While you’re playing each song it’s not a bad idea to think ‘this is the song I came here to play tonight’.
It’ll help put your full weight into it.
You travelled all that way, sacrificed a lot of other things to be on the stage…why not (at least) act like and think like every song is your sole purpose for being there?
As the artist it’s normal to think you’re interacting with the whole room. You and a hundred people. Or you and five thousand people, or ten thousand.
But remember, to everyone in the audience it’s one on one.
Each person is only really concerned with the artist and themselves.
So while you might think you’re having a conversation with a few thousand people, you’re really having a few thousand conversations.
Coming along at a time when there was the perfect amount of technology, shared culture, and opportunity to cause a global shift.
And out of that, a bunch of years later, The Beatles records found their way to a middle school kid growing up in Minnesota. The feeling I had listening to Hey Jude for the first time…the chord changes, the bgvs, the outro and everything else…it opened my eyes to what music could be and what it could do.
Cut to last night…I’ve been in Nashville for twenty years, played in bands, played all the gigs, written tons of songs…and then Paul shows up playing a 4000cap room five miles from where I live. This is a miracle.
That guy with those songs with that voice and all the history. The guy who sang to me on my Sanyo boombox in Motley, Minnesota is now twenty feet in front of me singing Hey Jude.
The poetry and beauty rolled up in all that is staggering to me.
It’s completing a loop…and then also a feast of new thoughts about creativity, fame, longevity, skill, luck, talent, connection and redemption.
And I don’t think I’m over selling it.
»» If you can find a way to go see him…save up your money, sell your shoe collection, drive Uber for a few weeks. Do it.
In between stimulus and response (or reaction) is belief.
Often we get distracted and overwhelmed by too many stimuli, which causes us to respond faster and faster in order to feel like we’re keeping up.
But belief is the filter it all goes through. The often forgotten filter. The ever important filter. The filter worth spending time focusing on. Even at the expense of some stimuli or responses.
At least not based on effort alone.
Why do some artists put in an exceptionally high level of effort but still not achieve the success they’re hoping planning for? And why do artists who seemingly put in a lot less effort sometimes achieve the highest heights?
Because effort doesn’t equal connection.
Success as an artist has more to do with connection than effort.
And there’s an emotional element to connection that effort alone can never replicate or sidestep…emotional connection is mysterious. As much as we want to bottle it up, it can’t be. It’s not transferrable and can’t be duplicated.
It’s both the most heartbreaking and inspiring thing about being a professional artist.