It’s no secret that my journey with music has been marred with naivete and idealism when it comes to money and distribution, but even putting that mindset behind me, it is evident and obvious to me that the world is in a strange place when it comes to the perception of music and musicians.
Pretty much everyone alive today is familiar with engaging with music in an album format (even if they prefer playlists/singles they still understand what an album is and does, right?). I am very much attached to the idea of what an album provides in terms of coherency and the subtle effect of having a particular song start after another, changing the context of how it is received. It’s only recently though I’ve really thought about how, despite these positive side-effects that the album format allows for in terms of creativity and delivery, the album format was formulated in the effort to package music in a way that could be sold. As someone who believes in music as a communal activity, thinking about this brings me to realize that packaging songs has never been essential to sharing music with others.
For me personally, I find that my interest in making albums has pulled me away from a bigger picture of what I should be doing with music. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe that an album is an effective way to add power to music and to deliver it. But for anything other than making money, I believe it must strictly be only a supplement, rather than the goal of the musical pursuit.
I believe that all people should engage in music and all people should find themselves worthy of calling themselves “musical”. Too many people today believe they can’t sing or shouldn’t play to others until they work up to a certain standard. I think there are two reasons for this. The first is that by turning music into industry, it has created a competitive arena. It’s certainly true that you should be looking to make no mistakes when playing a paid gig in a bar or other such venue, but if you’re getting loud around the campfire or in your own house it’s a totally different story. Which leads me to the second reason, which I do actually think is a lot stronger, that we are so inundated with other things to do and be interested in that people don’t experience a slowness in their life that gives them the chance to stop and think “I might just hum to myself for a bit while I enjoy this nice breeze!”
My goal is not about sharing my music that I’ve written, or my ability to perform and play, but rather using those two things as a vessel to share the joy and healing of playing music; to demonstrate the universal connection and understanding we all share when we hear melody, harmony and rhythm. I want to encourage people to interact more with making those melodies, harmonies and rhythms themselves as I believe it is intrinsically something we are all past the skill-floor of even before we start training with an instrument or any music theory.
I don’t know absolutely for sure, but from what I’ve read and studied, music playing in the household has been more common in the past – despite this, it is more accessible than ever to make some extremely pretty sounds with synthesizers and what have you. In Classical music history, there was a need for high level of precision as you needed dozens of violin players in unison to achieve volume to match the timpani’s, but now we have amplifiers and microphones. Of course there is still value in highly organized musicians coming together to perform. Never let such a pursuit deteriorate your ability to interact with lesser experienced persons trying to co-ordinate sounds with you. Unlike sports and games where the more skilled I get, the less enjoyable it is to participate with lesser-skilled players, I find that music never has to succumb to this.
Since the expression, manifestation and demonstration of the ideas I’ve touched on in this article are primary to what I want to achieve with the extra-curricular instrumental skill and musical understanding I have developed, it is clear to me that performance and in-the-flesh engagement are going to be the best tools for me. What I can do through recording and releasing coherent packages of music – albums – is show a degree of consistency and hopefully dissipate the veil of mystery around music for people. I want to show people they don’t have to be struck by a divine inspiration or get lucky to make the music sound good; as much as we glorify some songs, as much as some songs stand out to us, the beauty of music is so incredibly prevalent that creating passages of notes that feel great is in reach of anyone alive today, right now! Yes, in order to make these albums easily and quickly I will need to be mechanically precise, and practice a lot, and I will need to understand how the notes interact with each other so that the notes I choose will be relateable and parseable by the listener, but those are skills I only need to wield so that I can use albums as a tool and so that my performances are consistent. But I hope for the opportunity to demonstrate that this will allow me to interact with others who haven’t put in such practice, and still we will be able to harmonize and connect through playing music together. I don’t discourage anyone from practicing such things, but I do encourage them to interact musically with others even if they haven’t. To not fear the unknown, and to not fear making a sound! Especially with the voice, people are capable of learning how to control and hit the right notes on their own, naturally through repeated attempts. If you ask me, even these attempts have a musical value in their raw sound.
I’d like to begin this last paragraph with some disclosure, to say, look, I do find value in sites like Bandcamp and regard them primarily as file sharing websites. Anyone who has played music from there as well as this website can immediately see that their servers are superior. I consider that when we use distributors like that, what is being paid for is more to do with the digital convenience and the digital tools of distribution rather than the music itself. Similarly with performance, the time commitment and travel of the musicians has to be compensated. I don’t truly have a problem with people hustling and trying to capitalize on profits in the music industry, I simply dislike any compound effects this has on making the general public less musical themselves, and glorifying musical performance as some kind of high art rather than an intrinsic human value. Since my goals include spreading a message that is counter to this, I find I have to be rather careful in my decision making.
I hope you’ll look out for more and more releases coming out from me, and if you’re in Australia I hope to be able to announce shows on this page in the near future. As early as next year maybe! Hopefully I can do that frequently. Thank you, and let’s all keep appreciating more of the world!