The Failure Issue

Following in Michael Murray’s footsteps is like having James Brown as your opening act, near impossible to come close.

As a musician, I’ve only ever edited music. This is a magazine. With words. And the previous guest editors? Brilliant, organized, seriously competent people who set the bar impossibly high.

So, with the fear of failure riding high, I did what any self-respecting person would do: I chose Failure as the theme. Part thematic vision, part insurance policy.

In the television composing world, we call rejected cues corpses. Too slow. Too weird. Too old-sounding. The cut usually comes down from someone higher up, and that “chicken doing push-ups” music cue gets marched off and buried in a musical graveyard on some hard drive, never to be heard from again.

But sometimes, just sometimes, corpses are resurrected. Three days or three months later, I’ll be stuck on something new and suddenly remember that failed “push-up chicken” cue. And somehow, miraculously, it becomes the perfect chorus for a song.

Michael understood this kind of resurrection. He wasn’t afraid of failure, he embraced it. Some of his funniest, saddest, and most vulnerable stories were rooted in awkwardness and missteps. The fertility clinic masturbation room. He didn’t gloss over the parts of life that didn’t tie up neatly. He knew that sitting with the uncomfortable, especially the kind that undermines the story you tell about yourself—creates a powerful kind of intimacy.

We live in a culture obsessed with success and winning. But behind every gold-star achievement lies something messier: the song that never found its chorus, the story that went nowhere, the kite that never took flight.

This issue is dedicated to those moments. To the people who kept going and the ones who didn’t. You’ll find work from artists who showed us their beautiful messes, swings, and misses. We’ve got an incredible array of contributors: writers, musicians, artists, Olympians—we even have a trapeze artist.

This is The Failure Issue.

Come fumble with us.

Jonathan Evans
Guest Editor, Galaxy Brain #28