Fostering Community

As a regularly touring musician I am fortunate enough to experience both living in a city and living in a small town. I personally spend a lot of time in the mid north coast and the northern rivers areas. These regions have a small city then lots of little towns within 10's of kilometers. Each place has it's own community and own way of life. 

Obviously a town with a few thousand people can't sustain some of the things I love about being in a city, but for whatever they lack in that capacity, they gain in an area that is far more valuable. They have close knit community. 

I'd like to do a little compare and contrast. I spend a lot of time in Sydney, and I also spend a lot of time in Lismore. When in Sydney I'm guarded and have tunnel vision. I move fast, and I have a "get in and get it done" mentality, partially because that's my work ethic, but also because of the collective hustle and bustle of the strangers around me. It's really easy to feel lonely and invisible. 

Comparing this to Lismore, there's not the same frantic pace, because everything is close together. I'm not as guarded, because everyone is friendly - a luxury which is allowed to perpetuate due to the percentage of people who know each other. (Goodness, that's poorly worded, but I hope you get what I mean) One of the huge things for me is pretty much all the musicians (and creatives for that matter) know, or are aware of, each other. It also extends to the lovers of the arts. Word of mouth also travels fast, allowing for some of the coolest community spaces/house creative things that just wouldn't be possible without a tonne of advertising in a city. 

It's not like there aren't community spaces in the cities I live in. Three that come to mind are The Rhythm Hut, 107 spaces and The commons, but, the communities they foster are so much smaller, and it's so much harder to find them. In terms of "what's going on" cities are noisy spaces. There are so many things happening all the time. The events in small towns don't have to compete with the noise. 

So what can be done about Fostering community in a big city? It's hard to say. In the short term, increased government and mainstream media support is needed (but lets be honest, trying to get that is super hard, because community spaces aren't usually "money" focused, and that's what tends to attract the attention of these entities) 
 

In the long term, community starts during early education. Helping to foster and participate in a close knit community (at least in this modern age of ours) isn't a natural skill. It's taught. It requires kids to be exposed to all types of people, and foster friendships with all ages of humans. It requires regular gatherings where people can interact authentically in a chilled out safe supportive environment. It requires village like social structures so kids learn to be one part of a whole, instead of an individual. 

Having only discovered the true meaning and feeling of community in my late teens, I feel like a significant portion of my human development has been delayed. There are definitely social skills I lack because I missed out on this early community. The increasing individualism I'm witnessing in our society scares me, because community is the most valuable resource we have. 

(p.s, if you want to be notified about my happenings, you can sign up for my mailing list here :) https://mailchi.mp/edf9944672b3/the-emerald-ruby-mailing-list-signup )

Learning From Failures

Sometimes as an adult, particularly a creative adult, you end up failing at a thing. My most recent "Failure" has been the tour that I am currently on, and boy, have I learned a lot.  

I feel like I need to unpack exactly what I mean by the word failure in terms of my tour, because it's not a huge failure, and it's certainly not a disaster, but in terms of what you would call a "successful tour" it's a failure. At most gigs I probably won't sell much merch, I'm probably just going to break even, I probably won't grow my mailing list that much, and I'm not going to gain many "fans" who will then be "repeat attendees" at gigs. (I mean I hope I'm wrong, but with the amount of promotion I've managed to do, I'm pretty sure I won't be) 

As hard as this whole thing has been, I have certainly learned a lot about the music business, my strengths and weaknesses as a booking agent, content management, what I can handle mentally and (surprisingly) what not to do after a breakup. I feel like some of these lessons are 1) very valuable for others and 2) should be written down as a reminder to myself, so I'm going to share 5 of them! 

LESSON 1) If this is the first time you have toured solo NO MATTER HOW MANY BAND TOURS YOU HAVE BEEN ON keep your tour SMALL. Going into booking this tour my mindset was "I've been on the road SO MANY TIMES with Vanishing Shapes/The Button Collective I CAN TOTALLY DO THIS". Perhaps I could have managed if I wasn't booking the tour myself, but as this was a solo tour, booked by me I would have had a much less stressful time if I kept the tour to under a week and didn't go so far away from home. 

LESSON 2) Whatever gigs you have 3 months out are the gigs you have. Don't spend anymore time and energy looking for other gigs, instead spend that time and energy working on promotion. 
I was overly stubborn with this tour until the end of May (which was just a little over a month and a half before I left) This left me with not enough time to properly promote the tour and having expended more energy finding venues and sending emails than I needed to. 

LESSON 3) (This lesson is specific to me) You are not a good booking agent, nor are you fit to be a tour manager. Spend the money, employ someone else, it's definitely worth it. (I personally have joined World and Folk Australias roster of artists. Hannah their head honcho is an absolute wizard and infinitely better at this job than I.) 

LESSON 4) Have the content you are going to release on tour READY TO GO before you start booking said tour. The whole "point" I've been pushing for this tour is that I released a music video for a song I wrote called "I must go" (which you can see down the bottom of this post!) I finished the edit and uploaded it 19 hours before I left. THIS IS NOT AN OK AMOUNT OF TIME TO RELEASE A THING BEFORE TOUR UNLESS YOU ARE BEYONCE. 

LESSON 5) (Again, this is also mostly applicable to me) If you have just broken up with someone don't book yourself a breakup tour. In 6 months you're probably going to want to stay home with netflix and a beer. Perhaps a cute human as well. A lot can change, and you can always start planning a new tour AFTER YOU HAVE HEALED A LITTLE. 

So those are my thoughts on my most recent failures. Tour is running more smoothly than expected, partially due to some gig cancelations (which I may be not so secretly happy about) I also have a bunch of gigs I am looking forward to! I hope you enjoy the new video, and I'll be sure to write up a new post after I get back :). 

When life won't let you take a break.

(Unrelated to the topic at hand:For the first time in a while I forgot to take a shoe photo! I hate it when this happens :( Oh well, it happens) 

I want to talk about burn out today, specifically when you have to work through burn out. Unfortunately it's pertinent to my mental state at the moment, and has been on and off for many years.

To me, burn out feels like molasses. It's an all encompassing feeling, which makes me physically and mentally feel slow and gluggy. The pit of anxiety and overwhelm likes to rear it's ugly head and I also tend to become withdrawn, irritable, and flitter between too much and too little sleep. For those who have experienced burnout before, this may sound really familiar (that being said, your feelings may be different) and for those of you who haven't experienged it, consider yourself lucky ! :) 

If I worked a normal job, to cure these feelings I would take a few days off to destress, cut down on my commitments and focus on doing things I enjoy. This becomes twisted when big parts of your job fit into "this makes me feel good and helps me to destress". For example, I find the pre gig responsibilities and post gig aftermath pretty stressful sometimes, but the act of playing a good gig takes away the bad feels like nothing else. I also rely on the gig for income, further complicating the situation. 

More often than not, this leads me to working through my burnout. I know it's not healthy and that it probably keeps the sads around for longer, but the alternative for me (which is immediately cutting back on creative projects) is far more scary. 

There have been periods of burnout which have ended in spouts of depression where I've been unable to work work to even 50% capacity for (seemingly) endless months. It's almost like once I loose the momentum it's 200% harder to return to my fullest productive self. 

Over the last 2 years, I've experienced a couple of burnouts which I've worked (as in not slowed down my job worked) my way through. As such I've developed a couple of coping mechanisms. My favourites are:

1) The brain dump. This is basically a "to do list, but it also includes human things such as "take some time out" "don't forget to breath" and "you don't need to worry/panic". For these lists I also assign different tasks to different days so I don't feel like the full list in one days work. 

2) Talking to friends/making last minuite plans. I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH how important friends are. I've recently reconnected with my closest buddies/found some amazing new friends after a really awful breakup earlier this year. Without these people to hang with, I would find myself staying in and wallowing much more frequently. (Saying this, once I return to "normal" I still seek out their friendship, it's just when I'm feeling crappy, I tend to not see anyone at all for weeks at a time and disappear off the face of the earth!) 

3) Making a conscious effort not to beat myself up about productivity. If you can remember back to this year, this has been my only New Years resolution, and I've been doing pretty well at it! One of my mantras has become "you can only get what you have done today, done today". Whenever I feel myself slipping into "work guilt" I say this, either in my head or outloud. While it doesn't immediately solve the issue, it does help to calm my brain and make the feelings less strong/easier to work through. Along the same vein, every time I do a thing that's not feel sad and watch youtube I give myself a proverbial pat on the back. Whatever I'm trying to do may be small and insignificant, but the fact I did it, feeling like this is an absolute miracle. 

4) I try to remember this feeling isn't forever. This helps to keep the burnout sads from becoming existential (which is a whole other layer of weird). 

I'd like to conclude with something positive, but it's hard for me to think positively when i'm stuck smack bang in the middle of burnout. Real talk: Every time I "recover" from burnout I tell myself "this is the last time" but it never is. I suppose I'm scared that this cyclical feeling will continue my whole life. I'm also scared that one day the feeling will just swallow my whole (woah, that got dark quickly). That being said, I see so many people who are older than me functioning like humans should. I'm sure they've all been through periods like this, and look at them! Mental health. It's certainly a thing. 

LASTLY! I'd like to call your attention to my mailing list! https://mailchi.mp/edf9944672b3/the-emerald-ruby-mailing-list-signup It's a thing I have now because I don't trust the algorithmic gods to deliver the stuff I make to the people who want to see it! I'll be starting it up once I get back from my July tour, so if you'd like better access to my online life, feel free to pop your email in the thing! :) 

Daily Content creation is Rough.

I've been doing VEDJ this month. For those of you who don't know what VEDJ is, it stands for Video Every Day in June. There are 30 days in June, which means I *have* to make 30 videos to release EVERY DAY 

If you've been here since the beginning, you may remember back in the day, I used to photograph my outfits/write posts almost daily. This was back when I was at uni, and busy, but not in a bazillion bands, gigging a few times a week, teaching a full load, making a podcast, recording, shooting gigs, making art ect. Still, it was a little tough to get content out daily, but W/E I managed, and stuff got posted, and I was stressed, but still chill. 

Daily photoshoots/blog posts have NOTHING on daily video. Daily video is intense in a way I wasn't really prepared for, and trust me, I prepared. I had a whole schedule mapped out, with heaps of ideas. I even created a "rough map" of this month so I could keep up. It didn't work. I'm now officially behind. Not in posting content, but in creating it. 

I've had 3 shoots fail on me, and lost some SD cards with 3 other shoots. I've got a tonne of unedited footage, and 2 days to edit with no time to sit down and edit. I don't think I'm going to make it. 

In saying that, I'm going to try my very best to make it to the end of this month. If it gets too much, I'll stop, but it's not too much. Yet. 
 

Here are the 6 videos I've released thus far! Enjoy my blood, sweat and tears ;P 

So, I kind of sort of am getting hang of chords and it's a really big deal for me.

For the majority of my professional music life I've been trying to "catch up" basic chord/harmony theory. As you can imagine, this has been quite a problem for me as knowledge chords and harmony make up a significant portion of being a musician (particularly in contemporary/jazz spaces, which I'm becoming more and more involved in).

The other issue is that my peers don't quite understand just how big these gaps are: i.e when I tell them "don't tell me the chords, they don't mean anything to me" they don't believe me.  

A little context. When I was a young fresh musician learning the basics I was unfortunate enough to have two pretty terrible (for me/my learning style) teachers.

The first was my very first flute teacher who only ever explained basic concepts once, expected me to learn my scales without ANY sheet music and would insult me when I got things wrong. I almost quit flute after a year and a half with her, because she made the experience of learning the instrument entirely unpleasant (fortunately my mum found me a wonderful teacher to take me on, and I've been enthralled by the flute ever since) 

The second teacher was my very first theory teacher who was ill equipped to teach theory to anyone 1) who had no piano skills 2) had never learned theory before and 3) already had significant "basic" knowledge gaps. Somehow under his tutelage I managed to fudge my way up to a third grade theory level without ever understanding anything I was doing. 

Fortunately after I'd moved on from these teachers I went on to have some wonderful instructors. Unfortunately their instruction was always time sensitive to the AMEB schedule, and never allowed for the diagnosis of how bad the gaps were, let alone being able to work out exactly how to fill them in. Similarly, at uni, I just had to fudge my way through because there was no way I could catch up on theory, complete my assignments, work and keep up the crazy practice routine I had set. 

Since leaving uni I've made many a failed attempt to fill in these gaps, but due to the nature of playing a single lined instrument, being time poor, and the fact my ear is "good enough" to be able to work out what I need to play whilst improvising it simply hasn't happened...

All this has changed. I'm starting to understand chords, and it's one of the most exciting progressions in my post study musical explorations. What changed? I picked up ukulele and got just a little *too* into it. Having the ability to not only play chords, but see the intervals AND the progressive relationships of how the shapes transfer between chord changes has revolutionised the way I'm thinking about chords, harmony and music in general. 

There are a few morals you can take from this. 1) If you're a musician who's been playing forever with significant gaps IT'S NOT TOO LATE TO FILL THEM IN (yes, there was a while I thought I'd never understand the things I'm starting to understand now about music) 2) If you play a single lined instrument, don't understand how chords work and can't play piano (context: I tried very very hard for a lot of years to play piano. It's just really not my instrument) try a stringed instrument instead (it doesn't have to be ukulele. It could be guitar, or mandolin, or banjo, or bouzouki) 3) If you have a student who's struggling gap filling, try taking them off script for a little while. I wish one of my early teachers had had the opportunity to do that for me back in the day before the gaps in my knowledge snowballed  into a huge pile of nope. 

I just want to finish off by saying a quick word about my outfit: This was a really different one for me. I unearthed both the velvet tights and pom pom jumper from the bottom of my closet. I'd put the pom poms on the jumper ages ago and never worn it. You'll never believe the reason ;P I thought it was too much! (I can be a ridiculous human sometimes)