Creep
I'm writing again. That's the short version; that is the happy ending.
I have these droughts, blocks of time where I don't write songs. Usually goes along with feeling bad about myself, life change, or some kind of adjustment where my songwriting needs to change. They're droughts, because my songwriting garden could bloom if I watered it, and for different reasons, sometimes I don't. Moving to a different state and having a baby was an awful lot of distraction, and crawling out from the life change and the postpartum whatever took a while too.
I write best when I'm in a cycle of writing / performing, and if I'm trying to write with no hope of when people will hear a song, eh, that doesn't work so well. So, in the interest of getting myself cranked up again, I went online in search of a guitar player. Since my last guitar player / collaborator / all around Very Useful Music Guy is just about impossible to replace, I went online with much skepticism. I'm leery of guitar players anyway, because they are often very self-taught and (in my opinion) often undertrained. Add that to the smidge of misogynism so many have, and you end up with a whole lot of guitar players who I cannot use.
I got a response to my inquiry, and it was kind of in my face. The guy came on strong with his brags, and he started selling himself as a songwriter and before I knew it he had offered to sit down and give me "Music Biz 101" and I was like, ick. Then he started critiquing my songs, my band, my writing, and trying to tear me down and build himself up. Before I could shut the whole thing down, he had really gotten to me.
And that is the really sad thing. As artists, musicians, writers, whatever, we get torn down. Sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. I learned to separate the helpful ("you really like that major III, I can kinda see it coming...") or the pedagogic ("this digression into the blah blah mode isn't as successful as the rest of the piece..."). And bless the lovely people know the difference between quality - "that guy's songs suck!" - and preference - "that guy's songs are just... not my cup of tea."
But if you have made art, or music, or whatever, for long enough, you will have encountered the other comments. Not helpful, but hateful. Literally, "hate full." And you know who really dishes out the hate? Other artists. Do they not know how and when to put the knife in?
At first this internet creep really got to me, and mostly because there was no way to argue with him. I tried to just say, hey, let's live and let live, no need to be insulting, but he fired back by insisting he wasn't insulting - "just honest!" And this wasn't "honesty." He just was dying to ?? tear me down. Weird. Creepy. Looking back after a week, I saw a vein of desperation in this guy... once he figured out I wasn't going to fall for his scam he got a little desperate, and a lot angry, and I am totally serious when I say maybe scamming chick singers out of a few hundred bucks isn't his angle. Maybe it's a little more in the serial killer realm? Because there was some scary energy going on.
But anyway. The really sad thing about artists hating on other artists, or wannabe / frustrated artists hating on successful ones, is how common it is. I have done it, I am sad to say. At the beginning of my career I liked to be catty and critical, and a mentor I had at the time stopped me and said "Don't ever forget; there is room for everyone."
Of course he was right. And if there isn't room for everyone, then there might not be room for me. Which is, of course, where the cattiness, and the cutting-ness, and the hate are coming from. Fear that someone else is doing It better, or sooner, or louder, than I am.
Thank God for Julia Cameron, and "The Artists' Way," because she explains the haters (she calls them monsters) and she explains the drying-up of one's soul that too many monster encounters can cause. And she explains the wannabe, "shadow artist," who pretends to help or admire, but really just wants to siphon off a little bit of our light.
Never knowing that there is, in the end, always enough light for everyone.
New song, new video, coming the first week of February.
I have these droughts, blocks of time where I don't write songs. Usually goes along with feeling bad about myself, life change, or some kind of adjustment where my songwriting needs to change. They're droughts, because my songwriting garden could bloom if I watered it, and for different reasons, sometimes I don't. Moving to a different state and having a baby was an awful lot of distraction, and crawling out from the life change and the postpartum whatever took a while too.
I write best when I'm in a cycle of writing / performing, and if I'm trying to write with no hope of when people will hear a song, eh, that doesn't work so well. So, in the interest of getting myself cranked up again, I went online in search of a guitar player. Since my last guitar player / collaborator / all around Very Useful Music Guy is just about impossible to replace, I went online with much skepticism. I'm leery of guitar players anyway, because they are often very self-taught and (in my opinion) often undertrained. Add that to the smidge of misogynism so many have, and you end up with a whole lot of guitar players who I cannot use.
I got a response to my inquiry, and it was kind of in my face. The guy came on strong with his brags, and he started selling himself as a songwriter and before I knew it he had offered to sit down and give me "Music Biz 101" and I was like, ick. Then he started critiquing my songs, my band, my writing, and trying to tear me down and build himself up. Before I could shut the whole thing down, he had really gotten to me.
And that is the really sad thing. As artists, musicians, writers, whatever, we get torn down. Sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. I learned to separate the helpful ("you really like that major III, I can kinda see it coming...") or the pedagogic ("this digression into the blah blah mode isn't as successful as the rest of the piece..."). And bless the lovely people know the difference between quality - "that guy's songs suck!" - and preference - "that guy's songs are just... not my cup of tea."
But if you have made art, or music, or whatever, for long enough, you will have encountered the other comments. Not helpful, but hateful. Literally, "hate full." And you know who really dishes out the hate? Other artists. Do they not know how and when to put the knife in?
At first this internet creep really got to me, and mostly because there was no way to argue with him. I tried to just say, hey, let's live and let live, no need to be insulting, but he fired back by insisting he wasn't insulting - "just honest!" And this wasn't "honesty." He just was dying to ?? tear me down. Weird. Creepy. Looking back after a week, I saw a vein of desperation in this guy... once he figured out I wasn't going to fall for his scam he got a little desperate, and a lot angry, and I am totally serious when I say maybe scamming chick singers out of a few hundred bucks isn't his angle. Maybe it's a little more in the serial killer realm? Because there was some scary energy going on.
But anyway. The really sad thing about artists hating on other artists, or wannabe / frustrated artists hating on successful ones, is how common it is. I have done it, I am sad to say. At the beginning of my career I liked to be catty and critical, and a mentor I had at the time stopped me and said "Don't ever forget; there is room for everyone."
Of course he was right. And if there isn't room for everyone, then there might not be room for me. Which is, of course, where the cattiness, and the cutting-ness, and the hate are coming from. Fear that someone else is doing It better, or sooner, or louder, than I am.
Thank God for Julia Cameron, and "The Artists' Way," because she explains the haters (she calls them monsters) and she explains the drying-up of one's soul that too many monster encounters can cause. And she explains the wannabe, "shadow artist," who pretends to help or admire, but really just wants to siphon off a little bit of our light.
Never knowing that there is, in the end, always enough light for everyone.
New song, new video, coming the first week of February.
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