In my artistic life – a life that I wish wasn’t so separate from my daily life – I’m in a pretty crazy world.
By a very real and tangible metric, I’ve successfully put out roughly a dozen albums. Each one has successfully surpassed reach and influence of the previous. I’ve had music on indie charts. I’ve made music videos. My current band has successfully sold out copies of first vinyl release. I’ve successfully toured internationally as a performing and recording artist. I’ve sold out shows in this country and in Mexico. And I’ve successfully learned new lessons from each experience.
By another very real and tangible metric, I’ve never sold enough albums or had enough steams to make myself eligible for a Juno or a Grammy… meaning that every album I’ve released has sold poorly, failing to meet the criteria for those awards. I’ve never had a hit song. The album we sold out of had very low production numbers, so was a low target. Technically, our international touring adventure earlier this year lost money.
Every musical success I’ve had could be called a failure in the same breath.
There’s an interesting phenomenon that happens with hit songs. If you have a song perform well – say, #15 on a billboard chart, and the next one does even better – let’s say #12 on the billboard chart, things are; by definition, going very well for you. However, if you have a song go to #1, and the next song doesn’t crack the top 10, you get labelled as a has-been pretty quickly.
In a similar way, a restaurant owner I’ve known once said that he wouldn’t want to be the #1 restaurant in town (according to a local publication) because getting bumped from the top spot – which WILL happen – makes for declining value. He was content with consistently being (and his restaurant was) #2 or #3 for years.
Local musicians often suffer from what’s been referred to as hometown prophet syndrome. This is a situation where you have a difficult time drawing a crowd to a performance in your home town because the perception is that people can see you anytime, so what you’re doing isn’t special. But, to perform a few towns over can be a guaranteed barn-burner of a show, mainly due to the fact that a great performer can show up and blow minds and get a reaction like “where did these guys even come from?” which is a stark contrast to the hometown music scene who’s been watching that performer get on stage and just suck, while gradually grinding it out and honing their craft to near perfection without anyone really taking notice.
My band an I are embarking on a new recording adventure. We’re going back to the drawing board with a few things, and revising our approach to recording while working up a new batch of songs for what will no doubt be an album that we will release. In that way, it will be a success. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again.
How that album will perform, we sincerely hope, will be better than any of our previous efforts. The challenge will be to go back through every misstep we’ve taken and improve upon every bad idea we’ve ever followed through on, and amplify the good ideas we’ve barely scratched the surface of.
Addressing the shortcomings of the past is hard, but it’s how growth is achieved and it’s as painful as it is necessary.
I can’t wait to learn how to improve this.
After 30 years, I am still improving.
The Conscious Pilgrim 