> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.mikebakerhq.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Song in My Head Is Better Than the One in My Hands - URL: https://www.mikebakerhq.com/writing/the-song-in-my-head-is-better-than-the-one-in-my-hands/ - Published: 2026-10-20T14:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-20T14:00:00.000Z - Description: I’ve now made two live albums for concerts that never actually happened. Somewhere inside that ridiculous idea is the reason I keep picking up a guitar. - Author: Mike Baker - Tags: Human First, #hero-uncropped I’ve been working on a new album called *Out of My F\*\*\*ing Mind*, and this is apparently the second time I have decided to put on a massive live concert without the minor inconvenience of actually performing one. The first was *Live From My Head*, which was exactly what the title suggests. I built the show I could see in my imagination, complete with the songs, the band, the crowd, the moments between songs, and the feeling of standing on a stage with thousands of people singing something back to me that had started as an idea in my head. The concert never happened, obviously, but I could hear it so clearly that by the time the album was finished, it felt strangely real to me. Now I’m doing it again with *Out of My F\*\*\*ing Mind*, only this one is bigger, louder, funnier, and somehow even more ridiculous. It is a live show full of songs about getting older, marriage, menopause, family, drinking, kids, dogs, and all the weird stuff that accumulates when you have been alive long enough to have material. In my head, there are 50,000 people in the room. There is a great band behind me. The crowd knows the words. I know when the lights come up, when the guitar kicks in, when everybody gets loud, and when the room settles enough for one line to land. I would love to actually do that someday, and that is the part underneath the joke. The other part is the songs themselves. A lot of these songs are stories from my life, and some of them are closer to letters than songs. I write about Kellie. I write about my kids. I write about the dogs, the stupid things we laugh about, the stuff that gets hard, the things I am proud of, and the things I do not always know how to say directly. There are songs that are funny on the surface but still have something underneath them that I mean completely. There are songs that are basically me saying I love you, I see you, I am proud of you, I remember this, and I am glad we got to live it together. That is one of the things I love most about writing songs. I can take something ordinary from our life and give it a place to live. A family story becomes a chorus. A joke turns into a verse. A memory gets a melody around it, and suddenly I can share it in a way that feels bigger than the conversation where it started. Sometimes I am saying something I could have said at the kitchen table, but putting music around it lets me say it with more heart. And some of the songs are complete nonsense, which I also love. I am perfectly happy writing something because it makes me laugh, because the hook is stupid in exactly the right way, or because a ridiculous idea somehow turned into a song worth keeping. I do not need every song to carry the emotional weight of my entire life. Part of this whole thing is fun. I like making something that makes Kellie laugh. I like writing something my kids immediately know is about them. I like taking a dumb family story and treating it like it belongs in an arena. Life is serious and ridiculous at the same time, and I think the music should be too. The imaginary version of the concert is easy. Nobody forgets a chord, my voice always shows up, the band somehow knows exactly what I mean, and 50,000 people have apparently rearranged their schedules to hear songs about my family. Reality is a little less cooperative. I know a handful of basic guitar chords and can move around enough to play recognizable versions of things, but knowing a few chords and being able to perform a song are separated by a considerable amount of work. Strumming is particularly good at reminding me of that. Somebody can show me a pattern and I understand it perfectly. I can count it out, slow it down, and watch what their hand is doing, but once I start playing, my right hand develops its own opinion about rhythm. I get a few measures in, start thinking too hard, lose the pattern, miss a chord change, stop, swear at the guitar, and try again. What makes it especially frustrating is that I already know what I want to hear. I spend hours building these songs. I know when the guitar should drive the song forward and when it should disappear into the background. I know how the chorus is supposed to open up. I know what the band should be doing underneath the vocal. I know the feeling I want the song to create because I have already heard a version of it that works. Then I sit down with my guitar and discover that my imagination has gotten considerably farther than my hands. There is something strange about being able to create music that I am nowhere near ready to perform myself. Technology has opened a door for me that would have been closed not very long ago. I do not have to wait until I become an accomplished guitarist, drummer, producer, or anything else before I get to find out what the song in my head might sound like. I can write it, shape it, experiment with it, keep changing things, and eventually hear something come through the speakers that feels like mine. That matters to me because the technology is not creating the reason for the song. The reason is already there. The story, the memory, the joke, and the love all exist before the arrangement starts. The tools help me hear the idea more fully, but the heart of the song is still whatever made me sit down and write it in the first place. That is especially true of the songs about my family. I am not trying to manufacture emotion. I am trying to capture something I already feel and give it a form I can share. Sometimes that means writing something sentimental. Sometimes it means making fun of the people I love because that is also part of how we love each other. Sometimes it means putting something into a song because I know I will want to hear it years from now and remember exactly who we were when I wrote it. The surprise is that creating the finished music has made me want to learn the guitar more. I could have imagined the opposite happening. If I can build the song without personally playing every instrument, why put myself through the frustration of learning? Why sit there repeating a strumming pattern when I already have a version of the song that sounds better than anything I am going to produce in my living room anytime soon? The answer is pretty simple. I still want to play it. I want to know what it feels like when my hands finally find the rhythm I have been hearing. I want to pick up a guitar and get through the whole song without stopping to negotiate with my right hand. I want to understand the music from inside it, not only from the place where I imagine and build it. Somewhere in there, I still want the stage too. I know *Live From My Head* was imaginary. I know *Out of My F\*\*\*ing Mind* is another concert that happened and did not happen at the same time. I made the albums. I built the shows. The crowds exist in the artwork and in my imagination. Nobody bought a ticket, nobody stood in line, and I did not walk offstage sweaty and exhausted while somebody yelled for an encore. Still, there is something about creating those concerts that lets me get close to a version of myself I would love to experience. Maybe that sounds ridiculous at fifty. I am okay with that. One of the things I like about getting older is that I care a lot less about whether wanting something makes complete sense to everybody else. There are plenty of practical things in my life. I run a healthcare organization. I have responsibilities. I have a family I love and work that matters deeply to me. I also apparently want to be a bald fifty-year-old guy with a guitar standing in front of an arena full of people singing songs I wrote about my wife, my kids, my dogs, and whatever other nonsense seemed worth putting to music. I have heard worse ideas. The guitar is where the fantasy runs into reality, and I think that is why it gets under my skin. Most of my adult life happens in places where I have accumulated experience. I have been leading Heritage Health for years. I have written books. I have raised kids with Kellie. I have played enough hockey that I no longer have to consciously think through every movement. There are parts of my life where I have enough repetitions behind me to trust myself. Being new at something takes that away and makes you aware of every little thing you do not know. That feeling has been useful. Once you have done something hundreds of times, the basics disappear into the background. The language feels obvious. The process feels simple. Eventually you look at someone who is still struggling and wonder why they cannot see what seems so clear to you. I have worked with thousands of people during my career, and I know there have been times when I expected someone to move faster because I had forgotten what their side of the experience felt like. Someone asks a question you have answered a hundred times and you wonder why they do not know it yet. Someone takes an hour to do something you can finish quickly and you forget that your speed was built over years. A new leader mishandles a conversation and you recognize the mistake immediately because you made your own version of it a long time ago. Healthcare gives me an even more important version of that lesson. We spend our careers learning language and systems that people often encounter for the first time on one of the hardest days of their lives. A clinician might explain diabetes management several times in a week. The person sitting across from them has never had diabetes before. They are trying to learn about medications, food, labs, appointments, and what comes next while also wondering what all of this means for their future. Something that feels routine to us might be completely new to them, and that is easy to forget when you have lived inside the system for years. I think about how irritated I get when I cannot hold onto a basic rhythm, even though absolutely nothing important will happen if I screw it up. Then I think about someone sitting in an exam room trying to remember what the doctor told them while their mind is somewhere else entirely. Of course they need us to explain things again sometimes. Of course they might not remember every instruction. They are learning while carrying a lot more than a guitar, and that is one reason I want to stay close to the feeling of being a beginner. It keeps me aware of how much patience mattered when I was learning the things I now take for granted. But mostly, right now, I want to get better at playing guitar because there is still a part of me that would love to make one of these fake concerts a little less fake. Maybe there will never be 50,000 people. Maybe *Live From My Head* and *Out of My F\*\*\*ing Mind* will always be these strange concerts I built because I wanted to know what they would feel like. I am genuinely happy with that because they exist only because I had an idea and decided I did not need permission or perfect skills before I started making it. At the same time, every time I pick up the guitar, there is a little part of me thinking about the stage. I want the song in my hands to get closer to the one in my head. I want to be able to play these things instead of only imagining myself playing them. I want to keep closing whatever distance I can between the person creating the concert and the guy standing in the middle of it. For now, I have two live albums from shows that never happened, a bunch of songs that say more about how much I love my family than I could fit into an ordinary conversation, a few songs that are complete nonsense, and a guitar that keeps reminding me I still have some work to do. I kind of love that. ## Want to Hear the Concert That Never Happened? *Out of My F\*\*\*ing Mind* is my second imaginary live album, following [*Live From My Head*](https://www.mikebakerhq.com/live-from-my-head/). Right now, it is only on SoundCloud. A wider release is coming soon. These songs are about my family, getting older, marriage, menopause, dogs, drinking, and whatever else made its way into my head. Some have a lot of heart. Some are completely ridiculous. Most are a little of both. [**Listen to *Out of My F\*\*\*ing Mind***](https://www.mikebakerhq.com/out-of-my-fucking-mind/) and explore more of Mike Baker Music at [**MikeBakerHQ.com**](https://www.mikebakerhq.com/music/).