A Citizen’s Reflection on Music, Memory, and the Making of a Better America
Mark McInerney
May 8, 2025
Mark McInerney
May 8, 2025
I started as a musician.
Not a prodigy, not a star—just someone called to sound. To the slow unfolding of notes, the discipline of form, the joy of dialogue between voices. I made a living, for a time. Enough to stay afloat, pay rent, teach a few students, and carve out hours to compose.
But life doesn’t stay still. The costs began to add up. Not just financial, but human: family, health, a need for stability, for something more certain than the next gig. Music was never the problem. The world around it just stopped making room.
So I pivoted.
Wall Street, strategy, finance—worlds where outcomes were clear, language sharp, and success measurable. I learned the metrics. I mastered the models. I sat at long tables with serious people using serious acronyms: M&A, KPI, ROIC. And for a while, I believed in the game.
But the better I got at it, the more empty it became.
I watched the richest people I’d ever met live in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. I watched excellence subordinated to optics. I watched people chase accumulation not because it made them whole—but because they didn’t know what else to pursue. The work never stopped. But the meaning rarely arrived.
And in the quiet moments, I heard the silence again. The one music fills.
So I came back.
Back to what was real. To sound. To structure. To silence that listened back.
Read Marc McInerney on Substack.
Not a prodigy, not a star—just someone called to sound. To the slow unfolding of notes, the discipline of form, the joy of dialogue between voices. I made a living, for a time. Enough to stay afloat, pay rent, teach a few students, and carve out hours to compose.
But life doesn’t stay still. The costs began to add up. Not just financial, but human: family, health, a need for stability, for something more certain than the next gig. Music was never the problem. The world around it just stopped making room.
So I pivoted.
Wall Street, strategy, finance—worlds where outcomes were clear, language sharp, and success measurable. I learned the metrics. I mastered the models. I sat at long tables with serious people using serious acronyms: M&A, KPI, ROIC. And for a while, I believed in the game.
But the better I got at it, the more empty it became.
I watched the richest people I’d ever met live in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. I watched excellence subordinated to optics. I watched people chase accumulation not because it made them whole—but because they didn’t know what else to pursue. The work never stopped. But the meaning rarely arrived.
And in the quiet moments, I heard the silence again. The one music fills.
So I came back.
Back to what was real. To sound. To structure. To silence that listened back.
Read Marc McInerney on Substack.