the big pause
in which I celebrate the Pause, and also play SoFar Sounds tomorrow night!! COMPS within!
Hey Hartlist,
This is my favorite joke:
A bear walks into a bar and says “I’ll have a gin … … … and tonic.”
And the bartender says, “Why the big pause?”
(OK you kinda have to say it out loud.)
JUST THE (ONE) GIG
SATURDAY, JULY 1, 8PM - SOFARSOUNDS Series Midtown Secret Location
I HAVE TWO COMPS Message me if you’d like them! Otherwise use the discount code SOFARMUSIC15 to get 15% off!
FROM THE CHRYSALIS
Now, I can’t prove that these two things have anything to do with each other, but last week I:
*took the whole week off social media
*walked 5 miles a day and had a sudden epiphany that I need to be Done With the Music Business, at least for the summer.
(More on this in a moment.)
Buuuuuut let’s just say for a second that these two are related? And that maybe heavy social media use is, oh I don’t know, a depressant that saps our energy, dulls our thinking, and divorces us from the present moment/our bodies/our feelings?
Just throwing that out there, I know it’s a brand new and controversial idea. :)
I don’t know why it worked this time, because I have definitely tried before. Many’s the time I’ve said ok I should really take some time off this and then found myself going oh look a little red notification thirty seconds later. Maybe it’s because this time there was no ‘should’. I was sitting on the couch, engaging in my nightly ritual of endless scrolling with the TV on, and suddenly I was like THAT’S IT- ONE WEEK OFF. I expected it to be hard, and to relapse every five seconds, and I did - once. And that was it. It was great.
I think it’s important to listen to the little voice that declares THAT’S IT. For one thing, as my friend says, “burnout is real”.
(A true story from my life that the Wrong Band can’t get enough of: a long time ago I needed to break up a relationship I was in but couldn’t admit it. I kept putting it off and putting it off and then finally one night I woke myself up screaming “GET OUT!!”
If this is you, don’t wait for this to happen.)
We humans suffer when we don’t know when to take a break.
But I also think we suffer if we don’t know specifically what we need a break from. If we listen closely, the little voice is always telling us that, too.
And if what it’s telling us seems small, odd, inconsequential (a break from social media/talking to that person/eating sugar), we need to listen harder. We might brush it off or postpone it and just go back to thinking God I really need a break, which we are defining as perhaps as a long beach vacation that we have no time for or is too expensive so oh well never mind.
But that might not be what we need at all.
(Though, I mean, wouldn’t say no. Probably? I don’t know. I’m always thinking “What I need is a long hot bath” and then getting bored after ten minutes in the water.)
As a theatre person from a theatre family I grew up on the principle General=Nothing, Specific=Something, and over time I’ve come to see this as life advice.
In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron says something about the nonlinear nature of growth or answered prayers: “it’s like we shake the apple tree and the universe delivers oranges.” A week off social media/sugar/texting a specific person? What does that have to do with my Career/Life Path/Back Pain/Big Important Thing I’ve Been Asking About? I want to focus on The Big Picture! Well, there is a time and place for the Big Picture. As they say in various support groups, “If nothing changes, nothing changes” , meaning sometimes we handle the Big Things by tending to the small things (which are, of course, the big things, in parts.)
I think the inverse is also true. If something changes, Something is bound to change.
What Something, specifically? I might sound weird (but, hey, I have been stuck inside all day afraid of THE AIR1), the Little Voice will always tell us.
There’s so much I want to say about this but if I don’t get this out before the gig tomorrow, you definitely won’t be able to buy tickets.
I was pretty surprised to get my TAKE A BREAK memo from the LV. Even though I had already taken an “Am I Experiencing Burnout?” quiz online, answering intuitively as if the questions about “work” applied only to running a band and “trying to do music”. My score: Severe.
(Did you know that two symptoms of burnout are “excessive irritability” and “back pain”? Did you also know that I have a medicine cabinet full of muscle relaxants and am seeing a physical therapist twice a week? And that this newsletter is two weeks late because my first two drafts were about why is coffee so terrible almost everywhere now and about how much I hate the musical Grease.
I stand by everything I wrote, but, Grease, as it happens, is not The Word The Problem.)
A BREAK?? I thought, LV, you have this all wrong. My biggest problem right now is unemployment! Lack of income! The frustration of not working ENOUGH, not too much! Take a break from what?
Well, exactly. That was the question and the answer was clear.
It was also specific. I do not need a break from “Music”. In fact, I miss it - I haven’t picked up my guitar for any reason other than ‘I’m late to sound check’ in months. But - to make a long story short and avoid the several explanatory paragraphs I keep erasing - I sure do need a break from How I’m Doing It.
Also, I’m an actor. I’m a writer. I trained and studied to do these things (and yes, they include music sometimes.) I do them (even if not enough) professionally. And I guess it’s ok to admit that I want to pay them some more attention than I can when I am also trying to be a booking agent, promoter, fundraiser, and stage manager, all of which are actual full time jobs done by actual full time people. (Yes, during a writer’s strike, great timing, revelation.)
If this sounds cranky, exactly. I refer you to the Burnout Quiz results.
(To be clear: while I am not booking anything this summer, but I will still accept invitations to play; tell me all about your dream house concerts!)
And for anyone (ie., me) who is rattled by this turn of events, it has happened before. In 2014? I think? I was decimated by a string of music business disappointments and a traumatic recording experience and declared it all completely Over. Later that year, I was invited to sing covers with a group called the Dirty Waltz Band, remembered I love music, started writing songs again, and within two years had put together both The Magician’s Daughter and The Wrong Band. Nothing about any of it felt like a struggle, even though it was a lot of (joyful) work. There was a sense of flow, of coasting downstream, even though we were taking action. It was an incredibly fruitful time, and I think it would never have happened had I not listened to the Little Voice saying “stop” two years earlier.
We’ve talked about this before: sometimes, the best way to move forward is to let go. And sometimes the only way to let go is to give up. You can’t really fake it or force it. And there’s no way to say for sure what it will do.
But hey, if nothing changes, nothing changes.
Love,
Rebecca
PS COME TO SOFAR SOUNDS TOMORROW NIGHT anyway. :)
wildfire smoke in Manattan is at an ‘orangey-red’ level so no six mile walk for me today