This got me thinking about my role as a musician and performer. When performing in front of an audience, my hope is that I am interpreting the music and telling the story in such a way that I am helping the audience solve some sort of problem, or posing a question they may not have asked themselves before. In that context of helping the audience (in whatever ways artists can), what might it look like to choose autonomy-oriented helping over dependency-oriented helping?
Read moreWarming Up
Any singer will tell you that rolling out of bed and immediately making your most beautiful sounds is an unrealistic expectation. It can take hours of being awake and warming up before you’re in your “best voice.”
I’ve noticed a parallel with writing. It feels like a big ask to roll out of bed and dive into writing something of value. There’s a certain amount of warming up that’s required to activate those creative parts of the brain.
Read moreShow Up and Share My Work
Unlike many resolutions, the mantra doesn’t have a finish line. We can’t do the mantra and be done with it, meaning that we can carry it with us into as many aspects of our life as we choose. Rather than the limiting nature of a resolution (e.g. “I’m going to read more books this year.”), the mantra’s applicability is limited only by our imagination.
Read moreOriginal Work
The flaw in this logic lies in the fact that, unless we pour ourselves into the creation of unoriginal work at first, chances are we won’t find our idiosyncrasies. It’s in the creation of unoriginal work—yes, of copying other artists (to an extent, and without plagiarizing)—that we figure out how our voice differs from the rest. We learn how our work relates to the genre, and how it differs. Idiosyncrasy is born.
So the irony is: in our feverish search for originality, we actually significantly reduce our chances of ever finding it.
Read moreDesk Job Lessons
Artists often get very wrapped up in our whats. We are our art; we and our creations are one and the same. But what happens when a catastrophe comes along and rips away our ability to share our creations with others, at least in the way we were accustomed to sharing them? Over-identifying with the “what” leads to inflexibility, and if it all falls apart, it leads to despair.
Rather, we can realize that what we create is simply a function of our reason for creating. If I can’t build the empathy bridge on a stage, maybe I can do it at a computer.
The Illusion of Certainty
Experts will study the longterm physical and mental effects of the pandemic for years to come. And each one of us will walk away from this year with our own unique combination of perceptions, experiences, callouses, hurts, and lessons. I’ve been collecting mine along the way, and today, I’m focusing on one truth that has emerged from the pandemic: the deep uncertainty that has been made abundantly apparent over the last nine months is the very thing that inspires necessary change, fuels creativity, and fosters compassion.
Read moreThe Reverence Trap
I’m guilty of that trap we singers tend to fall into, which is believing that what we do is sacred and untouchable. I’ve been gifted with the ability to spin melodies out of nothingness using only the flesh and muscle I was born with, and this gift is fragile and must be treated with the utmost reverence.
This is bullshit. And it’s selfish. It displaces the onus of responsibility for the work, making “the voice” responsible for the magic, rather than the self.
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