Note Pad: Legit

Legitimacy is borne only of time, influence, and God. Don't make the mistake of believing that because you are successful you are legitimate.

Milli Vanilli sold millions of records. Vincent van Gogh sold one painting.

'The Red Vineyard', the only sale of Van Gogh's life.

Get Good

This past weekend, I once again joined forces with Hillary Hand & The Roseliers for a one-of-a-kind performance.

The show was for attendees of a conference called Via Affirmativa hosted at the beautiful Glen Eyrie castle right here in Colorado Springs. As I understood things, our set was an unofficial opening to the conference weekend, which brings together artists of all different stripes - painters, musicians, photographers, sculptors, you name it - and seeks to inspire them all to be diligent in the pursuit of their artistic dreams as well as to infuse their creations with a depth of humanity, spirituality, and intellectual & emotional appeal. In short, they want to encourage artists to be good at what they do, serious about doing it, and even more serious about using their talents for the betterment of the world in which they live.

It was a very compelling evening.

First of all, we got to play in a castle.

Secondly, our performance was well-received by people who could've been particularly critical and disparaging had they chosen to be so - after all, it was a room full of artists.  Instead, they sat and listened to our music and responded to it in an overwhelmingly positive manner.

After the performance, though, Hillary was asked to take part in a brief interview in front of the audience. They asked her about her career, how the band came to be, and why she does what she does. Somewhere along the way a question was asked that I myself got a chance to answer along with her - a question regarding the current state of our culture in regard to music and why people don't seem to listen or seriously engage with it anymore. Just what, the questioner wondered, are we as musicians supposed to do to help instill the idea that music is more than background noise during a shopping trip or workout session? What can we do to get people to listen again?

An encouraging word.

This is a few months old now, but somehow it recently made it into my own sphere of consciousness:

I don't know what precipitated this little editorial from David Ackert, but I certainly appreciated it when I saw it. I further appreciated this piece by Dave Carlock, in which he references Ackert's couple of paragraphs and then responds to a commenter attempting to rain a bit on the parade. I'll share this excerpted highlight with you:

The point is that musicians push through an incredible amount of uncertainty, risk and adversity to bare their souls and give something to every community that they play in, to every person who can hear them. That makes them unique, that makes them valuable to the human race, if for no other reason than their motivation isn’t only dollars.

And then, only a few days ago, this piece from Seth Godin's cool blog:

You are brave.

Such a generous soul, someone who doesn't hesitate to leap when others shrink in fear. Your work means so much to you and to the people you share it with, we can't help but be inspired at the way you make your magic.

You're a warrior in the service of joy and you never seem to stop standing up and speaking up and doing your very best work.

Sometimes, a particular audience doesn't deserve you. But that doesn't matter in the long run, because of your relentless generosity in sharing your gift.

I can't wait to see your next work, and the one after that.

Every once in awhile it's good  to feel like somebody out there gets it - not only gets it, but understands it, supports it, encourages it, & rallies around it. In the world in which we live, "music" is usually associated in people's minds with stardom, fame, wealth, and all the other Hollywood/celebrity nonsense that goes along with them. Some of us, though, while still retaining dreams of playing Red Rocks and Wembley Arena, really do love performing music for people and would love just to make a living doing it. For some of us, it's about something other than having your picture plastered all over People magazine or getting to date supermodels.

The Landscape

So I have this friend.

We graduated high school together. She went on to marry this cat who was a few years ahead of us in school. A guy who, as it turned out, went on to become a phenomenal photographer.

I followed my friend through Facebook (like how 'ya do) as she and her photographer husband moved to New York City and started down their own road of artistic endeavor. Eventually, life led them both back here to Colorado where they set up a gallery in Denver to display & sell his astounding landscape pictures.

These two were on my mind today after a rehearsal when the subject of a blog post detailing the changing nature of the music industry came up. There was a lot of frustrated venting and analysis of just why it is that people in our culture think it perfectly acceptable to illegally download music, listen to it via a streaming service that pays the artists next-to-nothing, or just allow the standard for artistic excellence to be lowered to the insufferable degree that it has been over the past 15 or so years.

Anyway, the proprietors of the Balyeat Gallery in Denver came into the conversation because we had taken the opportunity to visit the gallery a few months ago and had been blown away by what we had seen. Now, I've taken a handful of pretty cool Instagram pictures in my time, so believe me when I tell you that the art that this guy creates is absolutely mesmerizing. Everything from the colors to the contrast to the locations to how the pictures get prepared to be displayed on the wall - something technical that I don't quite remember that basically allows for each picture to play with the light that's shone on it and "change"... astounding, to say the least - everything is top-notch. No corners have been cut. No tricks are being played. No hackery is being employed here. Just a pure love of taking photos of nature and a desire to do it for the rest of his life.

Buy This Album - 'The Joshua Tree' by U2

Let me begin by saying that I'm not sure I can say enough about this album as it pertains to my musical life. Oh, I know, U2 has been the band du jour for just about every rock musician alive for the last 15 years and whole bands & an entire genre of Christian worship music seem to exist both because of & in order to rip off this record. But, for me, it was one of two albums that served to form my dreams and start me down the path toward a life in pursuit of all that music has to offer.

And, seeing as how The Joshua Tree is, by most accounts, one of the greatest rock albums of all time, I needn't spend too much time trying to convince to you to purchase it (if you haven't already). However, I could offer up a little sentimentality to try and distract you for a few minutes and perhaps give you a tiny peek behind the curtain of my musical identity.

It wasn't just the music with this one. I mean, it was, but it was something more than that. The intangibles of what make U2 who and what they are are part of what hooked me so hard. I mean, as I mentioned before, there are some very, very popular mainstream acts selling lots of records these days who wouldn't be anything if they didn't have U2 around to mimic. But there's something to U2 and to The Joshua Tree that these other, newer bands didn't quite get. Namely, that both the record and the band were more than the sum of their parts, more than the notes on the notated music sheets, and more than the particular chords and grooves they were playing. There was an identity there that went far deeper than the way the music appears on paper.

There was the joyful expectation of Where The Streets Have No Name immediately followed by the restless wonder of I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. There was the heartbroken passion of With Or Without You immediately followed by the rage of Bullet The Blue Sky. There was the depth of empathy in Running To Stand Still and Mothers of the Disappeared. And, for whatever reason, all this (and more) is what I needed to find in order to fall deeply and madly in love with the idea of being a musician.