The Only Revenge Worth Having

A while back I was at an industry event when an old friend caught my eye across the room. We'd drifted into “frenemy” territory over the years… the kind of relationship where you're polite in public and vague about why you're not actually friends anymore. As the event wound down I wandered over to say hello and ask how he’d been, and before we could even talk about the weather he launched into a story about how some mutual acquaintance from years ago had screwed him over.

I wasn't surprised. I'd heard plenty of variations on this theme before. Someone else is always the problem. I smiled, nodded, and drove home with a very specific feeling… anger? Not really. Not satisfaction. More like confirmation.

You see, I had been managing a false rumor about my professional reputation for well over 10 years at that point.

For most of that time I didn't know exactly where it was coming from. I had suspicions… this old friend and I had another mutual friend, a disgruntled musician from waaaaaay early in my career who signed our company’s standard writer’s agreement, who later seemed to decide they didn't understand what they'd agreed to, and had apparently spent the ensuing years telling anyone who'd listen that I was a publishing thief and not to be trusted. I couldn't prove it back then, but someone was besmirching my character, quite wantonly. I kept hearing things, from other musicians, from people in the local scene, warning me “hey I heard something that didn’t make sense,” all from connections that pointed back to someone in particular : the same someone I’d just said hello to at that industry event.

It took years before I had enough confirmation from enough people to feel certain I'd identified the source. At last count a few years ago, 8 different peers had confided in me what he’d been spreading. And by that point, whatever damage was gonna happen had already been done… and also, already been undone.

Here's the thing about an accusation like that : you can't fight it directly. The more you protest, the guiltier you look. The more you explain, the more you're handing the story legs.

What you can do is keep working. Keep signing writers. Keep hiring players. Keep creating. Keep treating musicians the way you'd want to be treated if the roles were reversed.

That disgruntled musician from years ago is but one person, with their distorted reality, attached to one legal document they signed and later didn't want to honor. I have that same document—the literal same agreement, the exact same terms—signed now by over 500 other musicians and composers. Not one of them has aired anything close to resembling that complaint. All of them still return my emails. Many of them are still working with my company decades later.

The only reasonable response isn't complicated, but I didn’t know that at the time.

When the rumors were at their loudest many years ago, I sat down with my longtime and trusted attorney to talk through our options. He looked at everything and told me I had a case for defamation, libel, slander. That I would most likely win. That he would love doing this and could stand to make a lot of money handling this for me. And then he said something I've thought about ever since :

"So let’s say you win. And then you'd be the guy who took his house. How do you think that looks to everyone in this city who thinks he’s a nice guy?"

He told me the only revenge available to me (the only one worth pursuing, anyway), was to “out nice” him. Win over more people. Be so consistently trustworthy, over so many years, with so many musicians and writers, that even if someone heard something sketchy about me, they'd have ten people jumping up ready to say “that doesn't sound right.”

I took my attorney’s advice. Not because I'm a saint (I have most certainly made mistakes). But because it was wise counsel, and correct.

When vindication eventually came, it wasn't a single a-ha gotcha moment. It was much more gradual. Private at first… a quiet internal knowledge that I was building something real and genuine while the rumor mill quieted. Then more public, ever so slowly, as the musicians I'd worked with for years kept showing up… kept recommending me… kept greeting me warmly at events like the one where I ran into this old friend of mine. And eventually enough of them were willing to name him the source and confirm my suspicions.

That frenemy conversation—watching him immediately redirect his career frustrations to being someone else's fault—told me everything I needed to know about where we both stood after all those years. No confrontation required. I just smiled, told him I liked his kid’s singing voice (they have some legit credits on their own), and walked away.

If you're early in your career and someone is saying something untrue about you, believe you me I understand the impulse to fight it. To correct the record. To put them on blast online and make sure everyone knows you were wronged.

Here's what I'd tell you now instead, with the benefit of having listened to my attorney’s advice : the record corrects itself, over time, if you keep your head down and focus on the work. Reputation isn't a thing you defend in a single moment. It's a thing you build in decades… one signed agreement, one returned call, one musician treated fairly at a time.

The people who matter will figure it out. They always do.