So, having emerged from the comfortable womb of academia this fall (by
my own volition), I have been working a job lately--a plain ol' regular
job, for the first time in years. It's not a bad job; in fact, there
are things I really like about it. But I'm not playing any music at the
moment (again, by my own volition) and it's gotten me thinking about
what it means to "be" something like a musician.
When people ask me what I do, that's my answer. I'm a musician. But
what if it's not really something I am *doing,* at least at the moment?
What actually makes me remain a musician, in that case? It's a strange
question, lingering--it seems to me--in the grey area between doing and
being. When I am not doing music, am I still being a musician? Where
does action end and identity begin?
This pondering led me to the conclusion that, for me at least, being a
musician requires one key thing: a listening audience. That might make
me sound narcissistic, but I don't mean that I need people fawning over
me or whatever. Rather, it's a bit like the old
tree-falling-in-the-forest adage. I need someone to listen in order for
me to feel like I am *being* a musician, in the present tense. For it
to feel like an active vocation, and not just some static trait of
mine, like the fact that I have brown eyes, or that I'm right-handed.
Whether that audience is at a live show or listening to a CD or MP3, it
doesn't really matter (although there is much more energy to be derived
from the former than the latter). I just need that sense of
communicating outward, toward someone else. Maybe there are others for
whom this isn't the case. Maybe some people could play their songs in
their bedrooms only for their whole lives, and be a hundred times the
musician I am. But I think I've discovered that that just doesn't work
for me.
And the reason why is simple: I stop playing. Without the energy of the
communication, my musicality atrophies. It happened about five years
ago, when I started grad school and moved away from my musical family
for the first time. My guitar literally gathered dust for about three
years. Then, gradually, I dusted it off and started playing with some
friends here in London (thank you Alex, Jason, Johnny and others...). I
actually had to re-learn one of my own songs from an MP3 I sent to a
friend after I wrote it, because I had totally forgotten it. (That song
was "Late," the opening track on my record.) And then, once I started
performing, the floodgates opened. All the songs started coming and a
record got made and everything else.
So I'm a bit hesitant about this hiatus I'm taking. It's nothing to be
blown out of proportion, of course--it hasn't been THAT long since my
last gig--but I just don't want to see that dust on my guitar ever
again. I don't want to fall into a depression, as I did in that
three-year dry spell. I don't want to stop *being*--in the active,
continuous sense--a musician. I'm trying to keep up a little activity
and keep moving forward, towards getting the next record happening. But
it's not easy. Very little money means that promotion is hard and
studio time is not possible; working all the time means that I'm tired
and have pretty much no time to do shows or write. I didn't get the
grant, but I'm going to try again. That's my most realistic hope at
this point.
Not to turn this into a political rant, but next time you hear a
politician talk about cutting funding to the arts, remember this. It
means that people like me can't do what we do, because we're too busy
doing what we have to do in order to eat and pay rent. Record companies
don't come knocking with bags of money anymore (if they ever did). We
all just have to kick and scratch our ways through, gigging and
applying for grants, until maybe, just maybe, things will take off.
Leslie Feist was a working musician on the rough-and-tumble Toronto
scene for years and years before the iPod commercial and the sold-out
stadium shows. This is what I try to remember, while I do what I have
to do in order to stay afloat, to stay true to what I am, and what I do.
Thank you all for listening.
Love,
Kaya
