Stand for what you believe in…

I have just watched this YouTube video by Damian Keyes.  If you’re a musician, particularly a very-not-famous one, it’s worth a watch.

 

In summary, he talks about how too many of us don’t take any risks, only doing what is expected of musicians in our genre or environment and therefore being completely un-noticed among all the “noise” of everyone else who is doing exactly the same things.

What does that mean for Secret Archives of the Vatican and Thousand Yard Prayer?  I’m sure this is going to take some pondering over time but I have a few initial thoughts.

• There is no point in us changing our music to make it more “commercial” or more genre-defined in order to, for example,  get on  Spotify playlists. If we become mainstream enough to get in there, we become bland and it’ll no longer be fun making the music anyway.
• Our unique combination of musical influences is what separates us from the middle of the bell curve where all the “noise” is.  It’s what makes us interesting, albeit to tiny group of people. Our challenge is finding more people but not just any people. We need to find fellow travellers.
• It’s better to have small number of people who are interested enough to journey with us (and maybe have some creative input too) than a large number of people to whom we’re just a part of the flavour-of-the-month. The larger group would just drop us when the next hip thing comes along.
• I should ignore my doubts!  What we’re doing is right! We make good, interesting music and we should keep doing so as long as it is fun to do.