So this is my first ever blog post, hurrah! I was going to start this in the New Year but there are things that I’ve read and things that are coming up that I wanted to blog about, so I thought I would start early. I’ll soon be posting more, so my blog seems a bit bare at the moment.

So I read this blog post from the band Pomplamoose. It’s really refreshing to read. I keep coming across more and more music artists releasing information about how they are managing to keep doing what they are doing in an increasingly difficult industry. A lot of artists I have noticed have started to become self-managed and self-funded, whether that be through crowd funding or through pure faith that their fans will buy tickets to their shows, like Pomplamoose. It’s a very complicated machine which is baffling as it is frustrating and ‘the industry’ appears in my eyes like that massive wall in Game of Thrones…large, impenetrable and the potential of a massive fall.

This got me thinking about my own story. In 2006 I moved to Manchester to study music at Salford University. It was a fantastic time, I developed not only as a musician, but also as a human being. That time was a crazy bubble of creativity, so many musicians available to collaborate with regularly and not really that much responsibility (most of us didn’t have kids, a job, a house etc). Thinking back I really should have utilised the time better than I did (mainly procrastination and a love affair with Newcastle Brown Ale, Guinness and Sambuca…in that order). I digress, I did work hard…but I also partied hard and was in that fantastic world…not the ‘real’ world.

I started working as a freelance vocalist during that time, a fantastic emerging events company (at the time, they’re doing really well now) took me under their wing and I got a hell of a lot of gig experience and insight. Sure, that was a company specialising in covers, but I learnt a lot in that time, also I asked questions about how the business was run. I think in those early days it was hard for them, and they were essentially selling performances of music that was already around, let alone original music that no one has ever heard of.

I played loads of original gigs, I did the man and his guitar thing, I did the band thing, I did the lets-get-16-musicians-on-stage-and-paint-my-face-and-wear-feathers-why-not epic thing…then the bubble burst and essentially I stopped making my own music due to many factors, including the dole, relationships, other friends in the same boat, bouts of depression, people letting me down…lots of reasons, but now 4 years later I’ve started coming around to the idea of making my own music again and playing some gigs. (I’ve done loads of other fun musical projects, don’t get me wrong, just not spearheading my own personal project). Reading things like that article, seeing artists struggling, looking into how people are funding their work, also makes me think “man, that is a lot of HARD work and dedication, I’m not sure if I can do all that again, and it’s even worse now”.  Not forgetting the main question ‘what’s the point?’,  as in ‘why am I doing this?’

And yes it is all those things, but I think the rewards, those little glimmers of pure magic out-weigh the total shit times. The feeling you get on stage, the pure joy of playing in a crap bar where you think no one is listening and that one person takes the time to come and let you know that your music touched them (so to speak), the joy of doing it just because you want to. And I think that’s the key, it’s so simple… and I ignored it. The whole ‘what’s the point?’… well there doesn’t need to be one. I was always living in the future, thinking about all the obstacles and there wasn’t much point as I’ll never ‘make it’. Well I’m going to take a segment from Pomplamoose:

“ We are the mom and pop corner store version of “the dream.” If Lady Gaga is McDonald’s, we’re Betty’s Diner. And we’re open 24/7.

We have not “made it.” We’re making it. “

Do things because you can. Make art because you can. Make art because it’s what you love to do. There doesn’t have to be a point. The point is just make art for the sake of it – the rest will follow.

I think I might give it a go.