I was in a cover band in high school.
We played hit songs but couldn’t figure out why people weren’t really dancing.
It turns out that while we were playing hit songs, they weren’t dance songs.
If you’re not getting the desired response, you might need to change what’s on offer.
The lemonade stand is open from ten till noon.
But if we close at noon we’re gonna miss out on all the potential customers who would have walked by at twelve thirty. So we stay open till early afternoon.
But what about the late afternoon crowd? So we stay open till dinner time. But what about…
You see where this is going.
At some point you have to decide which potential customers you’re not going be concerned with.
First Monday of the month, new Hum Love playlist on Spotify and Apple. Click the heart and future playlists will update automatically.
If you have one good song, we think you might have more. And sometimes it’s more fun (and takes less energy) to fish where we’ve fished before rather than finding a new fishing hole.
It’s so difficult to earn the benefit of the doubt.
So a bunch of the songs this week are from artists who have been on here before. They’ve certainly earned it.
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?
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?