SpiralTruth

I’ve always been rather serious about art. It’s more about obsession than fun and it often carries the burden and the zeal of a religion. There’s this notion that all the mistakes I’ve ever made, anything I might consider foolish or shameful, is somehow made right by creating something that transcends myself – something that somehow taps into the universal and eternal. I love the way art can turn ugliness into beauty and bring order to what can seem so cruel and random. The flip side of this is a constant dissatisfaction with whatever I create and a feeling of almost frantic discomfort when I don’t feel I’ve created enough.

How much is enough? I don’t know. I’ve written and recorded over sixty songs, finished a novel, designed the websites I use to promote all of this and… that just doesn’t seem like much after having done it. What I do think a lot about is whether I’ll write another song or book and whether they’ll be any good. Or about how I haven’t worked hard enough to market what I have created. Marketing has always seemed like a dark art to me. I’d rather not have to understand it but I know how important it is. Especially now. We’re at this amazing period in human history where everyone has a voice. Never before has the ability to have your ideas reach millions of people been so democratized. The problem now, of course, is how to be heard over the chatter. And anyone looking to do that also has to ask themselves whether or not they deserve to be heard.

There’s a lot of crap out there, and I guess there always has been. But when it was more difficult to publish your ideas, when you simply couldn’t take the DIY approach, the job of an artist somehow seemed a lot less ambiguous. Convince that one publisher or get on that label – and your desire to be heard above the crowd was given a huge sense of legitimacy. You can still go those routes, but as we see publishers struggle and the record industry flounder, realizing how many gambles these organizations take and how much of artistic success has been tied to the fact that they once had much more control over the media channels – that sense of legitimacy isn’t so strong.

So it’s the best of times and the worst of times to be an artist. You’re able to do a lot more yourself. But you’re also expected to do a lot more yourself. And no matter what you’re going to do, someone’s going to mock it, either directly or indirectly, by mocking the ideals that led you to create what you created. And they’ll probably get more YouTube hits too.