I’ve been letting worries fill my head recently.  It must be because the days are getting shorter and 2011 is coming to a close. I’ve been thinking about the uncertainties of a future in creating music, and whether the artists that I look up to are also ailed by similar troubles. I decided to ask DM Stith, a musician who I admire greatly, and who has produced one of my favourite albums for a long time. I found David’s reply incredibly interesting and it comforted me to know that even the people who inspire me have moments of doubt.  I thought I’d post his reply to me on here, as some of you may find it interesting:

“I’m sitting in my living room (I rent a little place in Rochester, NY, which is a small city about 5 hours drive north of New York City, and much cheaper) having been awake since 5am letting my worries about a future in music slam each other around. It’s a useless exercise really, worrying, but one I am compelled to endure. When I started making music, my intention was to work composition into a daily ritual - part of the contemplative way I try to shape my days and weeks. I never had any intention to perform - in fact it took some strong urging from the record label to get me to perform at all. At the time, it seemed like a modest plan - to release an album every couple of years as an accumulation of a couple years of writing and then move on to the next thing. Release albums like novels. Let a record label make records, publishers publish, and I’d just focus on getting better at the craft of songwriting, lyric writing, all that stuff. I wasn’t expecting that I’d make a living at it, but I thought that if I split my time between that and design/layout (which is, more or less, the way I get by) I’d have plenty of energy to pursue both, as well as keep a toe in something like a social life. Touring has really put a wrench in that plan. 

Besides the obvious drains that touring inspires, of time and money, it also enforces, in a very crude way, that the musical ideas (as well as the textual content, the emotional, the temporal) be made “performable” — having grown up a mark maker (drawing painting writing) this was a really frustrating idea to try and understand — which requires all sorts of dissecting of the structures, the lyrics, the sounds. I take off my writers hat and put on scrubs and become surgeon on everything I just made. All this because I’m a mark maker first, and a performer, like, 10th. I’m not a concert goer — of the top musicians I follow, I think I’ve maybe seen 2 of them. I have a mild agoraphobia which makes festivals really uncomfortable, but which, for whatever reason, disappears when I’m on stage. Growing up, the only shows I’d go to were ones I was required to by school or familial obligation — I think I saw the inside of a rock club maybe twice before the age of 25. …. All this to say, there’s a major compromise for me to contort what I make at home out of the mess of my life into something fashionable and sleek and loud enough and blocky enough to turn on people in a bar. 

I’ve learned a lot in the last couple years - enough to know that it is possible to take something deep and personal and unperformable and bring it to a group of people. It requires the right audience, the right venue, the right equipment, and the right frame of mind. But it also requires time to rehearse, and money to pay for musicians, and it requires that I let go of the writing life for months at a time both before and after a tour (because the stuff I write after a tour is written by a performer and I don’t do that well) and it requires that I keep friendships loose enough and accept that when I return from a tour, tour is all my friends are gonna wanna talk about. And it requires that I scramble around for press and hate myself for it, and it requires that my ego balloon and that I go to the gym and buy synthesizers and guitar pedals and worry about my outfits. 

If it were possible to survive on music without touring for a while, I think I would like that. I do enjoy performing - it’s invigorating and challenging and I get to meet a lot of nice people - but at a time like now, in which I’m writing a new album, the prospect of performance is terrifying. The little sound castle I’m producing here will need to be dismantled, chopped up, painted and sold. I’ll have to push it out into the world and watch it turn from relief to desperation.

ok. I’m gonna try to go back to bed.”