What you don't see from the front camera... (Patreon)

Rufus forever stealing the show!

The song I’m singing here gives me a lotta feelings. I've attached an mp3 download.

Everything is Free, by Gillian Welch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PFV6dj-q3E

It's about Welch's struggle with this expectation we should just play music for the passion and not the money. Written during the rise of internet downloads and streams, when it suddenly became much harder to actually make earnings from recordings. Even for well established, mainstream artists. As we all know, Spotify offers literal fractions of pennies for streams. All my music and tutorials are available on YouTube for free and (so far) not monetised.   

But singing the song also made me think about the "value" of art, and my "worth" as an artist. Though I completely relate to the song, and think it is extremely important for the world to recognise the arts as a "real job" and an essential part of our existence as humans, I also don't measure the worth of what I create by its monetary value. I also think it is an incredible shame that many of us "consume" art more than we "create" it, and I think we need to remove this idea of "performer" and "audience" and go back to our roots of creating art together.   

Being a "singer" has become a job, an aspiration, or something that that talented lady does on stage, separate from me, so I can watch. But actually, singing is how we share stories, how we connect with each other, how we maintain and grow a sense of culture and community.  Anyway, this song brought a lot of mixed feelings and interesting conversations. 

It's weird when your passion and your job intertwine. I don't wanna make people pay me to spend an hour with me making music... I feel so lucky to have the opportunity to connect with so many people around the world. This connection, the gratitude and gifts I receive in return, seeing people play and find love in music, for me, is enough. But also... I gotta pay my rent, ya know? I have a lotta feelings about it!  

Just my rambling thoughts on this song and the arts. THANK YOU, from the bottom of my heart, for supporting what I do, for being here cheering me on, for being amazing friends. I feel so lucky.