Being A Musician in 2022
When I was young, I liked two things: Art & Music. I was influenced by watching my uncle who was a touring drummer, and a grandfather who was a great painter, but also who was self-taught at playing the keyboards, accordion, violin and harmonica. By age 14, I had a drum set in my bedroom and a guitar, but as I moved into my later teen years, I was drawn more to the arts, specifically photography. It’s unfortunate that the musical instruments took a back seat for a bit.
When it came time to figure out where to go to college, there wasn’t one perfect location for me where I could effectively study both art and music. I made the hard choice and decided to take the arts route. (I wonder if anyone else has had this dilemma before—being pulled in multiple directions when it came to your education.)
Twenty years later having earned a BFA in Photography and an MFA in Visual Arts and spending time as a photographer, gallery owner, educator at a college, and an author, I decided to move on from all of it to concentrate on the other side of my artistic life.
Music was calling me from numerous avenues. One thing I wanted to do was build a guitar. I convinced my uncle Joe into teaching me a thing or two in his wood shop and voila, we started a small business building custom electric guitars. From there, I started to take guitar lessons each week to improve my playing, because I never truly learned as a kid other than a few chords. I also began to write a column for The Huffington Post called, From Behind the Six String, where I interviewed famous guitar players. In 2016, I was asked to help out on the Experience Hendrix tour and rolled around the country in a tour bus and had the time of my life meeting some of the guitar players who had inspired me for so many years. A year later I enrolled at Berklee Online, a division of Berklee College of Music and earned a masters certificate in guitar. It was at this point that I felt I had the ability and equipment to record my own music.
For three years I created work in private. It wasn’t constant, and most of it was crap, but I never gave up. I continued to listen to music from all genres to find inspiration and I attended multiple concerts on a monthly basis (pre-COVID). I became a radio DJ at a community radio station in New Hampshire and surrounded myself with others who had a deep appreciation for music.
After spending months of fine-tuning my skills and learning how to mix and master tracks, I was finally at a point where I was confident enough to release my music to the masses. My only trepidation was, would my friends in the art world embrace this, or would they be thinking, what the hell, he’s a musician now? But a calm came over me one day after I began writing a statement about the music I was about to release. I wrote:
Artistic expression is your imagination at work. And when you are an artist, your “art” can take on many forms. And in my case, it has.
This statement for me was my way to come to terms with who I was becoming. It doesn’t matter what you were in the past, it’s where you are going. Who cares that I’m going to be 50 years old this year. Age doesn’t define me, nor should it you. It’s important to just focus and follow your path. My music probably isn’t for everybody, and it is not Grammy worthy, but I still make it. There are some days that I am pumped up about the songs that I have created, and other days not so much, especially after sharing samples of new work to others. Having spent many years critiquing artistic works and having my own art critiqued, I know that the advice you receive can go both ways. You just need to be strong enough to accept feedback when it is offered. As my wife once said to me, let your fearlessness outweigh your fearfulness. And this right here is fantastic advice to get.
There is a statement that I use to tell artists that I worked with in the past. It read, “There are no perfect life plan formulas. It’s a roller coaster with various exit ramps.” Well, I got my blinker on now, and picked the exit I’m taking and it feels good!