The Honest Artist
It's time to step out of the emotional mire
It’s the start of a new year in early-2023.
I was getting everything ready and prepared ahead of the release of Imprints 1 & 2, the combined physical edition of two EP’s I’d released during the previous 18 months.
An essential part of releasing music these days is how you’re going to promote it. It’s not just enough to write and record the music; in fact, that is a surprisingly small part of the task.
As music artists - and especially those of us from my millennial generation - we have had to contend with a huge amount of technological change throughout the time many of us have been writing and releasing music, performing and working professionally in music and the arts.
Trying to keep up with it all has been and remains exhausting.
Where this has been most keenly felt, I believe, is not actually in the tools, software or technology we use to do our work (although the development in those things just within the music world has been similarly rapidly transformational), but in the ways, methods and approaches we have had to adapt to in order to reach, connect and engage with our audiences.
When starting university in 2005, I remember how enthralled we all were with MySpace. The Arctic Monkeys were the new cool kids on the block, creating a wave of excitement by giving out blank CD-R’s to everyone at their shows, before Facebook took off in 2006. By 2008, Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing was on its knees, the world economy blew a massive gasket and we all started carrying what are essentially computers in our pockets.
Instagram arrived in 2010 and changed the game. It quickly became seen to as the default way of sharing our work with the world, and this impact has been seen across virtually every industry, not just music or the arts. It grew quickly, registering 100 million active users in early 2013, before launching video sharing later the same year.
By 2015 the drive towards using the platform for advertising is fully enabled, and folks…that was a decade ago!
This is not an essay or academic paper, so I’m going to go right ahead and say what I really think to that:
LOL.
And yes, let’s just not bother thinking about TikTok, Snapchat or anything else right now.
We often hear phrases such as ‘the landscape changed’, which does make me chuckle, mostly because for my entire adult life, I’m not sure if the landscape was ever stable and unmoved. If so, I don’t think our generation feels we ever saw that view.
As 2023 dawned, and finally emerging from some of the most challenging years of our lives, something I felt was becoming especially apparent was just how much social media was changing. In effect, it already had changed, and we’d had no say in it.
In part, this was due to the ever-increasing focus on platforms serving us content based on algorithmic principles, the result of which has seemingly meant we increasingly less able to see and interact with the accounts we follow.
Post-pandemic, it also felt there was such a worn-out feeling around peoples’ social media interaction, not least due to the fact we had all been spending so much more time using it in the pandemic years, substituting the actual engagement and human contact we were denied.
Allied to a certain sense of lethargy around trying to get people to care about seemingly anything, and the landscape certainly felt quite bleak. Of course, if you come at things from a similar perspective to me, it probably feels even worse now than it did then, but that’s another story.
Either way, I was hungry for a place in which to connect. I crave genuine, authentic interaction and engagement. I value time, space, and a mindset which follows the mantra: ‘it takes however long it takes’.
All of these things have gradually been eroded via Instagram and other social media platforms, in their efforts to create greater algorithmic reliance and ultimately profitability.
Which is how we end up here, celebrating two years of my Substack page The Cut Through. There are other platforms such as Discord and Patreon which offer opportunities to do similar things, but after some research and investigation, it seemed that Substack was doing the kind of things I was looking for to host something that allowed me to go deeper; embrace time and space; be less beholden to an algorithm; and for genuine conversation to occur, creating opportunities for connection with like-minded people, and building a sense of community around my work.
I’ve eschewed the temptation to migrate my main newsletter/mailing list to here, because I’m trying to do something different with The Cut Through.
I still send a general monthly newsletter with updates, tour dates, new releases etc., but what I think Substack is great for, and especially seems to match the kind of people who are here, is that it rewards the ones who are most engaged in what I’m doing.
It becomes such a crucial place - a meeting point, like a coffee morning or going for a drink at the pub - for the interactions and connections that are always so pressured by time when I’m out performing on the road and speaking to folks afterwards.
It’s very much:
A place to share,
A place to be free;
A place to be me.
At this point, if you’ve not read the introductory ‘Welcome To The Cut Through’ post to this Substack page, now is probably as good a time as any…
It helps to demonstrate why it was so important to set this up. There is something of the barely-masked impassioned speech/not a speech (prose, actually) about it.
The elongated text in the first section of this post is what is called setting the scene - creating a contextual viewpoint for the audience. It’s also a last-ditch attempt to get you to give up reading any further by dint of it taking so bloody long, that you won’t then continue reading the following section…which also happens to be probably the most honest I’ve ever been.
But also…I really want you to read it.
Confliction is very much at play here.
The Honest Artist
I’ve been treading this path as an artist in my own right for ten years now. It is not something I had envisaged doing, or even really pursued for quite a while.
I found it uncomfortable and incomprehensible - and to a small extent still do - that people would be interested in my music, like it, want to buy it and come and see me play it. Some of these people even seemed to appreciate what I said and wrote too.
A great deal of the artist journey is actually about coming to terms with lots of things; very often quite fundamental questions, answers and realisations about who we are as the people behind the art. Whilst it’s taken me a fair amount of time, I have to acknowledge and accept that my music is what it is because it comes from me. The two are inseparable; each informs the other.
This grates pretty hard against my introspective tendencies and my introverted behaviours, feelings, emotions and reactions, but I’m finally - though slowly - getting to a better place with it all.
What is most challenging about this, is that I think I will only ever be able to be the artist I want to be by accepting that the music and me are so intertwined; that one must - to some extent - come with the other. Not that my heart is completely wide open for all to see the wreckage of my internal monologues, or indeed that I allow everyone to become my best friend; but to come to terms with the fact my music is what it is because of me (however obvious that sounds), and if I want people to like my music, I essentially want them to like me too.
As you can imagine, this is quite tricky. Not least when the skeletal frames of imposter syndrome, self-doubt and a lifelong challenging relationship with self-worth are somewhat visible.
It’s not about becoming less grateful or being seen to be less grateful (can you see why my therapist was baffled by the rings I ran round myself?!). I am and will always be amazed/astounded/baffled how anyone would care about what I do.
This is because the internal question which has plagued me for as long as I can remember is: what if nobody actually cares?
Essentially, it is the fear of inconsequentiality.
But with some hard work, plenty of thought, lots of conversation, graciousness and kindness of plenty of peoples’ part and a healthy dose of self-reflection, I know, now (and it is so important to say this) it does anyone who genuinely follows what I do - and also myself - a disservice to sit and wallow in my own emotional mire. I am, slowly and gently, learning to get over myself.
I have been able to come to a place where I trust and believe that people really do care, just as I do, deeply. Which is actually - and bizarrely - a painful thing to type.
None of this was ever really the plan. I could not have dared to dream it.
I guess The Cut Through is the place where I am able to - again, slowly and gently; safely too - explore why people care, why I care, and why it means so much.
Thank you for being here,
Simeon
p.s. I’m ok x
You are one of the artists I go to when I need to put the wild energy in the barn and harness up some contemplation, strength gathering, and wonder. Reading about your process does the same, and helps me explore my own. Thank you!
Great read. And though I’ve never (yet) seen you live or done a show together your music resonates with me very much. Mono remains one of my favourite piano works.