(~11 minutes reading time)
As I approached age 50—now several years ago—I decided I was no longer a professional musician. During my late thirties and early forties, I’d made some things happen. I’d produced concerts and concert series, created combined music/art events, and self-produced two CDs, the first one a set of jazz-pop originals and a few covers entitled MEMOIR, the second an ambitious reinvention of Pink Floyd’s THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, in collaboration with a coproducer and fifty musicians from the local rock, folk, jazz, gospel, and classical scenes. Over time, a few more people in town got to know me; a few more people out in the world got to know me. I’d even turned a profit on some projects, but it wasn’t what you’d call a living.
But I’d come to a place of deep burnout and disorientation. I had lost touch with the joy. For a while, I could barely tolerate even listening to music in any form. I stopped going out to hear concerts or listening to CDs, and the only thing I played on piano, several times a day, was Brahms Intermezzo in A (Op. 118 # 2). In 2014 I stopped gigging for a while, waiting until I could recoup strength and inspiration. I was still a musician in some core sense, but my professional ambitions had gone to ground.
The kid was getting older. College was in the offing. I looked for good-paying jobs. That ruled out obvious moves like arts administration or nonprofit management. I became a skilled bookkeeper and seriously considered doing what it might take to become a CPA. Then founded a production company to make TV commercials with a partner. It went very well for a while, until the partner admitted he was personally bankrupt despite the kingly sum we were paying him, and had not paid his taxes in many years. After that came stress, chaos, arguing, and dissolution—as bad as any divorce. really.
I was my own opposite, I was a walking contronym, self-contradiction embodied, a part yet apart, cleaving to and cleaving from. I craved an audience; I vanted to be left alone. I felt my family so close to me, my beloved husband, my adored son, as if we are all one body, and then I’d reach out a little further and feel the unbridgeable gaps between us. Like the charged particles in an atom buzzing around its center, we are bound together with vast empty spaces between. I thought that if anything were to split us, there’d be a powerful explosion.
More than ten years earlier, I had heard music and felt it calling me forward into my life. Inside the melodies and harmonies and rhythms, I thought I would find value and identity. And also a purpose, a mission, a job.
But this was a kind of trap: it still meant I’d forever be looking for some external measure of my worth. The process had left me empty and now it was clear how dangerous it had been to depend on the fickle audience or the entertainment business or even my fellow musicians to tell me who I was.
The paradox seemed irreducible, though. We all need each other, we need reflection, acknowledgment, affirmation, amen. We need mirrors out there in the world in order to see ourselves. But I did not want to be my mother’s daughter, turning this way and that with the song on my breath, forever looking around to see who was looking at me; I did not want to be my father’s daughter, hopelessly pegged to shiny status objects and endlessly asking, Was that fun? Was that fun? It was fun, wasn’t it?
A handful of steakhouse gigs in 2013 were my incognito swan song. The place had a working grand piano and PA system. I could walk there from my house. I was under no obligation to promote gigs because the place had its own clientele of tourists and locals. This, for once, seemed a fair trade for a hundred bucks and a steak dinner.
The guitarist friend who invited me on his gig, Michael Harris, was on the verge of doing well with a “hot club” jazz outfit he led, but since music was his only source of income, he was not above the occasional cover-song job, especially one so easy. Bottom line: we assumed we were there as background music. No one really cared what we sounded like as long as we didn’t sound offensively bad.
It was what we all called paid practice.
We both wrangled our old wedding-band charts and pop songs to fill a couple sets. At our first date a perky blonde young assistant manager bounced up to us and said Corporate would like to make sure all happy hour music is really upbeat, really fun, really just good-time party songs, okay?
Michael and I snickered behind her back but fell in line with the request as best we could. We were the hired help. The human jukebox. That’s all. I sang “Sunny.” Michael sang “Wagon Wheel” while I dropped in some harmonies. I sang Natalie Merchant’s “Carnival.” Michael sang Michael Franti’s “The Sound of Sunshine.” Neither of us played our original music.
No one was listening except for an elegantly dressed, elderly black couple who’d parked themselves at a high-top close to the piano. They smiled and clapped after every song. The woman tiptoed adorably over toward us between songs.
This is where I allowed myself—with my mind as well-furnished with stereotypes as anybody’s—to make an assumption. I thought for sure she’d request a jazz standard, maybe “All the Things You Are,” “Misty,” or “My Funny Valentine.” A hit from what I imagined was her era.
She leaned forward almost apologetically and asked, Do you guys know “Dust in the Wind”?
I laughed and said we’d try it. I pulled up the chords and lyrics on my cellphone and placed it on the piano’s music stand. Michael, a man well over six feet tall, had to lean in to see it, but within minutes he’d memorized the chord changes. Somehow I remembered most of the lyrics and didn’t have to stare at my phone too hard.
Afterward, our two adoring fans were ebullient with thanks. Later the gentlemen came by and asked us for America’s “Horse With No Name,” and again we consulted the Internet and obliged with an on-the-spot arrangement. They were just about the only people who put some money in our tip jar that night. Twenty bucks. We spent it on a couple of Moscow Mules.
I will remember that sweet couple for the rest of my life. I still see them clearly in my memory, as if they were old friends.
Speaking of friends, I’d gone to see two of them in their Americana-rock band at Rams Head Onstage in Annapolis. After an inspiring show, I spoke to their lead guitarist backstage—a badass who’d played his instrument brilliantly, as always. Onstage he had seemed his usual unflappable, confident self. Now he buttonholed me to ask, whispering, How did it sound? I assumed he was asking me a technical professional question about the house audio system, so I started answering along those lines.
No, he said, I mean, how did it SOUND? His eyes grew wide with doubt.
Suddenly I understood. He wanted to know if he had played his instrument well enough.
You sounded great, man! Like you always do!
I wanted to add, Don’t you already know how great you are?
I wondered why a person of such obvious accomplishment would need my reassurance. I wanted to take him by the shoulders firmly and say, Stop asking that kind of question!
In that moment, I understood that this deep self-doubt had everything to do with the stage itself. Putting yourself out there again and again to seek applause was the fundamental problem. If we were smarter, we would have stopped doing this at some point.
But we don’t stop. We compulsively keep going. Or we keep going because it’s our livelihood and therefore we must keep going. Or we keep going because we say we love it even if the truth is we are just scared of not doing it. We ask the question Am I good enough? every single time we step onto that stage, imagining that if we stay out there front and center under the spotlight, if we keep angling for applause, keep performing for strangers who could not care less about us or our self-esteem….well then, somehow the question will be answered.
Of course, this is backward. The day you stop asking for other people’s opinions is the day you’ll know you’re good enough.
I had wanted it so badly and now, for the moment, I hated it. Absolutely hated being a professional musician. Hated me in the job, the way it highlighted my vanity, insecurity, petty competition, self-absorption, childishness, neediness. I hated how—despite my rational understanding that doing what you loved did not mean the money would follow—I had come to confuse music-business success or failure with music itself, had lost touch with what had brought me to it in the first place, the deep and mysterious call from within to say something true and beautiful, capital T, B.
It was a stupid American category error, this notion that the only things or people of value were the things or people that commanded a premium price in cold hard dollars. Thereby including meaningless algorithm-induced stock trades and buggy yet addictive iPhone game apps, while excluding non-solvent artists along with kindergarten teachers, social workers, janitors, out-of-work coal miners and steelworkers, desperate refugees at our borders, noncombatant victims of the wars we perpetrate, and the people who’ll change your diaper in the nursing home when you’re about to die.
Or maybe it’s wrong of me to call this American: it had also been the bottom-line thinking of my immigrant parents, my poverty-fearing mother and status-conscious shopaholic father.
Maybe it was just the whole world that had gone askew with this belief, that nothing outside the almighty marketplace really mattered.
What kind of music would I make if I never got paid again?
Some days I’d try to find the interior space from which to write a song. But what emerged now too often felt forced. Fake. The elusive target was a sweet spot between driven intention and helpless surrender. I’d been in that spot a few times. I had run toward it like a mirage before it vanished in a shimmer. Maybe it would reappear one day. This musical beast I harbored, this fickle interior creator, refused to adhere to a predictable schedule. It had no Protestant work ethic. It was slave to no economy. It possessed no bourgeois orderliness. It would rather starve than be told what to produce and when. It was a bad employee, unprofessional as fuck. Bartleby the Scrivener was my muse: I would prefer not to.
I had once worked with a bassist and composer struggling to make anything happen, business-wise, but couldn’t even hold down a teaching job due to general orneriness and irresponsibility. He said, God wouldn’t have given me all this talent for it only to be a hobby.
Interiorly I scoffed and thought, That’s not how the real world works.
But in my own way, had I not also been seduced by this special application of the prosperity gospel? Was I not also a creature of these times, in which the greatest faith was not so much in the divine unseen as in the Invisible Hand? Had I not also spent the last ten years trying to prove the worth of my music, and my entire being, by pressing into the pre-existing contours of the gig economy?
Sometimes I still fell into terrible troughs of self-pity and false logic. If I’m so goddamn talented and beautiful, why aren’t I rich and famous?
These were the times we lived in. The billionaire Ayn Rand acolyte and unbridled capitalist Charles Koch—whose vast fortune largely depended on government subsidy—was now funding a philosophy institute, which I’d read about in The Baffler magazine. Its flagship course was “Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship.” Its textbook introduction offered the following sneakily poisonous premise:
“The human condition is that we each arrive as newborn babies to a world that does not need us. The greatest and most joyful challenge of adult life is to develop skills that make the people around you better off with you than without you. It is within your power to show up at the marketplace with something to offer that will make others glad to know you.”
There it was. Showing up in the marketplace. Making people glad to know you. Otherwise you’re nobody, you’re nothing, you’re deadweight, a taker not a maker. If you end up poor or uneducated or laid off from the industry that sustained your father and grandfather, well, it was likely your own damn fault.
I could be disgusted by this line of thought—by its denial of any intrinsic value of a human being, if not to some divine being, at the very least to her parents, friends, neighborhood, community, bosses, clients, et. al. It was exactly this belief system that was killing us with crony capitalist excesses and rewarding us with a clownish con man and self-described billionaire as President.
But had I not also been seduced by its fundamentally perverse conflation of personal worth with profitability? Had I not also trapped myself with this lie, first subtly propagated by my “foreign” Mom and Dad, then resonating through the entire US of A?
Do what makes money, they were telling us. The love will follow.
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