Wednesday 9th August, 2023
These days, I’ve been writing songs like a madman. Every other day I either start or ‘finish’ a new song. Very few are what I’d considered finished & need a lot of tweaking, but they’re performable, which is usually close to the final stage… & by close I mean about halfway there. :)
To take a break from all this writing, practising, etc, etc… lets get into a lighter topic today.
What to do when nobody cares…
To begin, we’ll start with the obvious. There’s always someone who cares. You care. This might seem cheesy & like a REALLY unsatisfying answer that’s intentionally misinterpreting the question, but you’ll see. We’ll come back to it.
For now, let’s tackle this question as it’s meant to be heard. “What to do when nobody ELSE cares?” This is a harder question to ask, & infinitely more complicated, & the compulsion to say ‘it depends’ is sooooo strong. But we’re not here for bullshit platitudes & trite cliches. If nobody else cares, then I’m assuming you’re doing something & showing it to other people. So there are three components to this who fiasco. (there’s 4 but the last one we’ll also come back to)
There’s what you’re doing.
There’s how you’re showing it.
& there’s who those people are.
To begin with, what you’re doing is most likely not good enough. I’m soooo sorry to say that, & I don’t know you personally so maybe I’m wrong, but MOST of us aren’t performing or producing to a level that demands genuine attention. (attention has never been more valuable & hard to wrangle) So the first thing you can do when nobody cares, is get better. That’s a particularly vague statement I know… to drill down deeper I could probably say that you might need to be a little more extreme & brave in your ideas. That means get louder, faster, slower, quieter, or just generally weirder. You might need to push yourself into an embarrassing & scary place to do this. This seems to be why most of us aren’t making great things, & why the people who succeed as artists tend to be weird people. Ya gotta do something that nobody else can or will. So either you become a technical master, or you leave your ego at the door & step off the edge of your comfort zone. With this one you need to be careful not to conjure up your own white rabbit. It’s natural to avoid the uncomfortable & scary. You’re a creative person so you’re probably good at making up distractions & detours on your way to artistic success. To get around this I can’t really help. Maybe connect with another creative & push each other? Your guess is as good as mine here.
Okay, this should be the smaller paragraph. HOW you show isn’t as important as what you show, but it’s definitely up there. This is why sweet wrappers are so brightly coloured. It’s why so many artists, politicians, & other folk curate their public image. It’s why some ‘trashy’ & ‘hollow’ songs devoid of ‘meaning’ can find their way to number one in the charts. The most basic lesson I learned about this point is that you need to just tell people in person that you make things. Hell, you might even want to show them in person. Putting a song on soundcloud, or a photo on instagram, & expecting the quality of the work alone to pull in the crowd is that brain of yours casting illusions to keep you safe. This idea extends into the promotion of what you’re doing. Hollywood films sometimes have a marketing budget the SAME SIZE as their production budget. Let that sink in. A 40 million dollar film might have a 40 million dollar marketing budget. That’s insanity from the outside… but it should teach you the power & importance of actually telling people about what you’ve done. (& if you say it’s not authentic then leave, just go… I can’t help you) :P Aside from telling people, how you show something can be your personal presentation. If you’re about to perform your song & you tell everyone that it’s ‘not good’, or ‘only new’, then you’re apologizing for taking up their time. Stop it, just, can we all come together & decide to stop this. It’s the biggest thing I see, in every art form. It’s something I used to do (& might again)… but it’s the easiest thing to stop doing & it makes such a difference. You gotta show that you believe in it, that you love it… cause if you don’t, why should anyone else? (turns out it wasn’t a shorter paragraph…)
Okay, the WHO. The big scary who that you want to care. The indifferent reflection of an uncaring universe. The infinite void full of dying stars. I’ve lost my point… Ummm… yes! Okay, the who that you’re showing too is just as important as the other two. I once played in a fantastic duo called the Untrained Professionals. My partner Sean would play guitar & sing backing vocals, I would play saxophone & sing lead. We had energy & power, & the novelty of a saxophone. There was so much to love about us. We played a whole bunch of shows, in a whole bunch of places. Mostly, people got the fun & joined in. But in Fibbers, at a heavy rock night, two teenagers with acoustic guitars couldn’t seem to grab their attention. The same thing happened at a reggae night we played. Our thoughtful lyrics & boppy sax hooks just weren’t interesting to the skank loving stoners… A lot of us make music that’s a product of our lives, of the world we’re living in. We subconsciously reflect the communities that we’re a part of. If you’re able to share your music with people like you, that’s usually a good start. If you’re a dirty hipster-contrarian like me, then you might have a more difficult time. My friends are not my ‘audience’ in industry terms that is. The people who like my music are not of my community. They’re younger than me, or older than me actually. :p But more often than not, I need to find those people. I’m working on it atm though… social media ads, etc, are where I’m about to dive in to. My experience with this one isn’t great so I won’t offer more than this… sometimes nobody cares because the people you do show it to just don’t get it.
Phew, I might actually get this done on the bus into the city… today is another Wednesday, so it’s a day of hanging out with other creatives & drinking too much coffee. Before we go, let’s revisit the two ‘cliffhangers’ from earlier. That sneaky 4th component to all of this is YOU.
We kind of brushed up against you for this whole journey. You, pushing your boundaries, not being so scared to try something crazy. You being disciplined enough to actually practice & improve, even when it doesn’t feel like it’s helping (it is). But let’s look at you here… You care. That’s actually a bigger deal than it feels like… & it’s more reliable & sustainable than you think. A lot of people stop caring… Only a few weeks ago did I realise that I’ve been struggling to have fun because I cared too much about success than I did about what I was doing. & THAT’S the big lesson to learn… Care about what you’re making, care about it so much that you work to make it better, & you work to show the whole world, no, even better… care so much that you find those who care & show them. It’s common to burnout & feel frustrated, like nothing is moving anywhere. I feel like this all the time. You can’t make people care, people are unpredictable nightmares. You can, however, make what you care about… & make it for so long that you eventually find those who also care.
To sum it all up… when it feels like nobody cares about what you’re doing: persist. Keep falling in love with your work, & try not to get in your own way.
OKAY I’M DONE. (I’m now officially bus sick…)
Until next week, Nathan
