Tag Archives: musician

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.

5 Signs You Are A Modern-Day Musician

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1. You’re in more than one band or project at the same time.
Do you find yourself constantly consulting a calendar so that you can squeeze in another band practice? While you’ve got four band projects going, do you get asked to take on an additional band project and say yes because THIS project might be the big one? Do you find yourself on multiple email lists or text clusters with various groups of musicians you call band mates trying to once again negotiate the details of the same weekly practices you’ve been negotiating every week for a year due to everyone having various work/life schedules? You might be a modern-day musician.

2. You work a day job for less than you’re worth in order to balance band practices/shows and tours.

Do you find yourself spending another day staring at the cottage cheese ceiling at your day job wondering why a talented mofo like you is spending so much time for so little money doing something they don’t even like to do? Do you have to constantly remind yourself that you CHOSE this job so that you could dedicate the majority of your time to music? Do you stare at your bedroom with the mattress on the floor and thrift store clothes all over the place, eating another bowl of beans and rice in front of your keyboard bench which doubles as a table for your outdated laptop? You might be a modern-day musician.

3. You have no consistent love life.
Do you find yourself put out by how quickly your friends are hooking up? Do you stare at photos of your married friends and feel a slight twinge of doubt about your life’s path? Do you find yourself so busy with work and band practices and eating rice and beans that you consider hooking up with one of your multiple band mates just for the convenience of the matter, but remember the cardinal no-no of bands just as you find your band mate making moonie eyes at you and look away? You might be a modern-day musician.

4. The thought of actually going on tour excites and horrifies you at the same time.

Do you kind of dread the go ahead to tour from your band mates/manager/band leader because you know it means quitting your job, eating more rice and beans, cramming into a van with your smelly band mates, schlepping gear and playing in small clubs/houses/coffee shops day after day? Do you also get thrilled at the idea of random discoveries, playing music every night, serendipitous encounters, all the new people you’ll meet and being able to say to people, “I’m going on tour in the fall?” You might be a modern-day musician.

5. You play bills that include two or more of your bands.

Are you the bass player in one band and keyboardist in another? Do you sing backup vocals and play guitar for one project and main vocals for the second? Do your bands books shows with each other and go on tour together, making it so you end up playing back to back every night you play out? Does this seem normal to you? You are most likely a modern-day musician.

Want more 5 Things posts? Check out 5 Observations About Bacon, 5 Helpful Links for Reading, Writing and Productivity, 5 Signs You Are a Writer, 5 Signs We Are Hoping for the Zombie Apocalypse, and 5 Signs You Are a Musician

Six Signs That You Are A Musician

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Seems a lot of people are in the air with the question, “Am I a musician?” I thought I’d make it a bit easier by giving you a trail guide pointing you in the direction of whether or not you are. If none of these apply to you, well, it doesn’t really mean you’re not a musician. But if some or all of these apply to you, there’s a good chance you’ve got the curse.

1. You’ve been misunderstood

Have you tried sharing your music with your relatives or peers only to be ignored, laughed at or told your songs are “different?” Keep practicing. Most people won’t get it. If you don’t suck, you’ll eventually find a few trusted followers (hell, even if you suck you can find followers. Plenty of examples of this on YouTube!)

2. You’ve been kicked out of the house while playing your music

My cousin, a guitarist and singer-songwriter (and 16), told me, “I knew I was a musician when my grandma kicked me out of the house and into the garage for playing too loud.” He immediately called his dad, a bass player, to brag about it.

3. You are obsessive

What they don’t tell you when you decide to pursue music is that having OCD is a good thing. You will need to be able to listen to and/or play the same snippet of a song fifty gazillion times in order to get it right. You won’t do this merely once or twice. You’ll do it almost every time you play music. And when you finally show a song you’ve supposedly finished to a friend, they’ll think it came seamlessly from your subconscious. You won’t want to tell them that you think with this song you’ve finally crossed the line into insane, that it was stuck in your head on instant repeat for weeks or months, waking you up in the middle of the night. That when they were talking to you about going to get ice cream you were wondering if you should cut the chorus a bit shorter and maybe add a more sophisticated bridge, or some harmonies. That when you were sitting on the toilet this morning you stared at the wall picturing the chord progression of your song and the lyrics all laid out in some sort of diagram and assessed each word for content to cut out redundancies and make it more consistent. No one wants to hear this part about being a musician.

4. You’re not conventionally good-looking

There are gads of musicians who are not known for their beauty. In the car yesterday, I was telling a friend, McKay, that I have to keep telling myself that I can still do music when I’m ugly, that wrinkles don’t preclude me from being a successful songwriter. He sneered and said, “Yea, because Leonard Cohen’s problem was that he was too old and ugly to make good music.”

Most musicians, (ala Simon and Garfunkel, for example) were not pretty to behold. Instead of being popular and cool, they sat in their bedrooms for years honing their craft and voila, in some kind of inverse universe reaction they became popular. Lennon, Ronstadt, Babs, McCartney, Nick Cave, Leadbelly…are (or were) any of these people pretty? No. Doesn’t matter. Next time you look in the mirror and decide you’re not beautiful and thus can’t make music, think again. You’re already halfway there.

5. You are never present unless you’re writing (or playing) songs

Most things in life, if you’ve got the curse bad enough, are like what my friend Joe calls the rice in a burrito: Filler. While you’re at your day job or chilling with family at a gathering trying to make small talk and deflect deeper questions about your personal life, you’re thinking about music. You’re thinking about getting into the studio again, or that keyboard part you added to a song recently and if you’re going to be able to replicate that sound, not the spreadsheets staring at you from a glaring computer screen. You boss might as well have a TV screen on their forehead showing you at your first big gig, rocking the hell out of the floor. Or biffing it and sobbing hysterically, but it’s music in your fantasies. Always music.

6. You listen to your own music in the car

Every musician I know sheepishly ejects a CD from their car stereo as soon as I get in their car. I have to reassure them that I know they are listening to their own songs in progress, and it’s OK, I do the same thing. It makes us dedicated, not egotistical. Where better to work on your songs than when you’re stuck sitting in traffic, able to listen to every nuance and assess whether or not it fits? Besides, we all know our own music is the music we’ve been dying to hear out in the world but can never find. That’s why we create it.   And also, if it’s playing on our own CD players, we can pretend it’s playing on radios and in CD players around the world, which we know it will be someday, or we wouldn’t even bother.

Working A Day Job

I talk a lot about my opinions on working a day job, i.e. a 9 – 5, when your heart is elsewhere. Many people have to work a day job they don’t like. I can list a slew of friends right now who work day jobs and are musicians or writers, but need to feed their kids, pay child support, pay the exorbitant Bay Area rents and grocery bills. I’m not saying that it’s always feasible for most people to not work one, though I always encourage trying to find other passions so you’re not miserable all of the time. Life is short.

My husband, in particular, gets pretty upset when I knock the so-called American dream of clocking in during the day just to space out to television or video games at night–mainly because he has searched his whole life for that “something” that he is passionate about and has come up lacking. The things he likes to do are pretty normal. He likes reading. He likes eating out. He likes playing video games. He likes cuddling (to the point it makes me a bit nauseous, I admit) with our smelly dog.

So when I rant about how I’m feeling stifled by having to show up somewhere at a certain time every single day on someone else’s clock, if only part-time, he rightfully rolls his eyes, and has for many years as I explored a number of jobs that weren’t a good fit.

I write more now, working two jobs than when I was unemployed! Go figure.

Actually, when he met me, I wasn’t doing much writing or music. I had just gotten out of rehab, for one, and out of a situation that had scarred me, for another, involving what I thought was a soul mate and bla de dah, but had actually been a catalyst for a relapse after four years sober. My way of coping was, of course, to imbibe copious amounts of pills from other people’s medicine cabinets washed down with a lot of vodka, and this being the Bay Area, some green, too.

After I stopped doing all of those things, for a time (before I got legal prescriptions for pills and had to repeat a similar process all over again) I was a little leery of my guitar. First off, it had some flaws. The tuning keys were falling out, the bridge was warped and the strings were way too far from the neck because the bridge had been adjusted to compensate for the warping.

(I’d had that guitar since I was 14 years old—my parents had traded some piano rebuilding work for it when it was new. Unfortunately, because I play left-handed, the shop didn’t have a single guitar that would work for me. They flipped a righty to make me a lefty. My pick guard was upside down and the nut was backwards. I played the hell out of that guitar for 7 or 8 years, it sure beat the nylon string contraption I had started out with.)

When my husband and I started dating, I cared not about my music or writing or art at the moment. I wasn’t even listening to most rock music, I could only tolerate tunes without words. All I really cared about was getting my brain functioning again and not feeling like shit all of the time–I’d done a number on myself. My beat up guitar sat in the closet, where I sometimes played some wistful three chord song over and over again while my neighbor listened through the wall.

In order to survive on my own, I needed to get a job, so I got one, a 9 – 5, and I started making more money than I had made, ever. It was nice to not be poor or running up tabs on credit cards I would never pay off.

My ex-boyfriend called me around that time, “Just to say hi,” and I shot the shit with him.

He asked how I was doing and I told him that I finally had a job. “Stuck in the grind, hu?” he said. I didn’t really know what to say. I was, but all of the lofty things I talked about with him (pursuing music at all costs, writing stories, the things I had given up doing while living in his apartment, even, until he had lectured me, saying, “If you would just do something, anything, write a song, write a story, I could justify the expense of having you live with me rent free.”) weren’t my priority.

The fact was, I didn’t really care about being stuck in the grind. I was watching all of the movies I’d been able to buy with my newfound income on my very own TV in my very own apartment. I was buying my own groceries (frozen pizza, sardines, crackers, toaster pastries) and I was answering to no one.

I began to think that maybe the ideals my parents had drilled into me (art above all else) weren’t my own. I didn’t miss the life of partial poverty I had in my teens, before they found other ways to bring in cash, wherein we rented a yellow one-story house and ate food from the church storehouse. I didn’t miss how sometimes we shopped at Costco and sometimes all we had in the kitchen for months were pickles, spam and ramen. I didn’t miss shopping at Goodwill and getting my fix of CDs by ripping off BMG Music (12 for the price of one!). I could now buy all of the nice clothes I wanted, all of the CDs I wanted and all of the food I wanted, every two weeks. I lived in a nice apartment in San Francisco.

A year went by, then two, and I started to self-destruct, again. Shopping stopped being fun, and I was bored, miserable, and started doing stupid things like not eating to see how skinny I could get (ending in more treatment). My husband got me to sign up for a class at the local college and it was like my spark came back. Pretty soon, I was in school full-time and I was writing music again and playing out at open mics, though I still didn’t have the drive I have now for my artistic pursuits. I needed to flounder and explore for a few more years.

***

I don’t knock hard work. What I have a hard time with is working my life away at something I don’t want to do when there is something I really, really want to do (music, writing) instead. I’ve reached a compromise—I enjoy working part-time at the library because I work with the teen programming and I get to do things like make a Tumblr account for National Poetry Month and play Rock Band and go to Juvenile Hall to sign up to volunteer without being in handcuffs. It covers pesky adult things like health insurance. I also do a lot of freelance writing.

My heart is, and will always be, in music. But like most musicians, I need to have things I do to bring in the bacon (or at least enough to buy me some bacon so I don’t starve), things that don’t take away from being able to gig and record and collaborate and write. It seems, as long as I don’t get too sick, that I am partially succeeding in that regard, though it’s all still a work in progress, a grand experiment.

My husband definitely earns more than I do, because he’s 11 years older and has been working at the same career (hair stylist) for two decades. He likes it. He can go to work and not bring it home with him, and it used to be something that would allow him to buy all the things he wanted to buy.

Unfortunately, he thought my degree (in Creative Writing) would guarantee a job once I graduated. It didn’t (I never promised it would). The publishing industry, where I worked for a time, tanked, and I also decided the 9 – 5 lifestyle isn’t my bag at all, after a year and half of full and then partial unemployment. And now, after ten years together (where does time go?) my husband is finally realizing he married a musician/writer/poet person who will always put art before money. Without him, I wouldn’t have a car. I would likely be living in a flat in Oakland or the city with probably 4 other people and shopping at Grocery Outlet. Not necessarily the funnest life, either, but creature comforts can only soothe you for so long, is what I’ve learned.

In the Bay Area, I am surrounded by people who can have their cake and eat it too. Whether because of inheritance or a silver spoon or savings or software jobs, there are a ton of people who get to live the high life, not sacrifice and not have to make the choices I make every day (do I buy a new shirt or do I buy some potatoes and meat for tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s breakfast?) It’s not much different than how I grew up. Everyone around me had money, we were the only ones who didn’t. We were in disguise, lived in the nice neighborhoods but didn’t own our house, didn’t have new cars, didn’t wear Abercrombie and Fitch, got handouts from the church. I’m used to it. I work very hard to make the small amount of money I do make, but I still don’t break even without being extremely creative and trusting in the benevolence of the universe.

I have no doubt I will learn how to use my talents to cobble together enough work to more than squeak by, but pursuing the path I’m pursuing will not make me rich. I’ve accepted that, and I don’t very much care. Sometimes, I get frustrated because I’d like to finish the partially done sleeve on my right arm and buy a nice guitar for once in 17 years, but I do have two nice mid-range guitars, and a lot of resources many people don’t have.

I only share these things because I think others are probably experiencing similar quandaries, and I know that when I read about other people’s lives, I often feel better about my own because I don’t feel alone. And that’s mainly the reason I write this blog. Lately, I am genuinely appreciating hearing your experiences in the comments section–I started this blog because I wanted to find other like me, and connect with them, and I am blown away by how I’ve met that goal, in spite of it taking years at this point.

You Need Chaos in Your Soul

You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.
–Friedrich Nietzsche

I spend a lot of time involved in wild flights of fantasy, where I imagine strange and extraordinary things occurring, meeting the right people in the right places, magical results coming from little creations. And when I’m imagining these things, I believe that they are real – for a few moments. Continue reading →

Bukowski, Why Be a Poet, Why Ignite Sparks

(photo credit Largo Poet)

“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery–isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum) Continue reading →

Don’t Believe Everything You Think

I passed a bumper sticker yesterday that said “Don’t believe everything you think.”

We think we know everything, because our minds lie to us about knowing everything in order to keep some sense of order in a completely insane world and universe ruled by utter random chaos. We have to have some sense of stability, and sometimes I think our minds fashion these lies about other people and the world around us in order to keep us grounded in a superficial sense of reality so we don’t just simply explode. And so we fail to see the parallel universes out there where anything is possible.

Our minds are wrong. Often. Question them. Trust your gut, question your mind. Sometimes that means stating the obvious. Just because it’s obvious to you, doesn’t mean it is to someone else. A reality of our human condition is the fact that we are all stuck behind separate spaces of flesh, trying to communicate with one another through barriers of blood, brain and bile. Which is why writing is often so effective, because it breaks those barriers to some extent. Which is why we should keep doing it, because it is possible, in some magical fashion combining words, pictures or music, to break these barriers.

Continue reading →

Former Students Urge Creative Writing Teacher To Pursue Her Music

As I was perusing creative news today, I found an article about a teacher, Carlo Dawson, 33, whose students reciprocated her efforts to support their creativity by encouraging her to follow her musical dreams.

Dawson had brought in her guitar to play and sing for the class at times, in order to help them feel better about pursuing their own creative endeavors in spite of any insecurities they might have. Some of the students thought that she was amazing and were incredulous that she was not pursuing her music. She told them it was just a hobby.

Some of the students came back after they graduated to support her music –and this part makes me teary eyed — one student helped her design her website, another helped with the album cover and a third broadcast her songs at his North Carolina college radio station. Her album is recorded under the name Carlo L’Chelle.

It’s awesome to see that Dawson is and was able to help her students pursue their own creativity by sharing hers with them. That supportive energy she gave out freely to her students grew large enough to encompass her in return. This is an empowering example, especially when I think of all of the implications it has for our lives.

Something extraordinary happens when we share something we’re passionate about with others. Not always immediately and with such dramatic results; sometimes it happens slowly over time. Seeds are planted. Just because you don’t find immediate success (as society and mainstream media project is the only way) doesn’t mean something incredible won’t happen. The world is full of stories about people that grow their talents over time and emerge later to captivate others, through any number of means.

Granted, 33 is still young. But for all of you worried that you haven’t succeeded in the eyes of the world if you’re not blasting into the public eye in your late teens and early twenties, keep on keeping on. Don’t give up. Good things, beautiful things, take time to grow. And sometimes it’s not the best time for your dreams to manifest. We’re all going where we’re meant to be going and sometimes it comes clear after we pursue our art in the dark for quite some time.

Don’t ever give up on your creative endeavors. Do them for you. The rest is just icing on the cake.

Your Title: Does it Define You As a Person?

There’s a joke (but it’s actually true in my experience) that in Los Angeles, anywhere you go, whether ordering food, buying groceries or performing yoga moves, someone is definitely going to ask you, “So…what do you DO?”

I have to admit that it happens often here in the Bay Area as well.

Some people laugh when you ask them this. Most people get serious and start explaining what their job moniker, or title is. We seem to only feel comfortable introducing ourselves by not just our birth moniker, but by our socially sanctioned title.

More and more these days I hear, “well, I do A for a living and I do B on the side and I would like to do C more because it’s really where my passion is.” Many people do three or more different things. According to the book, “The Paradox of Choice,” by Barry Schwartz, the average 32-year old American has already worked nine different jobs.

My dad has a post-it on his computer that says, “We are human beings, not human doings.”

As a short aside, did you know that moniker, according to The Free Dictionary, “Originally meant a mark left by a tramp on a building or fence to indicate he/she had been there; therefore, a tramp’s moniker identified him/her like a signature.” Early graffiti. The importance to humans of telling the world who we are goes back a long ways in time.

I interview a variety of people from different trades for a Who’s Who column and many of them have a passion they do at night while they work a corporate job they don’t really like by day.

People always told me when I was growing up, ”Don’t quit your day job.”

My opinion on this has oscillated wildly at times depending on my circumstances, but I’ve concluded that if you put yourself fully into something, and don’t just have one foot in the door, something will come of it. And that doesn’t mean you can’t work a part-time or a day job to pay the bills. Having food and a place to live are important for creating. If you’re scrambling to eat, how are you going to focus on penning the next best something?

Back to monikers. Do you associate yourself with what you do creatively or for a living? Do you feel like you truly ARE a writer or a musician? If you were stranded on an island and you couldn’t create in the conventional ways, do you think you would develop other ways to express yourself? Would you use these to define yourself to other human beings?

Do you feel like adding a disclaimer when you mention the day (or night, or part-time) job you perform to put bread on the table and a roof over your head? Or do you have a job you like that is complemented by the writing or other creative work that you do?

I find when people ask what I do, I answer according to my mood of the day. If I’m working more on poetry I might say, “Poet.” If I am writing for the newspaper predominately I have been known to say, “Journalist,” though, that isn’t the whole truth (see, disclaimer.) I never wanted to be a journalist growing up, so I don’t feel like it “fits” me as a title completely. I am afraid of certain judgements when I explain to people that I only do it part-time. What if they think it’s all I do? What if they think I want to be some big reporter? (I don’t.) See how we get tripped up by titles?

If I look back to when I was little, I wanted to be a writer AND a musician. I wanted to be a ballerina and a runner and a nutritionist. There are so many things I want to try in this life. Yet, underneath it all, I do identify with the titles writer, poet and musician the most. They fulfill. The words bring images of rewards to me.

With writing, I can be whatever I want. My personal experience is fodder for material. The quantam plane expands at my whim. I can create any new universe I want.

With music, I can play to my hearts content.

Whatever day job I take, I can mine for writing material. I think of Kafka, who worked in the bureaucracy while penning stories, or Thoreau, who hung with Emerson, working as his handyman, and sold vegetables at one point.

We can’t lock ourselves away in a vacuum (or a room) full-time and expect to be able to write about the human condition. Many of the best writers and musicians talk about the working class people (the people who are going to read their books and buy their music) and pull from their own visceral experiences in the trenches.

Many writers spend their lives perfecting their work. We look for a quick fix, but what will really last? The work you build over your lifetime may last for generations. It may not. It may affect one person here and now. Probably it will. And most importantly, it will affect YOU. Creating changes you. It shows you what you need to tell yourself.

Try it. Free write about whatever, no censor. Then read what your mind is trying to tell you. And don’t think you have to choose a single title for what you do or who you are. What does it matter if anyone else calls you a “writer,” “musician,” “poet,” or “artist?” Its you who creates the work. Validation is nice. Feedback is welcome. But you are the one putting pen to paper in the end. Nobody else can tell you who you are.

Musician? Writer? Poet? Do We Have to Be One or the Other?

Today, I was interviewing a local lady for the paper. She started talking about how she does writing for a living, but she loves photography and painting. She lamented about how when she was growing up she struggled a lot with whether or not she was a painter or a writer. She felt like she had to pick one or the other to be true.

We ended up concluding that to be interested in a lot of projects is a creative-person thing, not a bad thing.

I’ve often felt that I had to choose either writing OR music to be true to my craft. But recently, as I had a mad bout of poetry submissions when I was sick and not into playing my guitar and singing for a bit, I noticed that it fed the same deep need in me that music did.

Writing is something creative I manage to pair with photography for my living, cobbled together with various web skills.

Writing creatively in the form of poems or lyrics, however, is something that I’ve kept away from monetary earnings, because it fulfills something deeper. Not that I wouldn’t mind getting paid to do it. That’s another topic though, money and how it affects creativity.

Have you struggled with whether you are one thing or the other? Do you feel like in order to be the best writer or the best musician or the best artist you have to be that and that alone? Or do you feel that all mediums help grow each and complement each other? Share!