Keith Handy 1.999

Quick plea to performing songwriters
KeithHandy posted in Business, Personal Favorites, Your Soul on October 28th, 2007

If you perform covers and originals, please stop actually using the word “originals” (I have to work on this too). It attaches a stigma to your music. Present your music with the presumption of legitimacy that it deserves. Try this: at your show, don’t even tell them which songs are which. The focus is on performance, not songwriting. If someone asks about a particular song, “I wrote that” or “George wrote that” works fine. But in the energy and atmosphere of a live show, the experience will blur all the material into one overall vibe for most people; people don’t really latch onto songwriting until they’ve heard something a few times in their home or car.

Also, stop using the phrases “shameless plug” and/or “shameless self-promotion”. They were self-effacingly funny the first few times, but now that they’re commonplace, they come off like a desperate, passive aggressive sales pitch. Furthermore, it’s like starting sentences with with “I would just like to say that…”; they’re extra words that add no value for anybody. The DJ on the radio isn’t “shamelessly plugging” Black Sabbath. He just says “here’s Black Sabbath” and puts it on. Just say what needs to be said — “we’re blahblahblah, we’re at blahblahblah.com, our CD is over there (or better yet, refer to it by title instead of “our CD”), thanks for coming” — and trim off the fat.

Trust that your music has value of its own, independent of your salesmanship. It’s okay to be polite and show appreciation to your listeners, but there’s no need to reinforce the notion that your music is on a “lower rung” by repeatedly reminding the audience that you really really hope they’ll go to your website, and oh gosh you’d be so grateful if they’d please consider buying a CD because it’s so cheap.

Please copy the above plea and pass it along. Let’s all stop acting like wussies and present our music with the simple confidence it deserves.

I have a small audience, but I prepare for a large audience. I produce my recordings as if people will be picking apart at every detail and appreciating the extra care I put into them. I write posts assuming that people are interested. (Sometimes I’m okay with the small numbers and have more difficulty with the delay between creation and feedback — but of course larger numbers would shorten that delay.) Occasionally I have mini-breakdowns where I cry, throw fits, and question the worth of my existence, but then I get back on the horse and keep riding.

Validation is addictive, but not instructive. Commercially successful artists like to thank their audience for supposedly “making them what they are”, but the fact is, the audience didn’t pick out the chords or fuss over the lyrics. That has to be done alone, by the artist, in a void where he has no immediate feedback from anywhere but his gut, no matter how big of a star he is. Start making peace with that now, because although you say you’d love to be in a situation where your worst failure was going from an album selling 4 million copies to an album selling only 400,000 copies, that’s rejection by 3,600,000 fans. I haven’t experienced that, but it probably stings a bit.

You’re always going to be likening yourself to someone and differentiating yourself from someone else, so please, for all of us, help to rotate the line of differentiation so that it doesn’t fall squarely between independent and signed artists. So they have stars on their bellies and you don’t. Big deal. You’re not as different from them as you think you are, so stop playing up your “indieness” and just focus on being kickass.

(Dismounting soapbox and nodding politely to scattered applause)