near future, and he’ll switch gears. And while he used to be in denial about this tendency of his, recent months have afforded him more self awareness and a different perspective. 

“Now I’m going at life, where I'm seeing things as a learning opportunity.” Like, with this music thing, he says, he’s going to stick with it until he’s learned everything that he can, and then who knows? “I could either walk away with a really, really cool career, or if I decide to step away from it, I will walk away having learned so much. And when it comes to making decisions, I feel like having that mindset of seeing everything as a learning opportunity as opposed to a life decision is a lot healthier for me.” 

And now, we’ve reached my favorite point in any interview: the moment where I realize that I have a valuable lesson to learn from my subject, no matter who they are, and even if they’re my youngest brother. I often find myself plagued with crippling decision paralysis – my mind becomes a veritable version of Sylvia Plath’s fig tree on steroids. But hearing Charlie explain his thought process, I couldn't help but wonder, if I begin to approach more decisions simply as learning opportunities, will I be plagued less by the thought of what I might be missing out on by passing up another option? Will I start to see uncertainty as an adventure, rather than a trap? Maybe. Probably.

I wonder why he changes his mind so frequently. Is it a product of being 20 years old in a digital world where we’re surrounded by more information than ever before? Or is it unique to him? “I think it’s because I have a really big imagination,” he says. “I think that when I get hooked on something, or when something interests me, my mind always creates this image of me being the best at it… I don’t know if I can ever step away from something until I know that I’ve become the best at it.” 

Is it that he wants to be the best, or his best? “My best,” he clarifies. He’s constantly in competition with himself. He says he doesn’t mind bouncing around so much, though, as long as there’s some structure to it. “So it’s like, you want stability in your inconsistency,” I point out. He nods, and I nod back in a way that I intend to convey encouragement. “It’s good that you know that about yourself.”

Now that we’ve hit a more contemplative pace, I decide to bring up something I often wonder about: the impact our birth order has had on him. I want to know what kind of influence our middle brother and I have had on the way he navigates his early adult years. He says he likes this question, and he thinks I’m gonna like his answer. “I definitely take influence from both of you,” he begins. Despite being last in birth order, he feels like he’s in the middle when it comes to disposition. In watching me, he wants to emulate my work ethic and the structure and stability I’ve created for myself. (I silently applaud myself for this.) “But I’ve always really felt inspired by Max’s creativity,” he goes on. “I’ve wanted to have that in my life in some essence… It’s interesting seeing how completely different your lives are, and how I kind of want to be right in the middle of the two of you.” 

He’s still a few years out from being thrown into real adulthood, though. I ask what scares him about that impending doom. “I think the scariest part of [post-grad life] is that it comes with the forced recognition that I’ll never be a kid again… I’m a nostalgic person,” he says. He’s apprehensive of the changes that he knows will take place in some of his long term friendships. I try to reassure him with the idea that those friendships might change in nature, but they’ll still exist – and he says it’s this fact that scares him. In response, I urge him to spend these next few years making as many new friends as he can. Ironically, I think my social life is as full as it’s ever been now, but I know I wouldn't have come to enjoy my college experience as much as I did without the friends I made in Utah. Those last few carefree years bear friendship bonds like no other.

* * * *

We’ve talked at length about career over the past hour, but I still want to know what his dream job is. Is it the path he’s pursuing now, or something else entirely? This question stumps him. He says he’s still feeling the pangs of homesickness that plague the start of many a school year, so in this moment, his dream life would be “back in Denver as a kid again.” He’s eagerly awaiting the day when the yearning for his childhood settles so that he can “take life as it is, as opposed to how I would prefer it to be.” His ideal future is being at a place in life where he can focus on the present, rather than on what could be, or what could have been. Here, another example of where we differ: while I ruminate on the future, he ruminates on the past. 

“Do you feel like you make decisions on your life based on–”

“Yes.”

“Let me get my question out.” 

“Sorry.”

I try again: “Do you feel like you make decisions on your life based on the past, and how you wish the past went, or how you want the future to go?”

His yes was indeed a bit hasty, because he says it’s a bit of both. He knows what he doesn’t want his life to look like, so in that regard, he’s planning for the future. But he also makes choices “to make up for a feeling that I felt in the past… The past is making me want to make a decision for the future.” This is all very meta, and feels far too thoughtful to be coming out of a 20-year-old’s mouth. 

As our interview winds down, I’m left with a weird mix of nostalgic longing for my early twenties, and relief that they’re behind me. I can’t decide if there’s more that I miss about them (the bliss of naivete, my parents’ health insurance, nonexistent hangovers), or more that I don’t (homework, early career imposter syndrome, undeveloped frontal lobes). As I pile my laptop and notebook into a neat stack, I make a mental note to try approaching life with a bit more of the curiosity that Charlie does. Charlie, for his part, already has his headphones halfway on before he walks out the door.