Devotion

I usually have thoughts about my album a few times per hour. Lately the thoughts have been a rotating repertoire of:

 

I think this is a really good album.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

This is a project that I’ve done solely for my own gratification.

This is a project I want the world to know about.

I wish I had done this album all at home.

I wish I had a producer helping me on this album.

This album documents my growth as a musician.

This album documents how I can’t choose between styles (country, techno, folk-rock…what am I???)

 

I think the inconstancy of the mind can be interesting to observe, don’t you?

 

Wherever my thought needle lands, I continue to push my project into existence. I just emerged out of a break from it—which was entirely good for my spirit and sanity. Last night I feel like I fell in love with it again…all it took was spending about 4 hours to write an organ part.

 

A work of art can almost seem like a new country you are trying to form, or a child you are trying to raise. How do you know when it’s reached perfection? You don’t–you just nurture it the best you can, from a place of authentic surrender and passion towards expression until you can see it to completion. Not perfection, but completion. Like when the child grows up to be a somewhat sane twenty-something–and you let go. 

 

I went and saw my boyfriend’s old roommate perform last night—he’s a poet and wrote a surrealist fictional poetic narrative of Robert F. Kennedy’s life. It was wonderful and funny, and I admired how he’d created this entertaining, poetic entity out of such a random concept. My boyfriend told me he’d written at least 600 poems–he only performed around 60 maybe. It was heartening to know an artist can pour so much of himself into a project and not give a damn how obscure the subject matter is, or how sprawling, and it turns out to be a successful, universally appealing, mind-changing work of art. Can I ascribe the same focus and devotion to my own project? Sometimes I can, but it has to be in a place of joy and discovery, not self-inflicted pressure or the need for approval.

 

Image: Squeak Carnwath print

Ordinance is an Ugly Word

This whole event promoters ordinance thing really worries me, as a musician and concert-goer. It seems once again bureaucracy is blaring its misguided horn and the voices of real people try to respond in the midst of its honking.

“The ordinance will reduce the amount of music in Chicago, make events more expensive for consumers, dampen the large and growing economic engine that is Chicago music, and create a much less supportive business climate for Chicago’s small music business community.”  -Chicago Music Commission

So, if an independent musician wants to have a CD release party at a club, I need to have $300,000 in insurance?

Or if someone wants to throw a benefit for an injured musician at a venue, same deal?

Hmm. Well, all I can do  (besides attend the city council meeting) is continue working on the album. I go in this weekend to the studio again. I’m spending so much money on this little baby. But I have started to become less and less anxious about the outcome and rest in the knowledge that I’m a musician no matter what–and that will lead me to the next waterfall of creativity and opportunity.