Make your own music
Artists follow the muse, painters follow the numbers.
They don’t play cover songs, they make their own music.
When I used to perform music in bars and coffee shops, people would yell out names of songs or artists they wanted to hear. And that infuriated me. Because I didn’t come here to swim in the shallow end. I have an agenda, and people’s crappy childhood songs aren’t part of it.
Eventually, though, I became so frustrated with people’s disinterest in hearing original music, that I stopped performing in public and went into music hibernation for nearly a decade. Which I completely regret. I allowed the voices of mediocrity to get the best of me. I allowed public taste to overwhelm personal expression.
Fortunately, though, hope found its own way back. Thanks to the tunnel, I started performing in public again. But this time, I brought the fire. My fire. I created my own venue, my own permissionless platform, where I could do whatever I wanted. The music was all expression and zero apology. And nobody seemed to mind.
In fact, they quite liked it. Funny what happens when we give ourselves permission to make our own music.
When did you start singing in your own voice?