Arts & Entertainment

I’ve been sitting on this post for a while. I drafted it and gave it a quick editing once-over, but, as you’re well aware, life is busy. I’ve had my day job, gigs, rehearsals, and I opened a new merch store that I would really appreciate you checking out. So, here I am, over a month later, giving it yet another look and getting ready to click the “Publish” button. Hopefully the next post will come along a little sooner.

I wrote my first song when I was about fifteen years old and the floodgates opened. I wrote constantly. Not all of it was good, of course. Nobody bats a thousand, after all. I was learning the craft. I was finding my voice and figuring out who I was as a writer, even though I wasn’t necessarily conscious of that at the time. To me, I was just writing. I broke through with that first song and the faucet stayed on.

I spent much of my early adulthood interested in strictly performing my own music. I just wanted to be on stage playing the songs that I had written. I would play covers, sure, but I tried to book shows that would let me showcase my material.

I had, during this time, a boundary drawn up that kept two concepts separate in my mind: Art and Entertainment. I thought that I was an artist, not an entertainer. The two were and should remain apart. Separation of church and state. Never the twain shall meet.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to showcase your art, of course. You should want to showcase what you’ve created. The world is a better place with your unique perspective and voice in it. We want to hear what you have to say.

Thanks to a couple of decades of hindsight, though, I’ve realized that my dogmatic, binary approach to the Art versus Entertainment discussion was too rigid and not nearly nuanced enough. It just doesn’t work that way and, frankly, making music is a richer, more fulfilling experience if you can tear down the wall between the two. In music, art, and, well, life in general: balance is everything.

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I was a member of the Illinois Country Music Association back in the Aughts. In 2010, Janet Durham, a country singer from Central Illinois and fellow ICMA member, asked me to be a part of the PrimeTime Country Opry. There are a number of Opry shows in Illinois, and I had been a special guest at many of them, but this was an opportunity to be a part of an Opry band. I accepted her invitation.

The format of these shows is pretty straightforward: members of the house band will take turns singing songs, and there’s often a guest who does six songs or so, usually three at the end of each set. As a guest, I would usually get to do a mix of originals and covers. As a member of the band, I would be able to select a handful of songs per show that I wanted to do, but I would also be learning and playing everyone else’s songs. That amounted to upwards of thirty songs every couple of weeks with one rehearsal the afternoon of show day.

I was a part of the PrimeTime Opry until Echo and Ransom and my solo work really started taking off. It’s a two and a half hour drive for me to and from the PTO, and I was booking gigs every weekend a little closer to home, so it just wasn’t cost or time-efficient to keep heading downstate. I was, however, able to get back and sit in with them a couple of months ago, and it was good to play with my friends again.

Being a member of the PTO Band was a turning point for me as a musician. It was an opportunity to learn and grow which I could have easily missed. As I mentioned in another post, I’m an introvert, so my inclination is to say no to things like this. Further, I was used to playing originals, and any covers that I played were usually songs that really spoke to and inspired me. In this setting, I’d be playing whatever songs the other band members or guests picked.

Looking back, I can see some of the ways the Opry made me a better musician:

• I got to play with very talented musicians. Playing with talented people makes you a better musician, period. You’ll learn from them and you’ll get better. They’ll learn from you, too. That’s a pretty cool give-and-take.
• I learned songs I never would have learned otherwise. I was only in control of a small portion of the set list, so I ended up learning songs that I wouldn’t have picked for myself to play, either because they didn’t necessarily speak to me or I simply didn’t know them. Learning songs you don’t know or even songs you don’t particularly like makes you a better musician. There’s something to be gleaned from any song and, honestly, any genre. You just need to step out of whatever box you’ve locked yourself in and put yourself in a position to learn it once in a while.
• I became a more flexible musician. Regularly, band members or guests, myself included, will pick a song and find out in rehearsal that it’s just out of their vocal range that day, or maybe it’s easier to play in a different key. Being able to adjust to that on the fly is an invaluable skill for a musician to develop.
  • Side note: If you’re a musician, learn the Nashville Number System. It’s an incredibly efficient way to chart and, honestly, think about music. It allows you to be more effective when you’re communicating and more agile when you’re transposing. Trust me.
• I learned how to be an entertainer. But wait! That’s a dirty word, right? I was an artist, after all. Well, that’s sort of what I’m getting at.

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Back when I was colorblind to shades of gray on this issue (and many other, non-musical issues, actually), I saw entertainers as people who would do whatever the audience wanted or expected them to do. Artists, on the other hand, did whatever they wanted and presented it to the audience with the hope that they’ll like it. My little worldview back then was simple, black-and-white, and entirely, extraordinarily wrong.

All of this would have been easily disproven if I would have simply asked myself if there were any artists out there who I found entertaining. The age-old story of a person in their forties cringing in hindsight.

Being an artist requires authenticity. If you are being authentically you when you make your art, then you are an artist. Period.

Working at the Opry, I learned how to better engage with an audience. Prior to that, I had a tendency to let my introvert nature relegate me to a set staring at my shoes. I discovered that engaging with an audience makes the whole experience more fulfilling. The shared energy in the room is palpable, powerful, and it makes the whole experience a lot more fun.

It sounds obvious, but if you can connect with an audience, they’ll be more receptive to your work. It’s sometimes hard to be heard over all the noise (I mean that literally and figuratively), and if you’re more engaging or, dare I say, entertaining, people are more likely to listen.

I’ve experienced this firsthand. I’ve found that people are more receptive to my original music in recent years. People pay more attention, I get a bigger response for my originals, and folks will even come up after a set and comment on specific lyrics. That last point is kind of a big deal, because it’s really hard to get people to listen to lyrics (as we learn every time people tell the members of Rage Against the Machine to stay out of politics or they’ll stop listening to their music).

Playing live is a skillset, and it takes time and experience to develop that skill. Learning how to take command of the stage and engage an audience is important as an artist, and it pays off.

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Art can be entertaining. As long as it’s authentic, it’s no less artistic just because it’s entertaining. But, if you cover someone else’s song, can it be art? Absofreakinglutely.

I’ll lead with the evidence:

You can, without a doubt, take someone else’s words and music, crawl inside them, and make them “your own.” You can be unapologetically authentic playing a song that someone else wrote.

Covering a song is, in a way, like acting. An actor can become a character in a script that someone else wrote, bringing them to life. Another actor can go through the same process with the same character and interpret that character in an entirely different way. Actors are artists, taking words on a page and using their own authentic viewpoint to interpret the character and create them in the flesh.

When you cover a song that you didn’t write, you’re doing the same thing. You interpret the song and, like an actor, work on finding yourself in it. You inhabit it like a character in a script. You crawl in it, become it, and fill it with life. That’s authenticity. That’s art.

I vehemently believe that you can be an artist even if you’re playing someone else’s music. I play a lot of shows that are almost exclusively covers, and I know plenty of brilliant musicians who don’t write their own songs at all. They play full cover shows and, whenever I hear them, I’m engaged, inspired, and entertained. They own every song they play just like they wrote it themselves. They are, undeniably, artists.

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You may be reading this thinking, “So what’s not art?” My thesis here is that authenticity is the key ingredient of art, so, by that logic, anything that isn’t authentic isn’t art.

There’s plenty of inauthentic music out there, especially if we’re talking about lyrics. Songs are often written formulaically, and you can tell that when you hear them. Just squeeze in all the requisite genre buzzwords, throw together a bridge, and call it a day (Side note: not every song needs a bridge, but that’s another discussion). Also, as I mentioned in a previous post, complexity for the sake of complexity isn’t art, either. Making a song hard to play doesn’t make it more artistic than a more simple song, especially if that simple song comes from a place of authenticity. Some of the most powerful songs ever written have three chords in them.

Not everything is art, but I feel strongly that everyone is an artist. We all have the capacity to create something that is of ourselves. We can all reach inside to find something true and authentic, and use that to create art.

Authenticity is the key ingredient. Whatever you do, be it writing and performing original songs, or playing someone else’s, be authentic. Be vulnerable. Climb inside the song and experience it while you’re writing or performing it. That’s art.

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I’ve been meditating a lot on the idea of authenticity in general. I’m learning how necessary it is if you intend to really live your life in a full, wholehearted way, and I can see how being authentic as an artist makes your work more fulfilling to you as the creator and more impactful to the audience.

Everyone has the capacity to be an artist as long as they’re willing to dig in, be vulnerable, and create authentically.

Regarding entertainment, as far as I’m concerned helping people have a memorable Saturday night is a noble thing.

Be authentic and be you. Create that way. Entertain that way. Live that way.