10 min
Singing loud and saying everything Play It Like It's Music
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- Music Interviews
"What Freud mistook for her lack of civilization is woman's lack of loyalty to civilization"
- Lillian Smith
Moving forward: On self-silencing and un-silencing.
A savvy cultural commentator might say that David Bowie died an extremely artistic, expressive death when he timed his final album release to coincide with it.
Alongside all of the grief, you could indulge yourself in thinking - maybe just a little - that Blackstar wasn't just an ambitious album but also an extremely powerful and innovative PR move by a well-resourced and celebrated man known for making powerful and innovative PR moves. All these years later I still think to myself, “wow, no one will ever top that one”.
A fitting end to the Hero’s journey of a great musical hero.
It’s a thin theory, and only possible to contemplate if you sidestep all of the struggle that such a “move” might have required. And only if you disregard the real grief of a real human’s death mourned by many millions of real people.
You’d have to have a sick sense of humor like me.
But even someone with my sick sense of humor has to simply shut up when contemplating Sinead O’Connor’s recent passing. There are no theories for it. I can’t say anything, I can only listen. So that’s what I’ve been doing.
If a musician’s death could ever make me feel the opposite way that Bowie’s did, we just had one. But don’t listen to me, listen to her:
Album: Sinead O’Connor, “Throw Down Your Arms” LP (2005). Sinead + Sly & Robbie do the reggae hymn book.
Audiobook: “Rememberings” (2021) by Sinead O’ Connor. Listened on the drive through Arizona and New Mexico. Haunting and heartbreaking.
On making true sounds:
I finally made it to the east coast and I'm finally starting to get a pretty clear idea of the mission here moving forward. Let me share it with you:
In the first 80 episodes of the podcast I was asking each guest the following two questions:
1. Why do you play music?
and 2. What separates the professional from the amateur?
I had my reasons. Those two questions were relevant to me at the time, mainly because I was deeply questioining my own original reasons for starting down the professional path of a musician. I was going through some grief around having hit some dead ends in my own twisted creative path as well as certain collaborations that hadn't worked out. I had totally lost confidence in my own musical voice and ability, so I was turning to the folks I knew who seemed to have it together. Asking them how they did it.
Thanks for reading "Play It Like It's Music" by Trevor Exter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
We got some great answers to those questions. I am super proud of those interviews, and I stand by my reasons for conducting them in the way that I did. Many of you out there found them helpful, and they are still back there in the feed for you to listen to any time that you want.
But they also catalyzed some healing in myself and an eventual evolution which made that particular line of questioning less relevant. I decided to pause the podcast, partly because we outgrew the format.
What do I mean?
Well for starters: the question of professionalism has totally expanded into our wider environment and into a larger set of questions about general survival, purpose and prosperity in an age when the actual bottom has dropped out of the music industry we used to know.
Consequently the very ideal of professionalism is taking some hits.
Music is totally still a profession, but the core approach of professionals who make our living in music has exploded into a million methods. The means of making a living as a musician keeps shifting. Gatekeepers have multiplied, while their standards for admission are less and less musical in nature.
Musicians are adapting, and for many of us that means getting a day job or starting other businesses. It was true before. We've always been hustlers, but now it is simply no longer enoug
"What Freud mistook for her lack of civilization is woman's lack of loyalty to civilization"
- Lillian Smith
Moving forward: On self-silencing and un-silencing.
A savvy cultural commentator might say that David Bowie died an extremely artistic, expressive death when he timed his final album release to coincide with it.
Alongside all of the grief, you could indulge yourself in thinking - maybe just a little - that Blackstar wasn't just an ambitious album but also an extremely powerful and innovative PR move by a well-resourced and celebrated man known for making powerful and innovative PR moves. All these years later I still think to myself, “wow, no one will ever top that one”.
A fitting end to the Hero’s journey of a great musical hero.
It’s a thin theory, and only possible to contemplate if you sidestep all of the struggle that such a “move” might have required. And only if you disregard the real grief of a real human’s death mourned by many millions of real people.
You’d have to have a sick sense of humor like me.
But even someone with my sick sense of humor has to simply shut up when contemplating Sinead O’Connor’s recent passing. There are no theories for it. I can’t say anything, I can only listen. So that’s what I’ve been doing.
If a musician’s death could ever make me feel the opposite way that Bowie’s did, we just had one. But don’t listen to me, listen to her:
Album: Sinead O’Connor, “Throw Down Your Arms” LP (2005). Sinead + Sly & Robbie do the reggae hymn book.
Audiobook: “Rememberings” (2021) by Sinead O’ Connor. Listened on the drive through Arizona and New Mexico. Haunting and heartbreaking.
On making true sounds:
I finally made it to the east coast and I'm finally starting to get a pretty clear idea of the mission here moving forward. Let me share it with you:
In the first 80 episodes of the podcast I was asking each guest the following two questions:
1. Why do you play music?
and 2. What separates the professional from the amateur?
I had my reasons. Those two questions were relevant to me at the time, mainly because I was deeply questioining my own original reasons for starting down the professional path of a musician. I was going through some grief around having hit some dead ends in my own twisted creative path as well as certain collaborations that hadn't worked out. I had totally lost confidence in my own musical voice and ability, so I was turning to the folks I knew who seemed to have it together. Asking them how they did it.
Thanks for reading "Play It Like It's Music" by Trevor Exter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
We got some great answers to those questions. I am super proud of those interviews, and I stand by my reasons for conducting them in the way that I did. Many of you out there found them helpful, and they are still back there in the feed for you to listen to any time that you want.
But they also catalyzed some healing in myself and an eventual evolution which made that particular line of questioning less relevant. I decided to pause the podcast, partly because we outgrew the format.
What do I mean?
Well for starters: the question of professionalism has totally expanded into our wider environment and into a larger set of questions about general survival, purpose and prosperity in an age when the actual bottom has dropped out of the music industry we used to know.
Consequently the very ideal of professionalism is taking some hits.
Music is totally still a profession, but the core approach of professionals who make our living in music has exploded into a million methods. The means of making a living as a musician keeps shifting. Gatekeepers have multiplied, while their standards for admission are less and less musical in nature.
Musicians are adapting, and for many of us that means getting a day job or starting other businesses. It was true before. We've always been hustlers, but now it is simply no longer enoug
10 min