Random Thought Thursday: Why Do We (Musicians) Do This to Ourselves?

Set ourselves up for disappointment. Measure ourselves and our craft against others. Sink all our time, efforts, energy, and money into something that very often can drop us down a peg and be disheartening?

Usually I hit what I call “the funk” around Autumn time and question why I make music, support music, continue to exert energy and efforts to get the word out about my little community, but I guess I have some late onset this year. Last week I posted about fan funding and kickstarters/pledge campaigns. Some really amazing people have helped the Red Line Roots cover project campaign out so far, and I need to say that I am so incredibly grateful to the people who have donated, who have shared the link, who have gotten the word out… but I will be honest, I am slightly discouraged from the lack of outpouring from the musician community to help. In my head, maybe I thought 100 different musicians would be lining up to donate 2 bucks or something. I don’t know. Sometimes I just wish people showed excitement about this particular project as much as I do…as producer, I know I am supposed to be the excited one. I saw a friend post the other day about “remember when we raised 10 grand for a project?” and I just find myself saying “How the f*ck did you do that!?!?!?! I want to do that!”.

Songwriting…that’s a thing. For most of my career I have always given the pool of cash at gigs to the other musicians. I have consistently offered up my music for free to folks who wanted it (to the dismay of many of my colleagues). I’d like to consider myself a decent, if not halfway good songwriter, but still I look at my spins on a regular basis and I wonder why they aren’t doubled. Another downer I suppose. As of late I have had a lot of people I respect in the music community give positive feedback on some of the new stuff and say they dig some of the old stuff as well. I try to take that with a grain of salt, as I have known folks with inflated egos when they shouldn’t have them and it’s a huge pet peeve of mine (especially when their writing is sub-par). I don’t care how hard you rip it, if your a douche, I already stopped listening. I think as a musician all folks have a certain level of confidence (or at least faux confidence) on stage and with that comes a certain expectation that maybe people will react to our music in a way that we want them to. Not always the case. You can’t make the people feel the feels all the time.

I don’t mean this as a “tell me how good I am” necessity here. I don’t need to hear that, it’s really the excitement within the community thing that gets me the most. I want to be a support system for people and musicians I admire and call friends, but sometimes I feel the weight is too much and there’s no structure to fall back on. I mean, it’s not like having a mental breakdown of sorts…it’s more of a question of whether it’s worth it in the end to do this thing. Something I am sure that a lot of folks I know also struggle with. The pay sucks, the return on investment emotionally is often discouraging, and when you are surrounded by other amazing songwriters and musicians you more frequently than not have an extremely high standard to  measure yourself by.

So why the heck do we do this to ourselves???

I digest all of the above crap, and then every once in a while I get hit with a big dose of euphoric reality. Typically it happens on stage, when I am making music with someone else. This time around it came when I was listening to mixes from my latest record. I was listening to one of the tracks that my friend, banjoist and songwriting extraordinaire Mark Whitaker laid down some banjo parts on and it just hit me. This is why I do this. There was such a groove, such a different level that his thought process and feel brought to something that I wrote that I just couldn’t believe this was something that came from me. Something that someone else had latched onto and added their own panache to. In that moment of listening, I found nirvana in my own music. I carried that with me for days afterwards. I must have listened to that 11 second stretch of a song at least 20 times in a row, over and over. It just clicked with me. This is why I do this. It’s the connections that you are occasionally able to make which make up for all the time, energy, despair, being beaten down worth it in the end.

So keep your chin up. When it seems too tough or nothing good is going on, know that other folks are feeling the same. Remember the good times and why you make music. To create a bond with other people. To maybe touch someone deeply. To get your own emotions off your chest for a minute.

I am a musician and a songwriter, and for better or worse I always will be…