With all the things independent musicians have to deal with (e.g., self-promotion, branding, booking, sales, etc.), there is one aspect of your career you should be developing above all others: true musicianship. Today, I’m going to share why this is true.
This post is primarily geared (pun intended) to the gear-heads in the reading audience. That is, those musical techies who have entire rooms and closets full of accessory equipment, and who like to haul all of it to every live performance. You know who you are.
Guitar players are particularly prone to having lots of extra gear–guitar pedals, wires, special amps, and of course the obligatory seven guitars that must be brought along to every gig. (Yes, I’m exaggerating–mostly. But you get the point). And there are plenty of tech-toys for the rest of us, too: keyboard players, string players, even vocalists. (Can anyone say auto-tune?)
Last night, I watched a documentary of Johnny Cash called “Johnny Cash’s America.” (Oh, the power of DVR.) Johnny Cash is one of those lifetime influences for me, and he continues to inspire me even after his death.
One thing that’s interesting about Johnny Cash is that when he and his band first started, they could hardly play; they didn’t start out as iconic or anything. But Cash became known as a symbol of stark honesty in his music, a symbol of counter-culture. Years after country music stopped paying attention to him, punks and Goths started celebrating him. To this day, Cash defies categorization musically–his sound is instantly identifiable, even before he starts to sing. We remember him as a sort of dark horse, a man who stood up for the downtrodden even as he battled his own demons.
One of my all-time favorite movies is Mr. Holland’s Opus starring Richard Dreyfuss. Please take a few minutes to watch the video clip below. It’s not necessarily the easiest thing to watch, but there’s something Mr. Holland says to the principal that really sums up my personal passion for the arts, why they are important, and why they need to be taught and nurtured.
