My two biggest challenges as an artist are related to my voice. There’s my singing voice—my vocal performance—but there’s also my artistic voice that comes through in the things I put out. This blog post will focus on the latter, that elusive self-image that, if you’re successful, gives individuality to your writing and reveals your humanity, or at least some sliver of it.

 

I’ve never been able to write in just one style or genre. For this reason, my journey towards discovering my artistic voice has been long and confusing. I can’t say that I’ve found it or describe to you what it is, but over time I’ve learned how to keep myself aligned with the path to discovering it. When I’m in a creative state and I’m coming up with musical ideas, I gravitate towards the things that feel true, that sound good to me, that excite me. Whenever I’m able to do this without getting in my own way, I feel that my voice naturally finds a place to come through. However, when I’m thinking about myself in a more critical way, or trying to find ways to market myself, or label myself, I usually end up stifling my authentic self.

 

When I try to think of myself in terms of what is marketable (e.g. as an indie rock artist, or a folk artist, or a jazz artist), I fail to capture what is unique about me. Maybe at the end of the day, I really am just an indie rock artist, or whatever. Maybe I do fit into one box more easily than I would like to think. But the trap of thinking in those terms, for me, is that I start to compare myself to others who fall in those categories. I start filtering out parts of my authentic self.

 

When I write while in that mental state, I notice that I sometimes try to emulate other artists. Which—ok, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’ve written some ideas that I really like that were directly inspired by other artists or songs. I guess that’s the difference, is trying to emulate someone versus being inspired by them. You can write something that is heavily inspired, while still maintaining your own personality and voice. Like, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, for example, was Kurt Cobain—in his own words—“ripping off the Pixies”. But it doesn’t sound derivative or inauthentic because he’s taking elements from the Pixies’ music and following his own artistic intuition with it. Or, take “Brown Eyed Girl”, which is just Van Morrison’s take on a calypso song. It’s heavy handed in its inspiration, but it comes across as authentic. It doesn’t sound like he’s merely doing an impression; his voice sounds natural, and it sounds like him. I don’t know if it can even be articulated— the delicate line that exists between emulating someone else in an authentic way versus an inauthentic way. Maybe putting it into words is futile, because the reality is that there’s no guide or method that will lead to your authentic expression.

 

Artistic voice is something that I have only been able to discover over time, by creating more and more things, by being curious and open to my own impulses. I’m finding that the realest bits of my ideas live in the cringe. When I listen back to my demo recordings, or when improvising, I often catch myself off guard by thoughts and feelings that are too real, in a way that almost feels like embarrassment. I do a fair amount of filtering, rewriting, and revising. I try not to filter out all the things that make me cringe, because those moments are where my humanity is. The reason we cringe is when we feel naked, or exposed in some way. It could be a lyric, or the way I sing something, that may hit me as “too real” when I listen back. So how much of myself am I willing to show?

 

I feel grounded when I refer back to my whole reason for pursuing music: why write at all? My goals are to open myself up to musical ideas that the universe has to offer me, to be honest and vulnerable, to know myself more deeply, to connect with others so that they may understand themselves more deeply, and lastly, to entertain. If I were only interested in being vulnerable at all costs, without connecting with others or entertaining, I could just publish every new idea that comes to me, every improvisation, each and every confessional lyric with all the personal details that come with it. I could publish without a second thought about which instruments I’m using, if they’re even in tune, or how my singing sounds. That would be sort of the candid, hyper realistic snapshot of who I am on any given day. But I don’t believe that would be very interesting to anyone else, nor would it be very palatable. Too much raw information at once is just noise. If I only wanted to entertain, I guess I would not worry as much about being honest, and I would write what I think people want to hear. (Paradoxically, I think that would end up being very boring and not actually entertaining at all).

 

So I play with that balance in my music. I incorporate raw emotions and thoughts and incorporate them into musical ideas, which I polish into something that I think is beautiful without losing the realness (if I succeed). I believe that if I keep along this path, my unique artistic voice is bound to shine through naturally, through my personal taste that I impart on the music and through the honest expression I allow in my lyrics. I will talk about how that relates to my actual voice—my singing voice—in another blog post.

 

This blog, by the way, is my way of sublimating the masculine urge to start a podcast. Kind of the same energy, but at least I can revise for clarity and you don’t have to suffer all the “likes” and “umms”.