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Last fall I went to see a lecture by the artist Ryan Pierce at Portland State University. He paints landscapes depicting a post-industrial society after some unnamed breakdown or catastrophe. The paintings are not grotesque or disturbing. They're serene. They are usually just quiet depictions of some obsolete technology which nature has overrun. In his lecture he said something that was initially disturbing and then quite comforting:
"Your priority in life shouldn't be to work hard and save money, because at some point all money will lose its value."
Which is a pretty shocking concept to hear someone express. It goes against everything you were ever taught by your parents and your teachers. What he is saying is that if you use your time to learn skills and build up your character you are better preparing yourself for the future than if you just acquire material assets. Money only has value because certain men in a room say that it has value. There's nothing inherently valuable about the pieces of paper with green ink that we carry around with us, or even the numbers in our online bank account. Someday someone could inform you that everything you have is worth half of what it was yesterday, which is not such a far-off idea since that exact thing has already happened in places such as Brazil, Venezuela, and Russia, and it happened in certain ways in this country just recently. One day your house was worth $400,000 and the next it was worth $200,000, and yet it was still a house and it still had a roof and it still kept you safe and warm.
In other words, put your focus on assets that have a value that can never be taken away. If you learn how to chop down a tree, or skin an animal, or build a house, there's not anything any person in power can do to take that skill away from you. He can't walk up to you one day and say, "Actually, sorry, you DON'T know how to chop down a tree."
Or you could write a song. Whether that has value is still hard to determine, but at least it's not decided by fluctuating markets or a group of men in a room somewhere, though we are certainly led to believe that music is subject to such forces.
Canadian singer Veda Hille has a song called "A Peculiar Value." She wrote it when she was about to sign a record deal in New York City and there was a clause in the contract that said her talents were specific and non-transferable because her music had a "peculiar value."
The song goes like this:
"It's a fight to be good, a good fighter
you asked for ecstatic, you got it
you gotta admit, a peculiar value
so peculiar it's practically invisible
invaluable"
Some people think of playing music and touring as a vacation. I'm not going to tell you that it's harder than an office job or a construction job, but it does have a certain way of tearing you down. All the while there is a struggle to determine if what you spend all your time on and that is so valuable to you has any value at all to anyone else. The lines from that song express that helpless feeling a performer gets when they wonder at their worth, not just in monetary terms, but in other more lasting ways. The value is something, but it's also at times completely invisible.
If you're a writer of music, then music lives mostly in your head. It means so much to the creator of it. You pour every emotion into it, spend all your free time practicing and preparing and then you play for an indifferent crowd in Columbus and you walk off the stage and go to pee in one of those metal urinal troughs that makes you feel like some animal. And some dude comes in and says, "Hey man, sounded good." And you say, "Thank you," as you zip up your pants and think, "Is that what I'm doing this for? So that it sounds good? I'm trying to affect people's lives here, not just produce sound waves that are acceptable."
I decided to become a musician for life the day I discovered an abalone cross in a well at the San Juan Bautista Mission in California. It was 1995 and I was taking an archaeology class in my freshman (and as it turned out, only) year of college. I went to college not knowing what I wanted to do with my life and as soon as I got there I realized that I wanted to write songs and that I was in the wrong place for that. I used to go up to visit my friend in San Francisco on the weekends, and as I walked up the hill to her apartment in the lower Haight, there was a church behind her building and all you could see was this glowing white cross above. I was thinking about whether to leave college and move to San Francisco as I dug in that shallow well at the Old Mission. This was the first ever archaeological dig at this site, and no one had yet found any artifacts. I struck my pick into the soft dirt and this white abalone cross jumped out. I picked it up and held it in my hand. I was alone there in the well. I could have put it in my pocket and walked away, but of course I didn't. I climbed out of the well and showed it to the teacher and everyone celebrated and the Padre shook my hand. And then I walked across the street to a pay phone and called my friend to tell her I was going to drop out of school and move to San Francisco.
That led to open mic nights at a coffee shop on Haight and Ashbury, and later an inexorable slide through Greyhound buses to New York City, the streets of New Orleans and folk festivals in Texas, ultimately leading to me living in Portland and sticking around long enough to meet wonderful musicians and be a part of a community.
But a large part of the existence of being a musician is looking ahead. It's a business where you always have to know what you're going to be doing three months from now. And there is always that hypnotic prospect of your fame growing exponentially and your situation quickly improving. There is always some reason for hope, like the new song you just wrote, the new album that could take off if it gets the right push or the next tour that will be better than the last one. When you're young it's okay to live in the future and ignore that you're overdrawing your bank account and not brushing your teeth enough. But at a certain point you need to look at the present realities of your life and figure out if they are serving you.
Dorothy walked down a sparkling yellow brick road, and everyone she met kept telling her that all her problems would be fixed once she got to the end. And then she met people along the way and she told them if they joined her they would all get their problems taken care of if they just kept going down that road. So many musicians are on that road, thinking that once they get around the bend everything will be better. At a certain point you have to just step off the road, assume that no magical creature is going to appear and fix all your problems, and decide whether your present situation is good enough or not.
But let me tell you, that is one crowded road. Everyone is on it. It's not easy to see how exactly you exit it and keep your dignity and creativity with you. But you have to get off that road now because you can't start acquiring things that have real value unless you at least realize that it's quite likely that you have been misled about what is out there waiting for you.
WWeek 2015