Tag Archives: kyrsten bean

The Ups and Downs of Life as a Performing Artist

For every spectacular live stage performance you watch that seems like it was seamlessly evoked from thin air, you can bet that there were hours and hours of time spent in dark, crowded practice spaces going over those same songs again and again and again.

The performing life is odd. I don’t even know how to describe it. Especially for a person like me who is a library assistant (pretty much a librarian without librarian pay because I don’t have my MS degree) by day, musician by night. Most days I spend sitting in a quiet, old, dusty building in the middle of a semi-rural neighborhood in the Bay Area, helping old people find books about how to not die and kids find books about farts and diaper superheros. I have to make rent somehow.

library rockstar

My sister drew this for me, to describe my life.

At night, I am in a practice space with other musicians (the members of my band Kyrsten Bean, and the members of Nicky Garratt’s band Hedersleben), working on either songs I wrote or songs my band mates have written and we have all collaborated on. There is a lot of drilling of the same parts over and over again, debating about what works and what doesn’t. We record our practices and then I listen to them while I’m driving to the library the next day, to work so I can buy food and gas to fuel my life.

On Thursday night, Hedersleben had our first little sampler show at the Oakland Metro. It was a blast. I met a lot of awesome musicians in the bands that played after we opened, and in the audience of people who had come to check out this krautrock thing we are doing. It felt very good. I didn’t sleep much that night. The next day was the slowest day ever at the library. I sat at the reference desk or in the back room staring at the walls or ceiling, catching up on library projects, helping patrons, but mostly sitting. Staring. Wondering if the night before had really happened.

hedersleben***

That night after work, I went over to see the launch of my friend Joe’s book, Junkie Love. I helped with the trailer for that one by playing a junkie. My friend Joel was the star. It was filmed in my bedroom.

I was nervous to finally watch it for the first time in a room with 81 people, but when I finally saw it I was impressed. It’s a little love story. About what a junkie thinks love is–about dope being love and love being dope.

Here it is, anyhow:

***

It was the same thing that night. I went to the book launch, it was exciting to see my friends kill it with their readings and to watch the trailer I had been a part of.
After the reading, I bumped into Alan Kaufman, who had come to support Joe. We ended up having a conversation about performing life. I don’t know why I felt compelled to vent to him about it, he merely asked me how it had been filming the trailer in my bedroom. I told him that it had been heavy, and I’d felt like crap for a week afterwards. He totally got it. Alan is a beat poet, wrote the book Drunken Angel (which I am just now cracking open and is amazing). He’s been there.

I told him about how I’d just had a performance the night before, how exciting it was. We had a guy from a record label come out to see us, everyone loved it, I was on cloud nine. There are tours being booked, details being finalized. We are recording an album at the end of the month. I have a show with my own band being worked on for May 30 as we speak. So much of what I love. So much awesomeness. Then I spent the next day sitting at the library.

“That’s awful!” said Alan. I looked at him, and I knew he meant that exactly how it feels to me. That it’s not working at a library or being around books that is awful, it’s the contrast between being in the middle of a cosmic synergistic excitement hub of splendor and then having to drive to work the next day and sit and stare at books.

I’m not complaining, don’t get me wrong! I love libraries. It’s just a strange, deflating transition. I find myself sitting there asking myself if any of the excitement actually happened. Which of these scenarios is my real life? The one where I am on stage in my element, doing what I love, carting gear in and out, talking music language with fellow musicians, or the one where I am sitting still at a reference desk at a library in the middle of nowhere, a city most people don’t even know exists in the Bay Area as it’s unincorporated.

It’s enough to make me feel stark raving mad sometimes, the ups and downs. I love my life. I love doing music. I love that I took my dreams of childhood and am finally bringing them to fruition. But there are things I got to talk about with Kaufman that he just got immediately. Doing performances and then sitting in your room for days trying to decompress. Having your ego fed, having it inflate, and then having the pin stuck in the balloon as the air fizzles out over the next couple of days. Our conversation blew my mind, was just what I needed.  Joel, who had rode with me to the event, didn’t need a ride home, so then I went home to my diet coke and gluten-free cookie and stared at Facebook. Then I went to sleep, and got up to go work at the library.

Bitchez Brew, Tonight

Yea, yea, I shoulda posted this sooner. I’m reading tonight in Oakland. Poetry this time. I rant about poetry and what it means to me in a post I wrote over a year ago called Taking Back Poetry: Obscurity is Not a Stamp of Awful. I kinda forgot all I felt about poetry until I was looking through the poems I’m gonna be reading tonight, and I realized they had gotten me through some rough, rough times. Reading them will be cathartic. It’s like a full circle of where I’ve been and how far I’ve come since I penned the majority of these.

My friend Joel Landmine will be reading, too, and he’s real good. Makes me a little jealous watching a video of him reading, actually. He’s that good.

Era Art Bar in Oakland 6:30pm. Bitchez Brew. Tonight.

http://www.bitchezbrewreview.com/bitchez-brew-march-2013/

A Little Demo

I know, I know, I shorted you all a post this week. But if it makes (me) feel any better, I got more page views this week than any other week. Go figure.

I haven’t updated because I’ve been busy working on what I always talk about. Music. I talked about how I ran into a dude who records songs in his house. Since he’s cutting his chops recording all sorts of metal and punk bands in Oakland, I got in with him just before he starts charging money next year. His house studio is called Brain Splitter Studios. The dude is only 20 and super talented. He’s gonna go far. It was real fun working with him.

We worked on four songs, he played drums and I did bass and guitar and this awesome 19-year old kid named Roland who can shred like nothing I’ve ever seen before threw a couple little guitar solos down for me on the spot.

You can listen to or download the demo songs below. I’m still trying to find the right sound and style for my voice and songwriting. But it’s something!

This last two years has been a super learning curve for me in the world of music. Here’s the pep talk part of the post. I’ve been writing songs since I was a child, and picked up the guitar at 13. For many years, I spent most of my free time in my room writing and playing songs by myself. I was surrounded by talented musicians, but I was always too shy to really know how to get them to work with me on my songs, and after dating and breaking up with a guy who was pretty established on a major label, I really hit a bottom with my belief in my own music.

It seemed like most of the musicians I knew had these crazy internal worlds that I could not access, that they had secret powers I could not seem to find a route to in myself, though I knew I had something in there. I spent a lot of years after I moved back from LA at age 20 playing songs in my closet so my neighbors wouldn’t hear me. It’s hard to believe an overly expressive person like me could be so shy, but there you have it. I was hell of shy, and not very confident about my songs.

It took a lot of years of playing random open mics and coffee shops and sharing my songs with close friends before I got to a point where I was confident enough to start working with other musicians again. I still felt like I didn’t want to be part of the music industry system or grind, but I got to a place where I knew that music was very important to me and I needed to start trying in a way I never had before.

I always hear voices in my head when I’m writing songs. A lot of the musician friends I looked up to growing up, guys I dated who were talented, and so on. For years, their internalized critiques kept me from believing anyone else but me would like my songs.

Then I got to a point where I just didn’t care. At all. And I became like a pit bull. In the past two years I have jammed with a myriad of musicians, worked on a big project with a friend from high school that taught me a lot about my songs through the process of recording them and adding drums, bass, keyboards, etc, raised funds on Kickstarter for recording, tried out for bands, posted ads, interviewed potential collaborators, went to new shows to see what’s going on right now, and also started listening to other musicians more and asking lots of questions.

I spent a month and a half going to a practice space by myself in September, using a PA system to test out the arsenal of songs I’d written in the previous years to see which would actual make good ones to record with drums and bass and eventually play live. I worked on making them more dissonant and visceral, since previous incarnations hadn’t been as dark as I’d liked.

It’s still a crazy process, because I’m always improving and progressing, and being around other musicians gives me other ideas that put old ideas to shame, but that’s the name of the game, I suppose. Each time I meet a goal, I already have a new goal I’d like to attain. The work never ends and I always know I can do better.

But I’m enjoying the process. It’s what I live for. It makes being broke all the time and going to work at a day job when I’d much rather be working for myself more bearable.

Tonight I worked with this cool drummer and bass player who are helping me with some songs while their band’s singer is away for a few months. We’re trying to make them more dynamic and dissonant. When I’m working on my songs in their practice space, I feel good and I don’t worry about anything else. Money, relationships, drama–it all fades away. I love that. Music is life to me. Wherever you are in your music journey, you can get to where you want to go if you don’t give up and also accept that it might take much, much more time than you think–just let go and trust the journey.

Reading From LitQuake, Lenore Kandel’s Poetry

I found these clips of my reading from the Litquake event a couple weeks ago in honor of Lenore Kandel. Lenore Kandel was an amazing female beat poet that I knew nothing of before Evan Karp, a fellow poet, and mind behind Quiet Lightning, invited me to read for Kat Engh and North Atlantic Books, (the publisher of the book I read from, “Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel.”) I felt honored to be able to read Kandel’s poems, because they really spoke to me, especially as they related to sex, life and meaning.

I feel like Evan Karp summed up my life and what I’m trying to do on this blog eloquently in a minute, so I’ll post that video first, and following is a video of my reading of three of Lenore Kandel’s poems. Don’t mind me, I just obscured my entire head with the book of her poetry. It was a ploy to make you think I was Lenore Kandel.

Additional readings of mine from previous events:

East Bay on the Brain, Not Quite Dateable
Lip Service West, Cough Syrup My Gateway Drug

Not Quite Dateable

I recently located a video of a reading I did earlier this year at the Layover in Oakland for East Bay on the Brain, a quarterly reading series. I read a piece called “Not Quite Dateable.” It’s serious in the beginning, but wait for it. There is humor.

How do I feel about reading my past debauchery out loud? Well, I am not unlike thousands of other writers and musicians who share eviscerating personal details to a very small audience. It’s my story. I can’t pretend my story doesn’t involve some questionable, embarrassing behavior.

My main point in sharing is the whole hinge of being a caring human being. I share because I felt alone when I went through all my antics, and I really want other people who have done similar things to not feel alone.

Every little drop in the bucket helps with these performances. It’s all baby steps forward. And yes, I do worry I will attract some neurotic psychopath who will use all my personal details against me as has happened to me in past life. Truth is, I’ve been seasoned by sociopaths, so I know the ropes now. Since I’m comfortable with my past and I’ll likely not ever work a 9 – 5 again lest I implode or spontaneously combust, I’m not worried future employers will be able to hold my confessions against me. And frankly, I don’t care. I spent a lot of years trying to be this perfect person, and it’s impossible to be a perfect person. I give up!

I am me.

So yes, here’s another personal story I read in public. I plan on many more to come!

Music Show at Vitus Tomorrow, July 18

I booked a show a while back, and it has arrived, $5 tickets are available here: Vitus Oakland

Come, hang out. The two other musicians playing with me are Dustin Thomas and Shannon Harney, both of whom are on their game, with websites, music to purchase and everything else a musician needs these days. I’m a little intimidated! But hey, I’ll be there, at the beginning of the night, playing my soulful, bluesy tunes for whoever decides to get out of the house on a Wednesday night to hear them. I believe the other two musicians will be playing with full bands. Hard to live up to that with me and my little guitar, but I’m doing this sucker. Like my friend Bucky says, it’s not like something will happen like my guitar suddenly breaks and maims a small child and everyone goes, “And that was the last night she ever played guitar…”

God, the life of a musician. I’m currently looking for a music practice space to go in on, in Oakland, so if you hear anything, let me know. Need some private space to practice all these new tunes! I moved into a room, with roommates. Adjusting to that. Yikes!

Lip Service West Fundraiser Recap

Being a sober person sometimes makes things a bit awkward. Especially things like going out and playing live gigs. I haven’t had a glass of alcohol or any type of non-prescribed substance since October 18, 2002, so alcohol is not even a temptation, it’s just not in my arsenal of socially acceptable coping mechanisms. But it still gets a little weird when I’m around other people drinking for too long of a period. If only that communication levels break down, because they have a barrier between them and the world and I don’t.

Continue reading →

Paying Attention

I was in the kitchen the other day, and saw an ant scurrying down the wall, holding one of its fellow ants to carry back to wherever it came from.

Our apartment is cheaply built, and somewhat old, from around the ’50s or before, and looks kind of like a drive-in motel. In fact, people have gotten confused, or laughed, when they’ve seen it. “This is where you live?” they snort.

For some reason, in these old buildings, ants are constantly seeking dominion over our physical space, and are subject to be killed on sight.

My husband was standing near me, doing something else, and I called out, “Look, he’s trying to save his brother.”

Without missing a beat, Noel said, “They’re going to cannibalize him,” breaking through my temporary ant empathy lapse. This wasn’t an altruistic move on the ant’s part, he wasn’t carrying his soldier brother, damaged by war, back home to sit in a hospital bed and recover. He was taking the body back to the hive so that the other ants could feast on it. A lightbulb went off in my head, some creaky mechanism started turning, pondering the life cycle, and I squished them both.

***

I was in a barber shop in Oakland yesterday, waiting amongst the men for my husband to get his hair cut. On a side table sat Charles Bukowski’s book of short stories, South of No North. I started reading it, because I can’t resist one of Bukowski’s plain white covers when I see it.

I opened to “You Can’t Write A Love Story,” a story about a writer who can’t write, is stuck. In his room, he starts arguing with some girl he picked up at the local bar about the writer’s life. She criticizes him, saying he makes less money than her grandmother. He tells her she doesn’t understand the feeling of needing to shed his crawling skin through writing, of being unable to do so. She accuses him of throwing a lot of parties for someone who hates people. Finally, he badgers her enough that she leaves, and the altercation is enough to start him writing again: he types out the story of what just occurred, word for word.

I love this story. It’s pithy portrayal of the mobius loop some writers subject themselves to, the constant seeking of snakes to bite them, the slow extraction of the venom, the healing through typed words, and then the seeking of the snake, again and again.

I skipped through a few others, and then read Dr. Nazi. This narrator is visiting some forty-something doctor. The doctor is physically falling apart, and after the narrator tells the doctor he’s suffering from the fact that he’s a nervous man, the doctor tells the narrator he was once a Nazi, and spends the appointment ranting about his wife and his divorce.

The narrator keeps going back, because a doctor is better than a shrink. At one point, the narrator rants about lines. People love to wait in lines, he says, everywhere, at the grocery store, at the bank. The lines drive him nuts, make him nervous. He can’t understand the happy faces of the grocery store clerks, waiting to work up to management positions, going home to smiling wives. Lines are the problem with our society, the narrator thinks, the thing that separates him from them, makes him an outsider. Doesn’t anyone else notice these lines? Don’t they drive anyone else nuts?

As he keeps going back to the doctor, he starts to wonder why he never gets to talk about his own problems. I’m the one paying this doctor, he thinks. And then he starts to realize that he is not the only one with problems as he observes people he comes across in his daily affairs. Everyone has problems. Everyone has pain.

***

Sometimes, I get so focused and busy, it’s like I’m not paying attention, and the universe can’t talk to me because I’ve got my fingers plugging my ears. There’s something about noticing the world, not always sitting at the computer writing, or with a guitar, composing, but exploring surroundings, whether it’s an ant or a collection of gritty short stories.

Artists need space to observe the world around them and seek their inspiration. What does the ant seeking its home mean? What does it mean that I killed it? What does that say about me? What does it mean that after I spent the car ride over to the barber shop with my husband venting about the futility of the artistic life I opened right to Bukowski’s short story, “You Can’t Write a Love Story?”

Could mean nothing. Could mean something.

Someone else was equally afflicted by life. Other people balk at scripted space, crawl in their skin to get the words out. Ants are not necessarily altruistic. Come to your own conclusions. That’s your prerogative.

Pay attention.

Oh, and yes, in two days. Come. Lip Service West. Fundraiser. I am playing music at 8:00 pm. My friend Jafar Thorne will be playing bass. I was getting all nervous, and my husband, always my muse, reminded me that this isn’t about me. I’m playing music for the event. He’s right. It’s not about me. It’s about helping a really cool reading series keep being really cool (and free!). Ten bucks per ticket, funds go towards the series.

Phantom Reality — An EP

As you know by reading this blog, I spend a lot of time working on music and writing. An acquaintance offered to help me finish an EP of my songs, a goal of mine for over ten years. A kind girl I spent some time with recently recommended Kickstarter for raising project funds, so I spent a couple of days working on a video and a project goal. I’m going to post it here, because who of anyone if not my readers will understand how important this is for me and be excited about it. Continue reading →