Inside The Musician’s Mind

The musician’s mind can be hard to dissect at the best of times. In fact, we are often told that we sometimes speak a completely different language.

I remember a conversation I had with my high school music teacher who used falling leaves of a tree to describe dramatic modulations, key changes, tension and release in a Bach Partita.

I sat next to her in the car amazed at her ability to describe each movement of the Partita so vividly as if it were alive right in front of me. Fast forward 2 hours later, I tried explaining the same thing to a friend of mine, and they had no clue what I was talking about.

From life metaphors to inner awakenings, to random quotes from great philosophers out of nowhere, no wonder we are misunderstood creatures.

However, believe it or not, musicians are not that dissimilar to everyone else. In fact, we go through the same everyday struggles, worry about the same things and try to make all ends meet that most people do on a daily basis, including:

- Paying the bills

- Finding job stability

- Finding time to spend time with family and friends

- Maintaining a healthy relationship with someone

- Pursuing a fulfilling career path

We just have a different career choice, that is not your typical 9-5pm.

Picture this: you’re at a dinner table with your friends who are accountants, lawyers, doctors, business managers and IT engineers. Hypothetically all these friends of yours have stable jobs having struggled for 3 or 4 years after uni to land a job. Then you have another friend who’s a “struggling musician” who has been battling for nearly 10 years and is going through a bout of depression.

Almost every musician I know personally has been in a situation like this to some degree, and when they attempt to try and open up, they are told to “make a plan B” or “find a part-time job” or “a real job”, and “perhaps it’s time to give it up and move on”.

But here’s the thing:

- We don’t have a plan B

- Being a musician is our real job

- And we can’t just give up on our livelihoods like you wouldn’t just give up a well-paid office job, overnight.

On the surface, it seems like all musicians do is sit on their backside, play their instrument, and go perform at a concert for 3 hours each day. The reality is, we are on this never-ending loop of trying to keep our heads above water. If we stop paddling for even just a second, our livelihoods could be taken away from us. Before the pandemic, this was a nightmare that we hoped would never happen, but unfortunately, the pandemic has turned this nightmare into a reality.

Not every musician can afford to be like Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift or Adele as much as we’d like to. For most musicians, we just want to be able to do what we love and share that with the world, without having to worry about where our next paycheque is coming from, and whether or not we will be up all night stressing about our career opportunities.

For most musicians, we just want everyone to understand us, and to understand that what we do is real, we go through the same everyday struggles as everyone else and that means our stress, anxiety, struggles and depression are just as real as the everyday man.

Previous
Previous

What is the Mental Musician?