where the literal & metaphorical voices intersect
I had the fortune to collaborate with IndianRaga's intercity labs held in Chicago in September 2016. The final audio recording and video shoot was preceded by almost three to four months of rehearsal sessions over the web and was followed by several iterations of editing and post production work. Finally, it is here.
Here are a couple of pictures taken during the final shoot and during the rehearsals.
This incident happened a few months ago. One day as I was looking at my YouTube and SoundCloud accounts, I had a sudden realization that I am losing my interest in singing cover songs and songs that don't say any story. I felt like a factory worker on the assembly line producing like items on my music page, where every song of mine said the same thing about me - I am a good singer.
As much as I felt grateful for this fact, I also felt the need to move out of my comfort zone and realign with the safety zone. That means I need to be in the ‘student of music’ mode, always pushing my boundaries, making mistakes, often failing, learning from them, and repeating the whole process again and again.
“The power of being a student is not just that it is an extended period of instruction, it also places the ego and ambition in someone else’s hands. There is a sort of ego ceiling imposed - one knows that he is not better than the “master” he apprentices under.”
If I wanted to be in the game, I just could not afford to be complacent about this fact - I am an above average singer and I am going to remain one. I needed to keep learning even if that questioned my competency level.
I was thinking of what should I do next when I heard this excerpt in the audiobook version of The Icarus Deception.
What should I do next?
The answers don’t matter. At all.
You need the experience of repeated failure.
You need the good taste to see your work for what it is, and you earn that taste not only not by emulating those who made art before you but by failing, by repeatedly discovering what works and what doesn’t.
I figured that one way to see things differently would be to educate myself on music rather than just performing. I enrolled myself in a Western Classical Piano lessons a few months ago. I am seeing Indian music through the lens of an instrumentalist now, in addition to that of a vocalist's, and it’s refreshing.
At the end of the day, the point is to keep playing and be in the game rather than bothering on the outcomes. I choose the privilege of playing the music game as long as I can.
I have been following blogs that strongly advocate disabling comments section as comments provide little value to the blogger most of the time. I never quite understood the logic behind that at first. But, when I tried it on my blog and my YouTube channel for the last couple of months I could finally, relate to what they were all talking about.
Comments from the public can hinder artists from creating their body of work. The effect of ‘popular’ feedback is only short-lived.
The feedback that comes from popularity becomes an addiction. How does the popular one stay popular? The cycle of short-term pleasing. Instead of standing up for things he believes in, he calculates what the audience wants to hear right now.
If your work is filled with the hope and longing for applause, it’s no longer your work - the dependence on approval has corrupted it, turned it into a process in which you are striving for ever more approval.
If we’re in love with the feedback and trying to manipulate the applause we get, we’ll cease to make the art we’re capable of.
Instead, here’s what we must seek out.
Ask individuals for bold feedback; ignore what you hear from the crowd.
Show commitment. Consciously set long-term goals that are difficult to attain and do not waver from these challenging goals, regardless of the presence of feedback. If you’ve sacrificed your long-term compass at the altar of instant feedback, you might enjoy some short-term achievement, but you’ve given up your grit.
Only a self-negating artist reads his Amazon reviews and the Twitter feedback on his work. He will learn nothing and will amplify his lizard brain’s certainty of his worthlessness.
Seth Godin, who writes the number one marketing blog in the world, emphasizes the importance of daily blogging in almost every single interview of his. He says that it’s probably one of the biggest career decisions that have made him into the person that he is today. In fact, he wrote so many books so that people will get to know him to read his blog daily. Such is his evangelism for daily blogging.
Many of Seth's talks, interviews, and books, contain ideas that are repetitive.
Through repetition and redundancy we are able to train our mind to think that whatever we are studying is important and that must be the reason why Seth Godin has said one thing so many times so that the reader must think that this must be important enough to be repeated so it’s must be important enough to pay attention so I must pay attention.
In one of his talks, he mentions about the metacognition element in blogging.
Thinking about Thinking (Metacognition): Being aware of own thoughts, feelings, intentions, and actions; Knowing what I do and say affects others; Willing to consider the impact of choices on myself and others.
Watch this video to get inspired to start blogging daily. And, the best part is it's free.
Blogging is free. It doesn’t matter if anyone reads it. What matters is the humility that comes from writing it. What matters is the metacognition of thinking about what you are going today. How do you explain yourself to whoever is going to look at your blog, how do you force yourself to explain yourself in three paragraphs why you did something, how do you respond out loud. If you’re good at it, some people are going to read it. If you are not good at it and you stick with it, you will get good at it. You force yourself to become part of the conversation even if it’s just that big and that posture change changes an enormous amount. - Seth Godin
“No single thing in the last 15 years professionally has been more important to my life than blogging. It has changed my life, it has changed my perspective, it has changed my intellectual outlook, it has changed my emotional outlook, it’s the best damn marketing tool in order of magnitude I’ve ever had, and it’s free.” - Tom Peters
Simon Sinek, in one of his interviews, mentions that people no longer listen to politics. Instead, they watch politics. This relatively new change in behavior changes the way people perceive and understand politics and politicians. This interview was a wake-up call to me as I pondered about what it means in the world of music. Who are the people who listen to music and who are the ones who watch music (videos)? What does it mean to me as a musician regarding how my audience perceive and understand me?
As I was thinking about this, I stumbled upon another great podcast episode of the Tim Ferris’ show where the guest was Seth Godin. Seth proposes that you cannot win by being everywhere. We must have the courage to choose one medium where people can find us and lead a tribe. ‘You can win by being everywhere’ is a trap that steals away our content from us and takes away all our potential and creative energy. It is also, a way to hide since it’s easier to defend our failures on a scale of infinity. Small is scary since it becomes more noticeable when we fail. And, that’s exactly why we must embrace doing something on a small scale because it will help us grow.
This theory made sense to me, and I decided to make a few changes in my music and writing life. I have been taking a break from all my social media accounts, except my blog, YouTube, and SoundCloud accounts where I post my music and articles. I had to introduce this creative constraint to be more focused on deep, meaningful work.
It’s better to be a meaningful specific than to be a wandering generality. - Zig Ziglar
