This past weekend we attended a wedding in a lovely little town on the east coast of England. During the party, I ran into someone who I thought looked familiar. Within a few seconds of chatting and exchanging pleasantries, I realised they looked familiar because I'd met them once before, 2 years ago at another family gathering. My hunch was validated the moment they asked me a question I regularly get from people who know me but haven't seen me in a while.
“How's the music going?“
I have it on good authority that creatives of all stripes get this question regularly. It's a courteous question to ask when you turn up at a gig and you see a musician friend you've not seen in a year. You need only replace music with acting, i.e. how's the acting going (my wife gets this regularly), or writing (another one I get regularly), or painting, or dancing or your creative medium of choice, and the same sentiment applies.
The thing is, while I'm accustomed to being asked this question, I wasn't expecting it from this fellow at the wedding. I was surprised – pleasantly surprised, I should say – that they asked me about my music because I had no idea they knew I make music. Perhaps they clocked the surprise on my face, because they followed up the question with an explanation that they came across my music when my wife shared one of my posts about it on social media, and they loved what they saw and heard, but they hadn't seen any posts in a while, hence the question.
After thanking them for the compliments, I explained that I still make music – I still play my weekly shows and I'm recording my next album – but I just haven't posted about it in nearly a year because I'm taking a break from active social media use (if you're curious as to why, I've previously written about it here). Their response was one of joy and relief. They were pleased that I still make music, and doubly pleased that I was doing what I needed to do to stay sane and protect my well-being from the chaos machine. Inasmuch as I came away from that interaction with a warm glow and a spring in my step, it got me thinking about a feeling I've had for a while but struggled to put into words, which is the question of how to be creative in a world that's increasingly lived in a performative manner online.
Once every couple of days I find myself wondering whether I'm shooting myself in the foot for not shouting about all my creative exploits and activities online. Sometimes I feel like I am, like I'm missing out on gaining potential fans for my music or potential connections with like-minded creatives, like I'm being left behind while everyone else forges ahead on the packed-to-the-brim, algorithm-fuelled, engagement-driven train that is social media. And then I read a post like Catherine Price’s let's live life, not perform it, and I feel a touch of validation with my choices.
I recently had a conversation with a colleague which was quite illuminating in helping me realise that all I get from my passive existence on social media is just that – a place to exist online, like a digital billboard. Social media, as I currently use it, provides a digital space for me to store and update all the links to my creative exploits – my music and books and blogs (yes, including this one) – so that when I go play a gig somewhere and someone is impressed enough to ask if they can find any of my music on streaming platforms (as it happened this past week), all I need do is point them to my socials and say something along the lines of “yes of course, here are my socials, there you'll find links to everything else, thank you very much”. Most of the time I don't even need to point them to my socials because that's the first thing they ask for. This is increasingly becoming the norm in my experience.
I can live with this, at least for now. It may not be the ideal picture of how I believe we should create and engage with art as a species, but I have to accept that I, along with everyone else, live in the society we live in, and while I strive to build the world I want to live in, I have to make do with what we've got at the moment.
PS: In this week’s edition of sketches depicting events and conversations which may or may not have happened…
P.S.: My debut non-fiction book, Art Is The Way, and my middle-grade novella, A Hollade Christmas, are out everywhere now. You can get them in all good bookstores and from all major online vendors.