there is so much going on in spiraland right now and i’m teeming with excitement. allow me to indulge for a second:
- tonight! i’ll be on the radio! stream from 6-8pm Pacific on radiovalencia.fm or the TuneIn app.
- monday night! i’m doing a bunch of morrissey/smiths covers at pianofight in sf, 5:30-7:30pm.
- feb. 4! i’ll be playing original music at neck of the woods in sf at 8pm (and just asked my lovely friend Katie Stellar to join me on a few songs because FRIENDS ARE AWESOME.)
in the middle of all this promotion and event and creative pushings, i have to keep reminding myself:
hey, suzanne, hey buddy, yo. you still have to do the music part of your music career.
oh.
crap.
i thought this was all just a creative expression of promotion, right?
hahhahhaa! ha!
ha.
….ha.
i mean, i do all this digital marketing stuff for a living. i believe the business end of music is a creative act in and of itself.
and somehow, i feel… creatively fulfilled from promoting? could that be true?
no.
nope.
nuh-uh.
cannot go down that route.
so i did something risky to protect my musical creative time. i’m blocking off my fridays to work on the music itself. not the business or promotions part, the actual music itself.
it’s risky because that’s one full workday of not “working.” i mean, it’s plenty of work, getting great at a craft, but in the traditional i-need-to-earn-money-now sense of work, it could make things complicated.
but i had an epiphany a few years ago as i was working in the web production world.
someday, someone is going to make my tech job obsolete.
someone somewhere will program a better system that isn’t so labor-intensive. someday coding will be as easy as speaking into a screen telling the computer what you want. someday websites will truly build themselves. someday the web will be replaced by something better, faster, more efficient, and the fewer human hands that get in the way of that efficiency, the more cost-effective it will be. and them’s the rules of business.
so what use am i if the only thing i do well is something that will become obsolete sooner than later?
i’m not lamenting the loss of jobs to robots here. PLEASE, ROBOTS, TAKE OUR JOBS. if you can automate it, and we don’t have to put up with that kind of labor-intensive bullshit anymore, then maybe we can be a little more free to do the things humans do best. to do that one thing that comes from the heart, that can’t be replicated or replaced by code any time soon.
and for me that’s songwriting.
being fully human is risky. but you know what’s a bigger risk?
NOT being human.
what’s the one thing you do that could not be replaced by technology? what’s the one thing you do that makes you fully human?