Today is the birthday of Steve Albini, legendary recording engineer, musician, and human. He's someone who transformed the underground music scene not just in Chicago, where he operated his studio Electrical Audio, but worldwide. But more than that he was a person who never stopped learning and growing. He was generous with his time even while maintaining an unparalleled work ethic. I am lucky to have called him a friend, even as I remained in awe of all that he built. Steve died in May of this year, shockingly and suddenly. He would have been 62 today.

Steve was never one to mince words. If he thought poorly of you, you knew it (and probably deserved it), and if he liked you, you knew that too. On his birthday, I thought I'd share some of those words in the form of an excerpt of an interview he did with Luis Illades in Punk Planet #26, where he talks about how he lives his life. It's a philosophy that I recognize in myself, and one that I think will resonate with you too.

The way I operate now—and this is what's bred contentment in me—is that I know how I'm going to behave. I know how I'm going to interact with other people and weigh the importance of the things in my life and the things I have to do for other people. I know the process that I'm going to undergo. But I don't know the results—they're going to be a surprise.

That's true of almost everything in my life. I know how I'm going to live, but I don't know what my life will entail. Like the band that I'm in: I know how we work as a band, I know how we interact and how we get from having no song to having a song or from starting a show to finishing a show. I know how we're going to get through it, but what happens along the way is always a surprise.

The fact that I enjoy being surprised is what makes doing things that way very easy for me. Some people like to have things mapped out and then execute the plan. They plan on making plans, they make plans, and then they execute their plans. Most of what I do is based on the concept that I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what the results of many of these experiments are going to be, but I know how I'm going to conduct the experiments. I know why these things are important to me and why I'm going to be behaving in a certain way.

I'm very confident in my values. The things that are good about people are good by themselves; they don't have to have some use for me to remain good. I don't have to profit from somebody else's kindness in order for kindness to be good. I don't have to profit from someone else's honesty in order for their honesty to be valuable to me. My values are secure.

I don't think I'm trying to find my place in life. I believe my place in life is to pursue what I'm doing. I believe that my reward, if any, is in seeing what happens. The surprises that come up, that's where the reward is—not that I'm going to accomplish some specific thing, that I'm going to make money or have some stature in any community of any sort. What it boils down to is that I get to see what happens. I get to see the end of the movie. That's the payoff for having been in the movie all of this time.

Happy birthday Steve, miss you.