Bloom – Trusting Your Muse

Last Saturday I drove 250 miles in order to attend a reunion of family members I’d never met.  These were my grandmother’s surviving brothers and sisters.  My father’s mother, who passed away a few years ago at a ripe old age, grew up on a big farm in the tiny town of Manchester, Iowa, the oldest of sixteen children.  Life on the farm was rough, and my exceedingly independent grandmother left Iowa before the age of eighteen, moving east and starting her own family. After her departure my grandmother lost touch with her Manchester roots, including a number of her siblings.  This meant that if I were ever going to meet her family, I’d have to do it on my own initiative.

So there I was, a shaggy-haired, city-dwelling rocker in a room full of rural farmers.  Yet different as we seemed, I smiled every time I witnessed the undeniable ways in which these were, in fact, my people. I saw it in their eyes and their noses, in the sound of their voices.  We were clearly made of the same stuff.  And out of that connection poured stories that helped fill some of the gaps in what I knew about where I’d come from.  But of all the stories I heard that day, it was the story I heard about my great-uncle Forest’s peonies that struck me most.

Peonies – four-foot bushes that produce huge, vibrant flowers – are common in Iowa.  So when my great-uncle inherited the family farm in the 1930s, it wasn’t unusual that the sprawling property already featured a few of the plants.  But by the time he died last year, my uncle had cultivated an entire grove of peonies, hundreds of bushes that filled the expansive east lawn of the property.

Peony blossoms from my uncle's yard

My grandmother's siblings after she moved east, circa 1928. Forest upper left.

 

On my way out of town after the reunion, I passed the old farm and saw the peonies for myself, row after row after row of them.  Coincidentally, the date of the reunion coincided with the peak of the peony flowering season, and from the two-lane road in front of the property, the peony blooms were a breathtaking sea of pink, violet and white.

On my five-hour drive home that night, my thoughts kept returning to my great-uncle’s not-so-secret indulgence. In the manly farming culture in which Forest lived and worked – a harsh and uncertain world that prospers or perishes on the whims of capricious weather patterns – stoics and tough-guys are the norm.  My uncle was no pansy, yet he seemed quite clearly obsessed with peonies. I loved this apparent contradiction.  I found it interesting and artful, even courageous.  What in the world moved Forest to spend his precious free time filling his yard with these pretty plants?  Did his buddies ever tease him in town about his big prissy flower patch?  If they did, he obviously couldn’t have cared less.

Oddly, thinking about my uncle’s eccentric hobby led me to consider the way I approach my life as an artist.  In particular it made me think about the way my peers and I make decisions about the kind of music we create. We grew up in the habit of always aspiring to be part of the next big thing.  We tried to hate disco but secretly practiced those amazing four-on-the-floor grooves. We bought enormous drum kits to meet the challenge of prog rock.  We exchanged our big kits for drum machines and keyboards when New Wave rolled in. We stole mom’s hairspray for the cause of heavy metal.  And grunge got us to tune up our drums and make them sing.  With the dawn of each movement we all asked, How can I fit in and be part of this?

Being inspired by an exciting trend is natural, and isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  But as musicians we can be so worried about being out of sync with NOW that we doubt our own muse – our inner creative voice that exists largely out of time.  Instead of putting faith in making music we love, we can rely too much on what we think others think is cool.  While we’re busy thinking, we overlook the fact that the most successful and most enduring art has been made by people who’ve tended to ignore trends.  These are artists who – like my uncle Forest – had the boldness to act on the kinds of strange and mysterious whims that set them apart from everyone else.

 

Rethinking Cool

The day after the reunion I went to see the legendary Canadian prog rock group, Rush.  Interestingly, the concert confirmed for me that as a musician trying to make a living from their art, trying to be cool and current is a dead end, a waste of precious effort.

Like many drummers my age, when I was in elementary school Rush was my favorite band. To be perfectly honest, for a year or two I was so obsessed with Rush and the drumming of Neil Peart, I didn’t listen to any other bands.  I’ve been out of touch with Rush since middle school, so seeing the group live after all these years was an experience oozing with nostalgia.  But it was also a hugely educational experience.

Standing there in the 8^th row, surrounded by thousands of people who look like they don’t see the sun very much, it struck me that Rush just may be the most uncool band ever. Throughout the band’s epic thirty-five year career, Rush never enjoyed the status of “hip.”  Even in prog rock’s glory days, Rush was different. The power trio existed on the fringes – farther out than even Genesis and Yes.  They took “high-concept” to new heights.  As a result, popular culture never embraced them.  But it also couldn’t ignore them.  In spite of the band’s extreme geekiness – exhibited in songs with names like “Didacts and Narpets,” and in songs about trees that engage in warfare with one another, not to mention in their many ten-minute instrumentals – Rush got mountains of airplay, and still does today.

The truth is that Rush was never any good at being cool or “relevant.”  But then again, they didn’t need to be. Rush was only good at being Rush. And at that they were, and still are, unreal!  And make no mistake – it’s not the group’s much-lauded technical virtuosity that made them so unique.  There are a thousand groups whose members can play their instruments as well or better.  No.  What has made Rush so singular is the group’s dedication to their peculiar, nerd-o-rific creative vision.  Love it or hate it, this vision has made the group one of the most commercially successful, longest surviving bands in history.

Rush serves as an inspiring example for every artist with commercial aspirations.  The trio is living proof that an adoring audience can be the reward for having the courage to follow your heart to the honest and sometimes-strange places it takes your creativity.

Follow Your Heart…To The Bank

Now more than ever it makes better business sense for an artist to dedicate herself to her own muse rather than to jump on some prefabricated musical bandwagon.  Why?  Because with the slow death of big record companies, and the decline of radio as an effective way to promote an artist, the machine that once created the trends has broken down. The wheels have fallen off the bandwagon.

Happily, we’re now in an era that discourages sameness and rewards art that’s far more personal. In the impatient age of YouTube, the way to get noticed is to create an original statement, something that sounds like nothing else – something, that is, that only YOU would do.  If you’re good, if you promote yourself well, and if you have the patience to stick with it, eventually your own oddball vision will be feeding you and your family.  And there’s no better feeling in the world than that.

Bloom

Back at that reunion, it was interesting to observe the kinds stories people chose to tell me about my deceased relatives.  Surprisingly, I hardly ever heard about predictable and seemingly important things, like how someone made their living.  Apparently a person’s career was trite compared to tales that provided a juicy glimpse into what made them tick, what made them uniquely them.  So instead of hearing about how my uncle Forest managed the complexities of operating a large farm, I heard about something more revealing – his unusual fondness for peonies.

The story about Forest and his peonies reminded me that it’s the things we do out of love and passion, not the things we do out of a sense of obligation, that endure.  Great art blooms from the heartfelt, illogical, sometimes even embarrassing impulses we harbor.  When we mess with those impulses too much, when we censor them, smooth the edges, and try to conform them to something we presume people will like, we destroy the vitality that makes our work compelling.