Wednesday 27th March, 2024
Should I apologize for missing you last week?
OR should you be happy that I’ve been delightfully distracted?
Either way, the weeks are continuing on without me, with little to no regard. That’s the case with a self-employed career. If you don’t keep up with the world, it very quickly leaves you behind. At least with a school or employment, there’s a boss, teacher, & schedule on your back. So sickness, love, depression, whatever it is that renders you distracted from your work… you’ll eventually need to catch up, & that’s where I’m at right now.
I heard once a story. It might have been a study on the behaviour of architects in a large firm. They were all given a brief, a deadline, & were then monitored to see how they work. It was said that the majority of them took off in a flash to get drawing, to research their ideas, to tinker away with designs that were sure to work. A few, however, went in a different direction. They went for coffee, they met with friends, or played music… some had a nap, some saw their partners. The variety in behaviours was so diverse that the only thing uniting this minority of architects was one shared behaviour: none of them did the work. As the days passed & the time grew closer, eventually this group began to work on their own designs. Some were steady workers, some were violently drawing & discarding… but they all produced far greater work than the majority of architects in that firm. What does it show us? Well… nothing empirically, it’s just a single study, & I’m probably misremembering it… but the point that seems to be underwritten in this tale is that of the procrastinator.
I am this procrastinator. If I’m being kind to myself (& I am), I would say that I’m approaching my work in a ‘lateral’ way. What does that mean..? I don’t fully know, but it feels right. I’m the kind of person who takes in information & inspiration from a weird variety of places. If I’m writing an essay about the future of music… I might find an interesting way to think about A.I. in the letter writing of Khalil Gibran, or the way that bricks are stacked in a staggered pattern for a linear strength… or in the way that a drangonflies brain makes quick decisions to predict the flight path of its prey. (this one is actually what I ended up researching for my thesis… & it had nothing to do with anything.) But SHUSHHHHH…. be quiet, be calm, be stilll… you get my point. I’ll do my work, & I’ll do a good job. But until I get it done, I’ll be a weird & stressed out little information sponge. I’ll be absorbing what I can… at least that’s what I’m telling myself.
In other news, I’ve realised that if I wait until June this year to return to social media & gigging… it will be almost a year of my hiatus. I didn’t think that I could survive a year without posting on social media, or playing a gig… & yet here we are. Music careers are strange because they can take so many shapes. There are musicians surviving on money from a big fanbase online, supporting them on Patreon, etc… but there are musicians that are surviving on ticket sales, merch sales, streaming… some musicians are living off royalties from film music, some are being paid by arts councils. Some are earning a regular wage with another job & playing music on the side. Some are teaching, some are blah blah blah…
What a successful music career looks like is a weird kind of mythology that we carry in our minds. We all expect to be the next Freddie Mercury or Lady Gaga… but we never really imagine the complicated realities of the 1000’s of other musicians getting by out there. It makes it tough for a lot of us to accept any other kind of success & I imagine that it brings us a lot of turmoil & potential failure. I have lots more to talk about on this kind of topic, but let’s leave it for this week.
There’s someone on my shoulder who needs some attention. :P
Nathan
