Building
When I drive by any construction site around town it’s pretty clear they know what they’re doing and they know what comes next.
The brick layers don’t show up when the diggers are breaking ground. The painters don’t show up before the dry wallers. And perhaps most importantly, no one shows up and just does what they feel like that day…the roofers don’t get to decide the roofline, the plumbers don’t get to try putting a shower in every room because it would be exciting.
Everyone shows up at the appropriate time, follows the plans and the house gets built. And the best thing is that when big problems arise, the general contractor has done this a hundred times before and knows how to adjust the plan to still achieve the result.
As it pertains to so many artists wanting to make a career out of it…
There’s probably some building going on but they don’t know what it is. Because artists don’t know what they want to build. If they do, they’ve never built it before, don’t know how to build it and don’t slow down long enough to align with people who can help them achieve it.
Ideally, an artist would know what they want to build and partner with people who also want to build the same thing and have done something similar before.
The reality is, it’s really tough to find those partners and advocates and accomplices and can take a while…so start with the first part…What specifically do you want to build?
A Letter Worth Sending
When the post office first showed up in town it’s likely most people didn’t need it. Everyone they knew or at least everyone they needed to connect with lived close by. What’s the point of sending a letter if we don’t need to send a letter?
But then I imagine what quickly followed was…I don’t need to send a letter but it’s thrilling to get a letter so I’ll send one in hopes of getting one back. i.e. Communicating is fun. i.e. Maybe it doesn’t matter as much what the letter says just as long as I get one and send one and keep the cycle going.
And we wrestle with this still today.
In a world where all of life’s essentials are one click away, what’s worth communicating to the next town over or next country over?
Is the goal to communicate something specific or to simply keep a communication cycle going because it feels good?
Bad Crowd
How good can you be when you’ve got a bad crowd?
What if someone was watching you, taking notes of what a professional does when there’s a bad crowd? Or they take a video to bring it back to class and the students are going to study your show for the limits of how good you can be even when the crowd is bad.
It’s easy to give up on a bad crowd since they’ve already given up on you.
But you’re already on stage so what could you do other than give up?
How Would You Play It For Others
If you wanted to sing a Bad Bunny song or a Drake song for your friends…do you pick up an acoustic? Piano? Open up a drum machine on your phone?
Maybe younger generations and future generations won’t play songs for their friends since we can listen to the original anywhere and everywhere.
If the Spotify Top 50 is any indication of what is most popular, then we’re going on at least a five years of popular music that isn’t easily covered by hobby musicians just trying to find songs to learn and play for their friends.
I wonder how that will effect the staying power of the music.
Campfire songs turned into campfire songs because they were easily played, easily sung and easily shared. And it turns out songs you sing around a campfire stay with you for your entire life.
On the other hand, maybe kids will get their phones out…one on kick and snare, one on synth, one on misc sounds and one with a crazy vocal effect and jam out some 2022 hits while roasting marshmallows. That’d be pretty cool too.
Part Two: The Real Story
I alluded to it at the end of Part One but it needs it’s own post…
Why do we so desperately want the real story the full story? What is it we are hoping for when we watch the Behind The Music about whatever our interest is?
The easy quick response is that it’s fun, entertaining and interesting. True. But I posit there’s two reasons underneath our mere interest…
If we believe we have the full story…
1. We can copy the process and expect the same result.
2. We can finally uncover what their unfair advantage was, delineate the objective differences between them and us, and have an iron clad excuse about why we can’t achieve what they did.
And depending on what was for lunch or how sunny it is outside, the pendulum swings from one to the other on a regular basis.
Don’t get distracted by trying to get the full story or by the trappings of thinking you have it. Learn what you can, get inspired, enjoy the story and move on.
»» And it turns out we all we need to believe is that we have enough of the story in order to believe we have the full story.