What's The Value In Being A "Creative Type?"

In this brief essay I speak about being a musician. But before you click away, thinking, 'I'm not a musician,' I assure you that the ideas I'm proffering here are applicable to just about anyone who's attempting to draw outside the lines of what's expected.

I’ve got a friend who is perhaps, one of the finest keyboard players on the east coast. Though he doesn’t talk about it much, he’s also one the best drummers I’ve ever heard. He and I were on Skype one day not long ago. He was messing around in his studio, and just for fun, I asked him to hop on the drums that were set up in the corner of his room. He propped up his iPad on a music stand so I could see him better. “Play a funk beat,” I said. And he did. He killed it. “Play some uptempo swing,” I said. And he tore into a groove that would make most jazz drummers look like children. “Play a rock beat,” “do a wild fill in 6/8,” “play a super fast ska beat...” I couldn’t keep from laughing as I watched his casual brilliance on the little screen of my iPhone.

What I was seeing and hearing was nigh on unbelievable. His playing made me feel the same way I did when I saw one of Prince’s first concerts in North Minneapolis in 1980. Just like Prince, my pal was merciless on that drum kit; profoundly skilled. And lest you forget, drums are my friend's second instrument; piano’s his main thing.

But here’s the difficult part. A few years back my friend had been complaining to me about how hard it is being a musician; how hard it is to make a living, how hard it is to hold a family together from the road, and how hard it is to explain to anyone who isn't a professional player what it feels like to do anything resembling what he does.

He told me about some of his friends; investment bankers. They make so much money that my friend sometimes feels small next to them. He admitted that he sometimes feels like less of an adult, perhaps even less of a man than those bankers. There have been times in my own career where I’ve felt the same thing. If you’re a player, you know that's just how it goes sometimes.

My friend was having a hell of a hard go making ends meet around that time. He'd been wondering if he’d made the right choice in becoming a full-time musician. It’s a weird way to make a living after all —blowing and beating and strumming and pounding and plucking on things to make sounds. That’s basically what being a musician comes down to; you’re a sort of tinkerer. A tinkerer who shapes sound waves instead of tin. A ‘soundwave-shaper.’

What does it mean in the scheme of things, to be a soundwave-shaper? I guess it depends on how and why you shape the sounds. The ones who do it well, the ones who do it for the love of the sounds they make are like modern day sages. They are mystics who make emotional beauty out of invisible waves. They can make you laugh and cry, they can make you dance and shout; make you get up off your feet and shake your ass like you’ve become a child all over again.

A profoundly skilled musician (or any artist for that matter) might not make the same kind of money as an investment banker, but what is the ability to make beauty worth? What would you give to get up on a bandstand and blow a trumpet or a saxophone with such skill that it makes the grown man sitting alone in the back of the club feel a tender love they probably haven't felt since earliest childhood? What is it worth to be able to sit down at a piano and bring the woman in the front row to tears with just your fingertips? How do you estimate the value of being able to pick up a guitar and sing a song with such finesse that an entire room rises up out of their seats to be transported, if only for a moment, to a place where they feel the presence of God? I can tell you firsthand, just like I told my friend. The value is inestimable.

I say this to my brothers and sisters who have elected to become music-makers; soundwave-shapers, who have given their time, their sweat, and their waking and dreaming hours over to this strange and hallowed profession: The world would be a mighty desolate place without you in it.

We’ve got all sorts of people walking around looking for answers, looking to be moved, looking to feel something beyond the normal work-a-day rhythms of life. People who are looking for a sense that they, that we, are part of a endless and integrated system, part of a ceaseless history that moves through time as if on the crest of a colossal wave.

Most musicians aren’t making much money plying their trade these days. But not one of us ever set out with the goal of making money. If we had, we’d have become investment bankers. God knows I’ve got no quarrel with bankers, I want them to be enormously successful —especially when they’re investing my hard earned money! But as they are judged by the size of their returns, we musicians are judged on the ways, and the depths to which we move our listeners.

To my friend, the piano player, and to all musicians, and singers —and every other "creative type," who sometimes feel overlooked and undervalued in the shadow of a music business that has been so dramatically disrupted, take solace in the knowledge that our success cannot be gauged by quantitative measurements, as other things can. Our worth is of a totally different order.

The assessments appropriate to us are the same as with any strong leader of integrity and deep convictions. As I see them, they are these: How have you elevated people? How have you strengthened them and given them renewed hope? With what intensity have you made them know that life has purpose, and that our existence here on this planet is nothing short of a miracle?

“If music be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it...”— William Shakespeare

If you're so inclined, please shed a little light on the Kickstarter Campaign for our new recording: 'Press On." It consists of 13 brand new songs inspired by these singular times.