If you’re a songwriter, you’re likely a songwriter for life.
That will be true whether or not you make songwriting your public occupation.
In fact, many people find that songwriting occupies a “professional” place in their lives at some times and an “amateur” place at others. Although it seems natural to want to label our songwriting lives in neatly-defined boxes of “hobby vs. career”, or “private vs. public”, it’s often not necessary to do that, and those boxes can be a distraction from the more important goal of creating a life that’s manageable and sane.
Life circumstances have a funny way of changing. If you love writing songs, that fact will not deter you from writing: in fact, it’s likely to provide you with more inspiration. The challenge it creates for you is one of priorities. When do you perform and record? How often? For whom? Why?
To help explore these questions, I present a short debate between two sides of the “to gig or not to gig” question.
Argument #1: Get Out and Play
It’s very important for every songwriter to get out and play in front of people as often as possible. When you play your songs for others, they start serving a greater good…greater, that is, than the good they’ve already served by influencing you and how your own life will unfold.
Playing your songs in public is a way to validate their effectiveness. When people listen intently and applaud enthusiastically, you know you’ve connected with them. A song is sent out into the world, and when it connects with an audience it has fulfilled its promise, or started to. The interchange of experience and emotion that comes when songs are played for others is an essential part of the songwriting process; without it, songs are like diary entries: valuable and maybe even extremely well-written, but destined to remain private, even secret, acts of creativity.
So get out and play your songs wherever you can: in “official” venues like cafes, bars and clubs, and “unofficial” ones like homes, community halls, shopping malls, street corners and anyplace you can set up and play.
Not only will you find listeners, but you’ll have an opportunity to practice your songs…and when somebody is listening, you’re likely to practice with more discipline and energy than you might at home by yourself. With more practice, your songs will become better known, not only by the community at large, but by you. Their messages will become more clear to you with repeated playings, and you’ll emphasize the right parts—and deliver the song more effectively to every audience. You’ll also memorize the words and the chords, and your playing and singing will improve.
So, make sure you play your songs in front of as many people as possible, as often as possible.
Argument #2: Stay In and Deepen
It’s not very important that you get out and gig all the time.
Other people will tell you that you should: in fact, that you must if you want to “get anywhere” in music or “get your songs into the world”.
They say that if nobody ever hears your songs but you, they won’t do a whole lot of good…and if you rarely play for others, it’s harder to stay in practice when it comes to playing and singing. If you don’t play out very often, you might actually forget the songs you’ve written, which would be a terrible thing, because your songs are commodities and the key thing is to get them moving in the marketplace and in the flow of contemporary ideas and culture. It’s very important to gig as often as possible.
Except that in the big picture, it’s not important at all.
A song that is heard only by its writer is still a song, and its beauty, truth and meaning is not diminished by the fact that it has not found a wider audience.
If more gigs, bigger gigs, and better gigs are not forthcoming for the songwriter, it’s essential that he not start feeling inadequate and sad…a state-of-being which kills creativity.
It’s very easy to start measuring our worth by the number of performances on our websites, whether or not we actually need those gigs to earn a living.
Instead of judging ourselves by external standards, we can start to ask ourselves if we’re living our lives in a healthy and responsible way, and whether our songwriting is helping us to do that.
Despite our limited human perceptions, and the messages of our culture, life is actually not a competition!
It's an opportunity for growth, an invitation to act in more conscious and compassionate ways…to come to understand ourselves and our world, and to get better at caring for each other.
That stuff, the real stuff of living, has less to do with “getting your songs out there” and more to do with “getting your songs in here”—into a deeper and more meaningful place.
