joe

Are You a Real Musician?

I was sitting on the floor of my tiny apartment crying. I knew I had to make a phone call to accept a job I didn’t want.

It was a good job – a contracting position at Google, that paid really well. The agency was very confused as to why I was so reluctant to accept it.

But this great job offer, that to most people would represent success, to me represented failure.

Seven years before, when I left the corporate world and moved to Mexico to focus on music, I vowed that I would starve to death as a musician before I ever went back to working in a cubicle.

But the rough-and-tumble musician lifestyle had taken its toll, and here I was, broke, with nodules on my vocal cords, acid reflux, and a whole lot of credit-card debt and back-taxes. The part-time software jobs that had (sort-of) filled the gaps in my music income had dried up, and I was driving for Lyft to try to pay the rent. My life was falling apart, and my back was against the wall.

So I picked myself up off the floor, made the phone call, and accepted the job. It was only a one-year contract, so I resolved to make the best of it. I hired the best vocal coach in the world and started working on my voice, and tried to find a little bit of time to practice every morning.

I put a happy face on it and told everyone that it had worked out really well. But inside, I was defeated. I didn’t even think about it that much – it made me too sad. I wasn’t a musician anymore. I was a failure.

For several months, I kind of just checked out and went into survival mode. You know that feeling when you tell yourself “This is temporary” and put all your thoughts toward the future?

But eventually something shifted in me. I realized that I had no more excuses anymore to not be a songwriter.

For years, I had told myself that my financial troubles were making it too hard for me to be creative. Now that excuse was gone.

Then I told myself I was too lonely to write songs, that I needed love to be inspired. When I had two girlfriends but still couldn’t bring myself to write, I had to admit that that was just an excuse, too.

Eventually, I ran out of excuses and I had to just start showing up every day and doing the work.

And I realized that my quest to be a full-time musician was just another excuse, another way to distract myself from the hard, scary work of sitting down and staring at a blank page and actually writing new songs and sharing them with the world.

I had been telling myself that once I was a full-time musician, then I would be able to focus on my own music. In reality, a musical day job is still a day job. I know because I’ve been a full-time musician, playing covers in Mexico and being the lead singer of a classic-rock cover band. There were fun moments, but mostly it was a hustle that wore out my body and my vocal cords, and didn’t magically make me more creative.

So I started writing every day. Since October 1st of 2020, I’ve written every single day, without fail. On January of this year, I started a new commitment – to write a new song every day. Most of them are terrible, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m showing up and doing the work.

And I’ve realized that this is the real defining factor that makes you an artist or not: regularly creating art, and of course, sharing it with the world.

That’s it. That’s all that matters. Making financial success the defining factor is just letting society decide whether or not you’re not an artist.

Of course, I want to make music that people enjoy and I want them to express their gratitude financially, but I can’t afford to wait until enough of them are doing that before I start being a songwriter. As “Papa” John Philips of the Mamas and the Papas said: “You’ve gotta make your own kind of music, even if nobody else sings along”.

Austin Kleon says: “If you want to be the noun, do the verb”. If you want to be a songwriter, start writing songs. If you want to be a writer, start writing. If you want to be a painter, start painting.

Jesus said “By their fruits ye shall know them”, not by their paychecks.

American society is very fixated on how we earn a living, as evidenced by the way we ask “What do you do?” almost immediately upon meeting someone. But this is not the norm in other cultures, and you don’t have to let it define you.

The fact of the matter is, no one really cares how you earn a living. They only ask that question out of habit and to find out more about you. If the art that you make is a better representation of who you are, and it takes up more of your energy and devotion, you owe it to yourself and to others to put that side of you out front.

If someone asks the follow-up question of whether you’re making a living as an author/musician/artist, you can tell them you do other work to pay the bills. There’s no shame in that. Plenty of great authors and artist have had day jobs. T.S. Eliot worked at a bank. Salman Rushdie worked as a journalist while he wrote his first novel. The vast majority of artists, writers, musicians, and other creatives are not making a living from their work. A few lucky ones are, but I guarantee you they didn’t wait for a lucky break before they started working on their art.

Don’t let money be the definition of success. If your goal is to be an artist, then every day that you create art, you’re succeeding.

You don’t need anyone’s permission or approval to be an artist. You just need commitment.

If you show up and work at it every day*, you’re an artist in my book, regardless of how much money you make or whether or not you ever get recognized for your work.

Now get to work.

*For me, making it a daily habit is essential, but if you’re carving out several hours every weekend to get deep into the zone and producing a lot of good work, that counts, too.

Other reading:
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield – essential reading for anyone who wants to do anything creative but is being held back by the forces of Resistance.
How to Be An Artist – a talk by Jerry Saltz, the Internet’s favorite art critic.
Your Unfulfilling Day Job Might Be the Best Thing That Has Ever Happened to You

Announcing The Slow Tour

Dear friends and family,

A lot has happened since I last wrote to you. I spent a lot of time meditating and clearing my head. I stopped reading, stopped going on Facebook, stopped watching TV shows, even stopped chasing girls. And it turns out that when you clear your head of all the internal chatter of the thousands of unimportant things that we focus on every day, you’re able to hear the still small voice telling you what’s important. I don’t know if it’s God, or the Universe, or just the innermost subconscious, but the principle applies – you can’t hear if you don’t listen.

And what I heard was that my software work enables me to live anywhere in the world, so I don’t need to be stuck in one place. So, I’m going to go on tour. It won’t be a tour in the traditional sense of jetting from one city to the next and playing at sold-out arenas. I’ve never really liked going to those kinds of shows, and I don’t think they’re a good fit for my style of music.

Instead, it’ll be what I call the Slow Tour: moving from one city to the next, spending a month or two to settle in and take the time to get to know people and make real connections, playing small intimate gigs that allow people to really feel the music and hear what I’m trying to say. And because I have my software work, it doesn’t need to pay for itself. It can be entirely focused on my purpose, which is to share music with the world.

I plan to tour 5 continents in the next 5 years, starting with the Americas, since I’m already here and I speak the three major languages of this side of the world (although my Portuguese is pretty rusty).

So right now, I’m in Minneapolis recording an album with a very talented producer that I met in Puerto Vallarta. The way I met him was pure fate – he happened to be staying at a hotel where I was playing with a classic rock band called The Black Sheep, and he came up to me afterwards and said “I bet you’re a songwriter aren’t you?” When the songwriter is ready, the producer will appear. We’ve recorded three songs already, and I’m excited to share them with you as soon as they’re mixed and mastered.

So it looks like the tour will be starting in Minneapolis. I don’t have dates set for any other cities – I’m just taking things one step at a time and seeing where the universe leads me. I’m doing all the planning and promoting myself at this point, but if you have a gig you’d like me to play, or you know someone in your city who wants to set one up, please get in touch.

As always, I thank you for your love and support

I Believe In Love

Yesterday, I got hired to sing for a guy who was asking his girlfriend to marry him. I was rolling my eyes and joking that I would write them a special song called “It’s all downhill from here” (which might not be a bad idea, actually). But when the big moment came and he got down on one knee and tears filled her eyes, I was fighting back tears, too.

And at that moment, I knew that despite everything it’s done to me over the years, every time it’s chewed me up and spit me out, I still believe wholeheartedly in love. Maybe I approach it with more caution these days. Maybe I’m a little wary about how quickly I give my heart away, or maybe I’m just extremely picky about who I give it to. But I’ll never stop believing in love.

Because the only thing sadder than a broken heart is a songwriter who doesn’t believe in love.

Wishing you love and success in the New Year.

Joseph Dane

The Lies We Tell On Facebook

Recent studies have shown that browsing Facebook often makes people feel depressed because they see all the fabulous things other people are doing and their own lives seem boring by comparison.

The truth is that no one’s life is as awesome as it appears to be on Facebook. We curate our public profiles carefully. We don’t post pictures of the mundane things we spend the vast majority of our time doing. Some people post status updates when something goes wrong and they want sympathy, but when does anyone ever post the truth: “I’m bored and lonely and I’m browsing Facebook because I need human contact”?

Take my life, for example. Looking at my Facebook profile, you might think it’s all rock and roll and hot chicks 24/7. I wish. The reality is that I spend most of my time alone practicing, working, and yes, looking at Facebook. I’m a sad, lonely man. Ok, I’m not that sad. I love my life, but it does get lonely sometimes. The stuff you see on Facebook is mostly an illusion.

Those pictures of me on the beach posing with models? I only met those girls because I got hired to do a modeling job because Mexico has very Euro-centric notions of beauty, and there aren’t a lot of light-skinned blue-eyed guys here in Puerto Vallarta. And the fact that those girls posed for a picture with me proves nothing – I haven’t been involved with any of them. But like most people, I only post photos of the fun stuff I do, because I like you and I want you to think I’m cool.

And we stretch the truth, too. A couple of weeks ago, when I tweeted “When hot girls drop by unexpected to bring you chocolate, the universe is telling you you’re on the right path”, that was a slight exaggeration. There was only one hot girl, chocolate was the only thing she came over to give me, and if the universe was telling me anything it was that I had gotten involved with someone I shouldn’t have, someone whose feelings I wasn’t ready to reciprocate.

So, when you’re looking with envy at someone else’s fabulous life, remember that you’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg, and that the tip has been carefully carved and polished to look pretty. You’re seeing a beautiful duck sitting gracefully on the surface of the water, and you can’t see its pathetic little feet paddling furiously underneath the water to stay afloat.

And then when you’re done imagining icebergs and ducks, you should get off of Facebook and go for a walk. Or call up a friend and hang out with them in person. Because Facebook is a very poor substitute for human contact.

To the drunk guy who insisted on taking the mic away from me the other night

I know that you’re obviously doing very well in your life if you can afford to stay at a hotel this nice, and I congratulate you. When the show’s over, you’ll go upstairs to your luxury suite and get in bed next to your hot girlfriend, then wake up tomorrow and do whatever the fuck you want. In a couple days, you’ll jet back to your mansion and go back to making tons and tons of money. Good for you.

When the show’s over for me, on the other hand, I have to pack up all my equipment, squeeze into a pickup with three other guys and drive two hours back to an apartment in the ghetto (that I can barely afford), pick the meat off of a chicken carcass, and then go to bed, alone. You see, I sacrificed everything I had in order to devote my life to music. I left my 6-figure job, my house, my friends, my family, everything.

Being able to rock out on stage once or twice a week with my band is one of the few luxuries I have left. So, you understand why I’m a little reluctant to share it with you.

If, on the other hand, you had been willing to share a little bit of your wealth with me and the band, like by maybe, I don’t know, tipping, that might change my mind.

Keep calm and continue practicing

Sometimes, as a musician, you have setbacks. Maybe your equipment has trouble. Maybe business slows down and you lose all your gigs in one week. The solution: keep calm and continue practicing. A musician is someone who plays music every day, so as long as I’m playing music, I’m fulfilling my life’s purpose. I don’t need anyone else’s permission or approval to be a musician.

Other times, things are going really well. You meet people who promise you the world, tell you you’re amazing, and that they’re going to open doors for you. What should you do in that situation? Keep calm and continue practicing. I’ve heard a lot of wild promises that never amounted to anything, but you know what always pays off? The time you spend practicing.

Because success is something shallow people chase after, but greatness comes from within you, and the only way to achieve it is to cultivate it a little bit at a time, every day. There are no lucky breaks that lead to greatness, no personal connections, no secret handshakes.

And if you don’t have the discipline to develop your craft now, when you have lots of free time, do you think you’ll magically acquire it when you start to become successful, and you have a million other distractions and obligations? I doubt it. Better develop good habits now.

Because like Aristotle said: “We are what we do repeatedly. Greatness, therefore, is not an act, but a habit”. Make it a habit to be great, and let success take care of itself.

What is Timbre?

(Note: My name is Joseph Dane and I live in Puerto Vallarta. I wrote this blog post for assignment #1 of the Intro to Music Production Course on Coursera)

I’ve played classical, nylon-string guitars since I was 11 years old. About a year ago, I bought a steel-string guitar for the first time, and I’m still having trouble getting used to the difference in sound. I have an electronic tuner so I’m sure that they’re both in tune. So, why does the steel-string guitar sound so different? So ringing, so bright, almost twangy, when compared to the warm smooth tones of my classical guitar?

Isn’t sound simply vibrations in the air? And if I tune both sets of strings to the same frequencies, shouldn’t the sounds they produce be identical? Why is this not the case?

The term timbre is used to describe the characteristics of a sound that distinguish it from other sounds of the same pitch and volume. The terms tone quality, tone color, and texture, are also used.

But what causes these differences in timbre? If sound is produced by vibrations in the air, how is it possible for us to distinguish two pitches that are played at the exact same pitch?

The answer is that “pitch” is a lot more complicated than we sometimes make it seem. We tend to equate certain pitches or notes to specific frequencies. For example, when I tune my guitar, I tune the A string to 440Hz.

In real life, however, almost no instruments are capable of producing a pitch that consists of only one frequency. The actual sound produced is a combination of pitches. The lowest, called the fundamental frequency, is the one that we identify as the pitch. But the other pitches above it, called partials or harmonics, play a very significant role in coloring the sound. Harmonics are frequencies that are whole number multiples of the fundamental frequency. So, when we hear a guitar string playing A, we’re hearing 440Hz, but we’re also hearing 880Hz, 1760Hz. And there are also other frequencies present called partials, which are not whole number multiples of the fundamental frequency.

How is it possible for one string to produce multiple pitches at the same time? The answer might blow your mind a little bit. You see, the string isn’t just vibrating along it’s entire length. It’s also vibrating along various different lengths at the same time. Sometimes you can see this with the naked eye, and sometimes the camera captures it pretty well, like in the first 30 seconds of this music video filmed by friend Richaud Valls:

If you need further proof, take a look at this spectrum analysis of the sound produced by the high E string on each of my guitars. Frequency is depicted on the x-axis, so each of the spikes in the graph represents a frequency of sound that is being emitted by the string at a given moment in time:

Notice that the one on the top, the steel-string, produces many more harmonics in the upper range. This is what causes my steel string guitar to sound so much brighter.

For a more extreme timbre contrast, consider the difference between whistling and singing. Below is a spectrum analysis of me whistling a C4 note, and below that is me singing it.

I think this demonstrates one reason why singing is way more popular than whistling: it produces a much richer, more complex tone. The natural harmonics present in the human voice create a sense of warmth and texture.

Another important factor in timbre, that’s related to harmonics, is something called inharmonicity. Going back to the example of the guitar string, we can theorize that the string will vibrate along different lengths, each of which is a whole number division of the overall length of the strength. In real life, however, the string is stiff and resists vibration. Some frequencies are resisted more than others, and this causes certain harmonics to be slightly out of key from what the “perfect” mathematical harmonic would be. However, in many cases, we are accustomed to this, so much so that makers of digital pianos have found that they have to reproduce the inharmonicity created by piano strings in order for listeners to perceive the sound as warm and natural.

This factor of inharmonicity also explains why the steel-string guitar sounds slightly out of key to me, especially on the higher strings – the steel strings are stiffer and more resistant, so they produce more inharmonicity. Most people who play steel-string guitars are completely accustomed to this. To them, my classical guitar sounds soft and dull, lacking the complex upper harmonics of steel strings.

One more factor in timbre is attack and decay. Attack refers to how quickly the sound reaches its peak volume and decay refers to how long it takes the sound to fade out.

Ojalá (Translation)

I’ve had this hauntingly beautiful song on repeat for the last few days so I thought I’d translate it for you all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB9wpKXvr1o

Ojalá (I wish)

I wish the leaves didn’t touch your body when they fell
So you couldn’t turn them to glass
I wish the rain would stop being the miracle that drips down your body
I wish the moon could rise without you
I wish the earth didn’t kiss your footsteps

I wish you would lose that permanent look
Your precise words, your perfect smile
I wish something would happen to erase you suddenly
A blinding light, a blast of snow
I wish that death at least would take me away
So I wouldn’t see you so much
So I wouldn’t see you always
In every second, in every vision
I wish I couldn’t touch you
Not even in songs

I wish the dawn didn’t let out screams that fall on my back
I wish this voice could forget your name
I wish the walls didn’t retain the noise of your tired way
I wish this desire would go away chasing after you
To your old government of flowers and dead people

I wish you would lose your permanent look,
Your precise words, your perfect smile.
I wish something would happen suddenly to erase you
A blinding light, a blast of snow
I wish that death at least would take me away
So I wouldn’t see you so much
So I wouldn’t see you always
In every second, in every vision
I wish I couldn’t touch you
Not even in songs

 

A poem I found the other day

The other day I stumbled across an old poem that I wrote when I was 20 years old, so almost 12 years ago:

 

He lived in average luxury

But life was not a breeze

And the pleasures that surrounded him

No longer seemed to please

The boredom grew and strangled him

It burned inside his mind

And so one day he packed his bags

And left his world behind

He drove for several hundred miles

Until the motor died

Then held out his thumb on the side of the road

And waited for a ride

While walking fast so he could feel

Within a state of change

That nothing could derail him now,

The heavens were in range

With many people he rode on,

Further and further south

For the tastes and smells of that strange land

Still lingered in his mouth

And he was tired of shivering

In an air-conditioned world

He longed for the stench, the dust, and fumes

Of those memories that seemed blurred

Like animals, who, homeward-bound,

Feel drawn and do not flinch

He felt his goal grow closer

With every passing inch

Before too long he reached the line

The temperature was rising

They stamped his passport and he passed

The experience was inspiring

For he had done what they all dream

He’d simply run away

His life belonged to him alone,

He’d truly seized the day

But now the question lingered:

How long could he remain?

Could he make this dream reality?

Or was he just insane?

When all his money has run out

Will he somehow make more?

Or have no choice but to return

To the life he lived before?

Would he have been far wiser

To have planned it all for years

And never do what we all would

Could we o’ercome our fear?

So this is your decision,

As the reader you have a say

Will he flourish in this brand new world?

Or will he fade away?

So ponder the significance

Of daring to rebel

From a world that tells us how to live

Yet keeps us trapped in hell

 

I think the lesson here is that you’re going to follow your dreams eventually, so you may as well do it while you’re young and unattached. Time is short. Don’t waste it.