February 13th, 2021. I’m a lotta me.

Loving my snowy weather. Wouldn’t be playing out tonight anywho.

Well – I work with a bunch of different organizations and they all do ALMOST exactly the same thing – but different enough to not really be competing with one another – in ALMOST the same way – just different enough that I get confused switching “clients”.

And sometimes I feel weird calling them “clients” because they’re all different fish in the same sea that I Live in as a performer and artist and community organizer. Truly I can’t tell if I’m breathing in our out and whether I’m working for or against any one of them at any particular time.

Forsooth and verily!

At the moment two of these entities : Institute of Musical Traditions and Focus Music, are working at perpetrating ticketed shows. Unfortunately I feel like I’m in too-deep waters with both of them – and in a minor-enough position (while simultaneously arguably being the one making EVERYTHING work) that the things I’m learning from x won’t be adopted by y and z refuses to learn from either of THEIR examples leading me to reinventing my ABCs.

It’s frustrating, to say the least – and yet a lot of my problems are caused whenever I take my hands off the wheel. Am I really just the architect of my own demise?

I think I’m well-and-truly just sort of beyond my skill set and I’m not quite sure where to go from here.

Well – wait – I’m being unfair to myself. I am also having honest difficulty in finding my place in this world as a venue. At the very beginning of the Pandemic I was asked to speak by SAW (I continue to be honoured that Jay Keating and the Songwriters Association of Washington value what I have to say) and I basically talked about how this was a forced renegotiation of every THING that gets between an artist and their audience.

I come at the music scene from a lot of angles and each of them has to sort of see and respond to the pandemic in a number of ways. I’ve attacked it from both the most existential and true-to-me places as I’ve been able to but forgive me as I think out loud at you…

I’m first and foremost an artist. Or at least, that’s how I choose to see myself. Even on the days when I don’t feel like playing, or when it’s “just” a bar gig, or I’m getting firm “nos” from venues and festivals or I feel like I’m not writing enough, this is my self-definition. A lot of things are wrapped up in that – but from that angle the pandemic has been close to my most successful moments ever. We’re playing steadily almost entirely on our own terms. We have a small-but-devoted audience who donates and keeps us afloat. It’s not truly sustainable – but I have a little bit of contempt for those people with Real Jobs who think that THEIR Life is sustainable – because just as our fans may well eventually tune out, or our fingers freeze up or our voices crack – so might your employer drop out, dry up – or the stock market might crash, or there might be a pandemic… we’ve found a way forward and it almost feels more honest than anything I’ve ever done before.

Second I try hard to be a community builder. Whether that’s purely self-serving or not, even *I* will never know. Staying in touch with people, reaching out to a number of people I hadn’t heard from, calling my mom more often, finding a way forward with the open mic. This also has thrived in this context – and if anything has doubled in importance! People need this connection more than they ever have before – and I’m helping to create that so that feels pretty good.

Third? MAYBE I’m an audience member, but I’m worse at that than I’d like. And it should probably be FOURTH – except the thing that’s fourth is actually the thing I do a LOT more of the time… care about the least, perhaps AM the most – and that worries me to my soul.

Fourth? I’m a venue. Not sure how it happened. Slowly I went from being merely a promoter of my community to a promoter of some things that I don’t even like. I’m a pusher of things I don’t… DISbelieve in… but in some ways I’ve gone from being someone who couldn’t get through the gates to being a gate keeper and I don’t know what to make of that… and at THIS time at least, I’m unsure of what the venues can offer the artists.

As an artist and an audience member I ABSOLUTELY get that it’s important that they survive this. We’ll need them again and our country has NOT created a system by which any business can just Magrathea their way through bad times. But I don’t know that they ALL should survive. Though I certainly know we need MORE music and arts venues, not less – those venues need to be more than just a flat space or a wall that takes their cut and then pushes the artist back out on the street.

The free shows “sponsored” by venues have been very lucrative to artists – at least ours have. The ticketed shows have been dicier. I’m running one now where I probably have 1/5 of the audience we’ve had for any of the “open” ones and unless people are absurdly generous in their additional donations the artist’s are likely to make 1/5 what the last artist (with an open show) made. ilyAIMY’s got OUR first ticketed streaming show on Thursday. In that case the venue’s actually functioning AS a venue – they’ll run the cameras and the stream – and my soul can’t decide if that’ll relax me or freak me out. They’re also providing a guarantee… but if they weren’t so fair we certainly would’ve done better just playing our weekly webcast for tips.

Well – there’s four mes.

I’m a whole lotta me.