by T. Perry Bowers
One day I will tell you about the most horrific experience of my life. It was a time when I gave my power away to someone else. I gave it to a man whom I trusted implicitly. He betrayed me completely, bankrupting me and almost destroying my family. He was a business man but he had no business advising an artist-entrepreneur such as myself. I learned a lot from him. I learned emotions are important, but they aren’t the end of it all. Emotions come into your body and flow out. They visit you, but they are not you. As artists we need to be in touch with our emotions. Our job is to feel and to make other people feel. But, when you consider the entirety of the human organism, emotions are only one small part of us. We have our intellect, our physical self, our spiritual body. Some may go further and say we have our etheric or astral body, but I’ll leave that for people who know more than I.
Our physical body is just that. It’s our body, our organs, our eyes, our ears, our heart and lungs etc. Thirty or forty years ago we didn’t know about the connection between our emotional health and our physical health. Now doctors, therapists and spiritual leaders understand the connection between emotions and physical health. If we are stressed, we have a higher risk of disease and sickness. Our emotional health is connected to our immune system. People with emotional problems can suffer from addictions and obesity. As artists our job is to feel deeply and express those feelings. So how do we stay in balance, keep healthy and still create emotionally inspired art?
One thing that helps is understanding our emotions as best we can. But that’s a difficult task especially as no one can even properly define them. Where do emotions come from? Are they energies traveling through the universe? Do they find us when we are experiencing certain events and visit us? Or are they created in our own body or our brain ? Are they teachers or are they guides? If so, what are they teaching us or where are they guiding us? See what I mean? It can get pretty confusing out there!
So, if we can’t understand them, the best thing we can do is ensure we don’t allow our emotions to dictate our lives. It’s easy to let emotion hold us back from making hard decisions. It’s why a lot of us in the music industry don’t handle our own business endeavors. It comes naturally to feel emotions and make music to express those emotions. Writing a song or painting can be an escape from pain. It can also be a catalyst for change and healing. It’s helpful to know how you use art. Do you use it as an impetus to take action or do you use it to hide? Be aware because sometimes our emotions are pushing us to make a decision – to do something or change something.
Even though the man who took away my power had bad intentions, he did teach me a few things. Maybe it was part of his con game to teach me things to keep me distracted while he robbed me blind. He was very detached from his emotions. Perhaps that makes him a borderline psychopath. He never suffered remorse and he didn’t hesitate to do something that needed to be done. He called it “eating your peas” and he told me to “eat my peas” first thing in the morning. If I had a hard phone call to make, an important email to write or a difficult action to take, he told me to do it as soon as I woke up. He also taught me to put my feelings on hold. “Just know what you need to say and say it.” It was a very powerful lesson for me. I realized I procrastinated many things because of the way they made me feel. As an artist, I was so “in-touch” with my emotions, I thought they were protecting me from something bad. As it turns out they were also holding me back from good things.
It feels strange analyzing your emotions this way. It seems to me we have an experience, an emotion is created from the experience, we feel the emotion and eventually the emotion goes away. Some are difficult, some are easy. Of course we all love to feel happiness. Whatever it is to us it’s a wonderful feeling. But it’s easy to not notice we’re happy or take it for granted. Sadness on the other hand we notice – it’s pain; it hurts! As artists we often embrace it and use it to our advantage – sadness can create beautiful art. But do we hold it longer than is healthy for our physical self? Art created from sadness can become a trap. When something beautiful comes out of melancholy people resonate with it. We may feel we need to go there again to create a connection for people. It can be devastating for our own lives.
For example imagine you’re an up-and-coming pop artist and you create a catalog of songs about the passing of your mother. You release the music, everyone loves the songs and you become famous. You are given accolades and even make a lot of money. But, now you are healed. That’s the beauty of music. It is an especially powerful healing agent for the person who created the art. So, you’ve moved on and now you create a collection of songs inspired by happiness. But these songs aren’t received as well. Your fans want you to go back to that place of sorrow so they can wallow there with you again. Our tendency as artists is to want to please. So maybe you do go back to that sad place. You can use substances or unhealthy behavior to get there. This is the pathological trap of an artist in the modern era. In fact it’s the pathological trap of our culture.
Artists are commodities. Katy Perry works with a team of writers to create a song. When she releases a song she is looking for the best return on her investment of time. Her company polls listeners in her target demographic to decide which song she should release as a single. So she’s hardly exploring her inner most depths or using music as a way to heal. I’ve never had that level of fame, I have no idea what it’s like. I’m not trying to judge her, but I think it’s a good example of how, at a certain level, music becomes all about the money. What matters most is the number of hits and the volume of albums sold. These are good things to be aware of and to strive for, but as artists we are much more than just business numbers. We are the explorers of beauty!
Emotions don’t have a timeline. They will come and go and we can’t control when things will happen in our lives to create them. Some things are assured: Our parents will die. We will have breakdowns in our relationships. We will likely struggle with addictions. We’re all human.
Does the pathological public mind allow us to go on that emotional journey? Usually not. There are a few artists that ignore this paradigm and get away with it – these are my heroes. I think of Neil Young, Pearl Jam, Tool, Radiohead, Joni Mitchell. Somehow these artists got a pass. Society allowed them to be authentic and still hold them up as relevant artists. I think one of the reasons why is that at some point early in their careers, they all stopped giving a shit. They didn’t care about record sales or critic’s reviews. They stopped listening to their record companies. They made art that came from their hearts. Fortunately for them, they had enough credibility and talent that their record companies were still willing to help them put out records. And they created such a large fan base that even if they lost half of their fans, they still had enough to fill theaters or stadiums and sell a substantial amount of records. As independent artists we may not have that same fortune.
To stay in balance with your true self and still have a career you need to understand your market. Who are you writing music for? My band Silverseed makes alternative rock. We are influenced by the 90s Seattle sound, the 60s and 70s classic rock sound. It’s what we dig. Our lyrics often center around spiritual questions like, “Who are we as humans? What else is out there? How are we all connected?” I guess we’re somewhere in between the hipster scene and the jam band scene. We aren’t totally willing to commit to either side. Because of this, neither side have embraced us. But we’re not willing to change our sound just to sell records and shows. We know what we like and what resonates with us. We sing about things that mean something to us. And because we are authentic, we are slowly gaining fans. And our fans really dig us. We’re finding our niche.
The pop culture wants to see bands in their early twenties. By the time musicians are 28, they are considered too old to start a career. But who really knows who they are at 28 years old? We’re allowing children to represent our collective pop consciousness. Pop culture is for 14 year old girls. I see people in their 30s, 40s and 50s talking about Kim Kardashian and I ask, “how did you get stuck in your teens?” I know I can’t change the paradigm of pop culture with just a few blogs, but maybe I can encourage people who are a little older or who don’t fit the mould to continue with their goals.
It’s not always about creating a hit song. Sometimes it’s about your own capacity to heal yourself. If you can use your music to heal yourself, others will heal, too. Art and music have a power that pop culture gives no credence to. If you are an artist who wants to sing about deeper levels of being, know that it may be an uphill battle. You are fighting against a whole sick society. But remember, you’re not crazy. The rest of the world is. Emotion has the power to create and equally to destroy. Embrace what you need and learn to let go of what doesn’t serve you.
