The Tuba Mindset

As Americans, we seem to be searching for systems that don’t rely on us being decent people.

We want the right traffic engineering formula so we don’t have to slow down and be considerate of others. We want the right housing policy so we don’t have to persuade our neighbors, build trust, or work through conflict together. We want the big grant, the catalytic project, the miracle investment that will reverse decades of decline without requiring sacrifice, patience, or responsibility.

And, especially in politics, we increasingly want victory over relationship. We define people as enemies instead of neighbors because defeating enemies feels easier than understanding them.

What strikes me is how often we search for shortcuts around the difficult work of building community.

Strong Towns has always rejected that shortcut. There is no silver bullet. No savior project. No final victory where the work is complete.

Strong and prosperous places are built block by block, relationship by relationship, small act by small act.

That’s one reason I wanted Sam Quinones — author of "Dreamland," "The Least of Us," and "The Perfect Tuba" — at the National Gathering this year. Beneath the stories of opioids, fentanyl, methamphetamine, and economic decline, Sam’s work is ultimately about what happens when communities lose the habits and institutions that bind people together, and what we can learn when people begin rebuilding those connections again.

What follows are highlights from my conversation with Sam, which will air soon on the Strong Towns Podcast. I’ve edited our dialogue for readability. 

What happens when communities lose the habits and institutions that bind people together?

Chuck Marohn:‍

Let me give you a story and have you react to it.

We have a town — messy, complex, imperfect — but functioning. It’s been built up over generations. Then we run a highway through the middle of it. We cut it up. We bisect it. We put a mall out on the edge and kill the downtown. Then the mall declines and we replace it with big box stores. Then those start to fail and we wind up with dollar stores scattered across the edge of town like some kind of infestation.

It feels like, in the pursuit of growth and convenience after World War II, we gutted the core and essence of our places.

When I read "Dreamland," I kept thinking: this is the same story. Human beings as an ecosystem. Communities as ecosystems. Your book felt like it was really about that.

Sam Quinones:‍

Absolutely.

One of the things I learned reporting "Dreamland" was the importance of not holding too tightly to the story you think you’re writing. You let people lead you. You listen. You re-interview. You follow where the current takes you.

And what I realized was that I wasn’t just writing about heroin. I was writing about the shredding of American communities.

At one point, it hit me very clearly: if you write about heroin in America, you’re really writing about America itself. Because heroin lives and breeds in isolation. That’s where it prospers.

At first, people told me this opioid epidemic was fundamentally about economic devastation. I don’t think that’s the whole story. I think the deeper story is isolation and the destruction of community.

That’s why you find addiction not just in poor neighborhoods, but in some of the wealthiest suburbs in America. Places that outwardly appear successful, but where people are profoundly disconnected from one another.

Why did Americans suddenly start paying attention to addiction?

Chuck:‍

For a long time, the narrative around addiction was that it belonged to “those people.” Inner-city neighborhoods. Poor communities. People society looked down on.

Then addiction spread into middle-class suburbs and places like Ohio, and suddenly America seemed to care.

Sam:‍

Middle-class America had struggled with addiction for years before that. The difference was that people wanted to hide it. After "Dreamland" came out, people started coming out of the shadows. Families realized this wasn’t some abstract problem happening somewhere else. These were their kids.

Football players. Cheerleaders. The children of judges and police chiefs. Kids who got prescribed painkillers after a wisdom tooth extraction and wound up addicted. People knew these weren’t the caricatures they had imagined when they thought about heroin addiction. And suddenly the conversation changed.

I especially saw this in conservative parts of the country where the instinct had often been: “Throw away the key.”

Then people realized: Wait, that’s my nephew. That’s my son. That’s someone I know. And once that happened, empathy became unavoidable.

How do we learn to see value in people and places that have been left behind?

Chuck:‍

One of the things Strong Towns struggles with is helping people see value in places that have been neglected or written off.

I remember a local elected official once saying about a poorer neighborhood in town: “Those people just don’t care about their place the way we do.”

There’s this moral overlay people apply to struggling neighborhoods and struggling people.

What I appreciated about your work was that it asked readers to see dignity and humanity in people who had largely been abandoned or dismissed.

Sam:‍

I think that’s true. But my approach has always been to trust the power of stories. I’m just a storyteller. And I have a tremendous amount of faith in the ability of stories to illuminate, to change hearts, and to help people understand each other.

That’s an essential human need. We’ve always needed stories.

So my job was simply to tell them honestly — the stories of people caught in addiction, the stories of towns struggling, the stories of families trying to survive.

I don’t think you change people by lecturing them. You change people by helping them see others more clearly.

And when you do that honestly enough, empathy tends to follow.

Is isolation the accelerant?

Chuck:‍

One thing I want to clarify is that neither of us is arguing that addiction only emerged after community breakdown. Human beings have always struggled with addiction, despair, and self-destruction.

But it does seem like isolation acts as an accelerant. The weakening of community intensifies these problems in ways that are hard to ignore.

Sam:‍

Absolutely. And that intersects with the economic story in important ways.

A lot of these towns lost their economic foundation — coal mining, manufacturing, local industry. But what made recovery especially difficult was that the people with the energy, ambition, and opportunities often left. You wind up with a kind of brain drain.

The people who remain are frequently older, isolated, struggling, or disconnected from opportunity. And then you combine that with weak local institutions, weak leadership, and a lack of new ideas. That’s where despair deepens.

Chuck:‍

I remember being in my early twenties in my hometown and people assumed I either had a drug problem or was recovering from one simply because I was young and still living there.

The assumption was: if you had ambition, you left.

Sam:‍

Exactly. I saw the same thing in immigrant villages in Mexico. The people with initiative often leave first. They send money back, so the town physically survives, but the social and entrepreneurial core weakens.

And that’s what happened in many American towns too. Then local leaders fall back on the same economic development strategy they’ve relied on for fifty years: “Let’s recruit a big employer. Let’s land the factory. Let’s get the big box store.”

But often those companies don’t want to come. And even if they do, they don’t create the kind of broad-based prosperity people imagine.

What can places like Hazard, Kentucky, teach us about recovery?

Chuck:‍

You wrote a remarkable article about Hazard, Kentucky. And I’ll admit something embarrassing: if you had mentioned Hazard to me ten years ago, I would have had every stereotype in my head. Backward. Declining. Uneducated. A place people leave behind.

Then I read your story and came away thinking: this might actually be one of the most hopeful places in America.

How did you find Hazard?

Sam:‍

Almost by accident. I had been invited out to speak there, and afterward a woman in recovery came up to me and mentioned that she had opened a bookstore downtown.

And I thought: a bookstore? In Hazard? There’s hardly a bookstore east of Lexington.

But she had done it. Then COVID hit. Then flooding hit. And somehow the bookstore survived all of it.

Later she told me something else important was happening in Hazard. The town had begun modernizing how it thought about downtown development. They hired a downtown coordinator whose job wasn’t to recruit giant corporations but to help very small local businesses survive and grow.

And suddenly there were dozens of new businesses opening downtown. Not giant employers. Tiny businesses. Two or three jobs each. But taken together, they were changing the town. Every time someone opened something new, other people began thinking: maybe I can do this too.

Why was Hazard succeeding where so many towns fail?

Chuck:‍

One thing that fascinated me about Hazard was that they seemed to reject the normal economic development script.

For decades, struggling towns have basically said: if we can just become successful enough, maybe Walmart or Costco will come save us.

Sam:‍

Exactly. But Hazard started asking a completely different question. Instead of asking: “How do we attract a giant outside corporation?” They started asking: “How do we make this town hospitable to the ideas and ambitions of the people already here?”

That’s a radically different mindset.

And the businesses emerging weren’t even really “small businesses” in the traditional sense. They were micro-enterprises. A bakery. A bookstore. A toy store. A coffee shop. Very small things economically, but socially they mattered enormously. Because they rebuilt local confidence.

Why were recovering addicts central to Hazard’s recovery?

Chuck:‍

One of the details that really struck me was how many recovering addicts were involved in these businesses.

Sam:‍

A huge number. Many of the business owners were in recovery. Many of the employees were too. And what I began to realize is that recovering addicts often bring enormous energy once they begin rebuilding their lives.

They’ve spent years consumed by destruction and fatalism. Recovery redirects that energy. They become optimistic. Creative. Grateful. Determined.

I sometimes describe them as energy emerging from decay.

And when a town figures out how to harness that energy — which is not easy — it can become transformative. Once enough people begin moving forward, they reinforce one another. The fatalism starts breaking apart.

Why did art matter so much in Hazard?

Chuck:‍

The person running downtown development in Hazard — Bailey — actually has a degree in art.

Not economics. Not business. Art.

And what fascinated me was that she approached the renewal of downtown like an artist instead of a traditional economic developer. Hazard was struggling, and her instinct was simple: if we show a little love to this place, maybe other people will too.

So she started building these tiny little “elf houses” — miniature facades attached to buildings downtown, as if elves secretly lived inside the city. People started wandering around looking for them. And somehow that small artistic act became part of changing how people felt about the place.

Sam:‍

That’s exactly right. A lot of struggling towns lack creativity. They fall back on the same exhausted economic development ideas over and over again: subsidies, malls, big-box recruitment, industrial parks.

What Hazard demonstrated was that government could instead help create conditions for imagination, experimentation, and local initiative. And art became part of generating hope.

That’s incredibly important because once people begin believing a place has value again, they start behaving differently toward it.

What does the tuba teach us about building strong communities?

Chuck:‍

One of the things that struck me in "The Perfect Tuba" was the humility of the people you wrote about.

The drummer keeping time. The tuba player carrying the rhythm. They’re not the stars. They’re not getting the applause. But they understand that if they stop doing their job well, the whole thing falls apart. There’s a humility there, but also a deep understanding of their importance to the whole.

Sam:‍

Absolutely. The tuba players understood that if they played badly for even a few notes, the entire band could collapse.

And part of the gift of playing tuba is that you don’t get the adulation of the lead guitar player or the football star. Frankly, that kind of attention can be too much dopamine for kids anyway.

What the tuba teaches is something healthier: work hard, improve steadily, contribute to the group, receive a little praise when you earn it, and keep going.

That’s a much more durable way to build confidence and fulfillment.

Why is the “tuba mindset” so important?

Chuck:‍

One reason this resonated so deeply with me is that Strong Towns often asks people to do the tuba work every day. The unrewarded work. The repetitive work. The work that doesn’t provide the immediate dopamine hit or dramatic victory.

And I feel like one of the insights in your book is that this is actually the healthy way to live.

Sam:‍

It is the mature way. Think about how absurd it would sound if someone said: “I’m signing up for college and I want my degree by Thanksgiving.” That’s not how human beings grow.

We need repetition. We need persistence. We need to work at things over long periods of time. That’s how we discover what we’re capable of.

And it’s the opposite of addiction. Addiction delivers this massive blast of pleasure and reward all at once. Human beings didn’t evolve to handle that well. We actually need smaller rewards earned gradually through effort, discipline, and collaboration.

That’s what the band teaches. Kids learn: “I can do difficult things. I can contribute to something bigger than myself. People are depending on me.” That realization is enormously powerful.

Especially for kids who are often lower in the social hierarchy. The tuba players aren’t usually the popular kids. But suddenly they realize: the whole band depends on me.

That changes how people see themselves.

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You can learn more about Sam Quinones and his work at samquinones.com.