Back in February I took a workshop called KYST – Keeping Your Shit Together – with Shannon Heaton and Laura Cortese at the Passim School of Music. It’s kind of a boot camp for people who want to be touring musicians, and was fantastically helpful both in inspiring me and in giving me practical advice about a number of things. They were doing another one this past Thursday, focusing specifically on publicity and branding, and I signed up. I’m not sure I even understand why it turned out as productively as it did for me (although they’re great teachers, which certainly helps!), but it was useful on a more existential level than I’d imagined. Perhaps I was at the right place conceptually for this workshop – the one other person there at about my stage of the music biz remarked at one point that I seemed really “focused.” We spent more than half the workshop doing a series of exercises designed to get us to figure out what our music is, and who would want to listen to it. The broader point is that it’s too exhausting to try to be everywhere and try to reach everyone, and so it makes sense to figure out who is going to want to listen to your music and focus on trying to speak to those people in places they go and languages they understand. We started by listing who our initial influences were (for me: Peter, Paul and Mary; Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Chad Mitchell Trio; slightly later Stan Rogers and John McCutcheon and also some traditional music) and who they are now (Dave Carter, Richard Shindell, Antje Duvekot, Jeffrey Foucault). And in the discussion we talked about WHAT it was that inspired us about them. So I noted that my early influences were community-oriented, proudly folk, and somewhat political. My later influences are especially literate (and complex), tradition-inspired, socially-aware but subtle in their politics, questioning, searching, with stories at least implicit. We then had to each describe the “vibe” of our music. I had trouble with that, initially, coming up with a bunch of the words from my previous discussion of my current influences, which is useful in describing my music but not really about the vibe. Eventually I decided that my music is optimistic, intellectual, searching, and somehow the phrase “Americana without the angst” popped into my head. Third, we had to do a free-write on why we’re doing this (music, songwriting, performing). And that’s where something really started to click. Here’s what I wrote, verbatim: “Because it matters. Because the characters need their stories told. Because we need a new way to look at the world, or a new perspective on the same old stories. Because there’s never been a time without music. Because I want to reach someone else the way music reached me. Because no one is alone when there’s music.” When I read that aloud, Shannon said the last line gave her goose bumps. The final part in this part of the workshop was to write a “mission statement” – something for ourselves (although it could be for others too) that sums up what we’re doing, and why. Here’s what I wrote in response to that: I sing because no one is alone when there’s music. I write because the characters deserve to have their stories told, and we all need a new way to look at the world. I create literate songs, inspired by tradition, complex but fundamentally optimistic, Americana without the angst. We may not be sure where we’re going, but we’ll probably figure out how to get there. There are bits of that I might change if I want to use it for public consumption (as part of a bio, perhaps). In particular, one thing I thought of while we were discussing these was to include something like “socially-aware without [political] preaching,” although I wonder if that kind of phrase would itself sound preachy. I also think I probably want only one of the clauses in the second line, but I can’t figure out whether to keep “the characters deserve to have their stories told” or “we all need a new way to look at the world.” If I kept the second but lost the first, I’d probably want to find a different way to indicate that my songs are often story-based. And I do need to figure out if “Americana without the angst” even makes sense, although I love the way it sounds. When I first went to the newbie orientation at the Northeast Regional Folk Alliance conference nearly three years ago the first thing I heard was that I can’t describe myself as a “singer-songwriter.” And especially not a “New England singer-songwriter with a guitar.” There are thousands of us – that doesn’t distinguish me from anyone else, and doesn’t describe what’s unique about my music. And since then I’ve been struggling to figure out how to describe what it is I do. The exercises they marched us through weren’t that unusual, but somehow they helped me think through this question in a way nothing else has. I suspect that my long search for a CD title probably helped prime my thinking – I wanted not only a phrase that sounded cool and came from one (or more) of the songs, but that accurately describes what the music in the CD is doing. So I’ve clearly been thinking about how to describe my music. I think it also helped that we were a pretty small group, so we actually had the time to talk through everyone’s answers (and Shannon and Laura did a great job pressing us to refine our answers and thoughts, and that was helpful even when it was happening with other people). The rest of the workshop had all sorts of other great suggestions. If you are my facebook friend and you just received a message to “like” my fan page, it’s because of this workshop. They had some good ideas about how to use facebook more productively and how to interact with both fans and potential fans with the idea of providing something to them. And we talked a bit about booking, negotiating, etc. But for me the real breakthrough was in thinking about how to describe what it is I do and why I do it.