That place called music

At risk of contradicting myself, I am going to finish a post I started before another that I’ve already posted. Partly because I think the ideas are important to share, and because I liked what I wrote, but also because no state is ever solid and I have to remind myself of the potential to bounce back to this place- now I know how to get out of it.

Here it is….

And so the ever ending un-peeling continues. I spent a lot of my twenties feeling paralysed by a pressure to fit into a very specific box as a musician. So many contradictions, to create something new whilst also staying true to the classic writing that has come before. To look shiny and manicured and also like you could just be the person next door. The paradox of choice made me stand still in a world where standing still is not exactly career-inducing.

Becoming a mother makes you care less for sure- less about the way other people see you. But those years of inertia have imprinted pretty firmly, and now the movement is scary. The unpicking of these issues is such a delicate task, to look underneath the carpet and figure out whether these ideas are simply a result of the top down music industry mainstream pressure, or whether they can be put down to being a control freak and not having enough control. I assume that both play a part.

Ultimately these ideas push you further away from the centre of the thing. Away from that place called music, that Philip Glass once spoke of when asked about what it is to be a musician. Away from a free flowing state of creation. Sure, having boundaries and clear ideas can lead to a place where creativity is safe to flourish (another quote comes to mind, this time biblical- “keep me captive, you will set me free”) but to me I feel most free when I am playing music, deep involvement in my practice without any temporal or outside thought. To me, that is music, and as soon as you think of what someone else might think of what you’ve just written or how it might sound as a produced piece of work then the spell is broken and the curtain which keeps you from reality is dropped.

So how, as a person who makes an end product (in my case, music) do you strike that balance of not thinking of the end ‘user’ when also creating for them? Rick Rubin in his book ‘A Creative Act’ says that the moment you starting thinking of your audience, you are doing them a disservice. How I wish to be that artist that can step fully into their creative space without a thought to what others will think, but I would not be able to say that out loud in truth. The separation here strikes me as odd somehow, that perhaps it’s not the acknowledgement of having an audience, but the power we assign to them. Surely as social beings we are not meant to do things in such isolation that we actively sever ourselves and our art from other humans?

There are so many of these impossible lines on the journey of creativity and of existing in a creative industry. We have decided as a culture what is considered to be success, even though it’s mostly unachievable. The more I step away from the tunnel vision of the music industry, the more fulfilled I feel. I used to think that you had to choose your lane early, decide which sort of creative you were going to be and then put all your time and energy there. Focusing on any other is akin to cheating, or at least it meant you weren’t trying hard enough and obviously didn’t really want to be successful in the first place. The irony of course is that I didn’t want to be successful, not in the way I thought I did.

Sometimes, these days, I hear stories from friends who have been very successful in the music industry. In the ways I dreamt of as a twenty-something-self-indulgent singer songwriter. They aren’t happy. They aren’t fulfilled and they have so many restrictions in what they are ‘allowed’ to do, decided by the powers that be. There is certainly a whole other conversation to be had here, about the systemic issues that underpin creative industry (and the capitalist perspective on art altogether…) but I have personally found such freedom and sustainable work in opening up my creativity and I wish that it was something I had thought about earlier.

All this to say there are days I feel absolutely hopeless about creative endeavour, like I’m stuck within a paradigm I made for myself in a pressure cooker of my twenties, but there are days that I find myself in that place called music and everything feels ok.

B x