What you do does matter

In the past week I have had this nagging thing at the back of my mind. I am a few days late on my deadline to finish my fourth album. I had some creative struggles along the way, but the real fact I believe was time management. Ok I admit that my schedule between live shows, sessions, blogging, promotion and all the rest is pretty crazy one, but I did feel people around me and myself as well putting the finishing of the album lower on the priority list… Now today is the day, after finishing this blog post I am going to lock myself in my small studio and get done what needs to be done 🙂

This got me thinking though, how easy it is for us musicians to brush aside the importance of what we do. Sure our music is very important to us, but how do we communicate this to those around us? The first mistake is how we value things, how we prioritise. It’s easy to dismiss the importance of a creative process, as you do not see a direct financial return from it. It is easy to say we should do something else as there is no guarantee that this will make money for us.

This week a lot of my blog posts have circled around the subject of financial profit in the music industry and how us musicians are the last to get paid. We like to shake our fist in the air about it, but still we prioritise our own work based on what makes us money before what is important for the long term growth of our career. Sometimes we need to just tell everyone around us that this is important to us, and for now everything else needs to wait. It might sound cruel, it might sound irrational, but if you are not true to yourself, then you cannot be true to anybody else.

So let’s put some value to it 🙂 And this mind test is for everybody, not just musicians, play with me for a second. There are things in this world that are more important than financial profit. Let’s imagine for a second that I would take away the music from you. let’s imagine that for a one month you would not be allowed to listen to music, not your records, iPods, Spotify, your music library on your computer, no YouTube, no TV with music, no theme tunes, no background music in bars, no music in radio, no live shows, no buskers on the street, no humming of tunes, no whistling. Now imagine it, I mean really try to picture your day to day life without music. What would it be like?

Did I scare you yet? I know there are people who really does not care for music, but to go to the extreme of not having at all, my guess is not many would cope.

So my dear musician, what you do does matter! Sure there are all the great ones and you are just one guy or a girl writing songs in your bedroom, but that is how all of those great ones once got started. So please from time to time, put your music first.

And for the rest of you music loving people out there, in my career I have been lucky enough to be complimented time and time again over my music, but I like to tell you all that when you do, it really does mean the world to us. You keep us musicians going 🙂

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get three of his free songs go HERE and click Download