There's nothing like doing something wrong to learn how it might be done better.
Trust the tale, not the teller.
I'd make a terrible practitioner of any religion in any formal setting.
Gandhi was only minding his own business when he took a walk to get some salt and ended up overthrowing the British Empire. You can't set out to overthrow an empire, but if you have to get some salt then get some salt. If you have to write some independent songs that are honest, just write them. If you have to do a day job stacking shelves, so be it.
I've been getting pretty focused about that recently, and even considered doing a masters degree to polish up the craft. I've been pretty lucky in that I seem to have found people online who are willing to constructively tear it apart for me, and indicate its weaknesses.
I took the process of doing as much myself as I could like a duck to water. I set up my own label and publishing, etc, and it was a fun learning curve two decades ago.
In some ways it's taken me decades to come clean and make honest work - and still to this day, sometimes I find myself wanting to hide behind my work and deny the more biographical aspects.
The statistics of mines that need clearance are staggering but the truth is it's a challenge that is absolutely doable.
My faith, inasmuch as I have any, is more like a kind of Joseph Campbell thing, and even that frequently finds itself tested to oblivion in siren waters.
I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.
Oh yeah - for sure - hardly a week doesn't go by when I don't hear something wonderful that someone has made in some low-budget situation, primarily with a view to selling a few hundred copies at their concerts.
I feel like I'm stepping into a place of spiritual contemplation every time I enter a studio; it's always had a certain magic to me that has never worn off with familiarity.
Now that I'm staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I'm less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for creative writing.
Now I'm having to live with sales of around 50,000 per album - but I'm pretty content with my place in the general scheme of things, even if it's meant I don't drive a fancy car and can't afford grand vacations.
The school was prone to dishing out punishments for anything creative that didn't fit with expectation - I just followed the logic and figured the folk club was probably much the same.
I don't know to what extent someone can BECOME an artist - you either are or you aren't - and if you are you'll HAVE to make your way to some kind of sickly light, no matter how terrible the soil you were seeded in your nature will out somehow.
I didn't really escape that gravity until I moved 300 miles south to go to college at 18, where authorship no longer seemed something liable to induce vengeful punishment.
If you feel driven and compelled to make your work and to be fiercely original and have something unique to say, in a compelling way, then chances are the helpers will be there for you the doors will open some, the ice will crack.
Whatever the opposite of regret is best describes how I've always felt about that decision - it opened me up to a million creative opportunities I needed to experience away from the bull and distorting mirrors that fame engenders.
I work in the margins. The margins are where you'll find the nice people. You'll find real friends. You'll find honesty. You'll find integrity. You'll find relationships that will last you for a lifetime and will be there to support you in the bad times, which are the only relationships that matter anyway. Relationships that are all about power and money aren't worth having.
