I know the reason I don’t enjoy performing anymore. It’s really not even that I don’t enjoy performing, as much as it is for whom I’m performing. Music is the most personal facet of my life and it’s what I take most seriously, and spend most of my time with. The reality is that I’m really just up on a stage parading myself around for the better end of an hour. The only time I can be personal is when I’m playing covers to strangers who don’t know me outside of my guitar.
My dream as a musician is to express myself fully through my music, and to have that expression reciprocated through the audience or the fans. I want them to feel what I feel, how I feel it. That just can’t happen where I go because the venues just aren’t the place for that. I could try to explain to you the intense isolation of having literally no one who is like you to communicate with, but I’m sure you all know how this feels. The tragedy is the only way to get rid of that feeling is through playing, and I can’t play because the audience can’t feel what I feel, or at least they shouldn’t. I’ve become afraid and distant to the one thing that brings me any real kind of relief. And now the whole world looks like a series of little voids to me, all because I can’t seem to escape the one I’m in.
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I have the opposite problem: I want to listen to music that explains how I feel. I love music (I do sing but don’t play any instruments so I don’t perform). And there is this amazing singer that I love, and she sings in different bars throughout the city. But there are always jackasses in the bars making too much noise or requesting stupid songs, it is hard for me to focus on her songs.
I wonder if it’s possible that there IS someone like me in your audience, who does really appreciate and want to connect, but you just don’t know it because the jackasses are too loud. (Kind of a metaphor for life in a way…the jackasses are always too loud….)
If there aren’t people in the crowd I’m playing to now then there have to be some in other venues. I know it’s a weird thing to ***** about complements, as if it gets anymore first world than that, but when people see me as an attraction more than anything else everything I do there feels so hollow. I’m playing to a demographic at least twice my age and the venue (and house band) are really equipped for blues and soul, which I can do just fine, but it’s not the kind of stuff I write or make myself. In fact I probably wouldn’t be so alone if I went out to these other places and met some people. It’s just now that my drive for it is shot it’s hard to take the initiative lol