Surrender
it just might save your life, 5/2/24
Wild Geese - Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
I’ve written my favourite song I’ve ever written. It’s not based on this poem, but it made me think of it. So here’s the poem instead of my song, just in-case UMG want to erase that from the internet too / s
And no, I’m not on tiktok’s side either, I hate all of this. You know what…you just can’t put your energy into it. We can’t fight it. I’ve seen loads of independent artists post - “is it our time to shine!!!” - well, no, only if you can bankroll yourself, because tiktok isn’t going to pay you, basically, and if it carries on the way it’s going, it’ll make sure that no part of the music industry can. So we’ll have a global music scene made up of wealthy musician hobbyists and...AI. Well, we already do, and it’s getting worse. Working class musicians in the UK have shrunk by half since the 1970s.
The Adrianne Lenkers of the world would never have broken in a tiktok based market, could you imagine Adrianne Lenker on her phone 24/7? (she’s all over the app now but that’s because she broke before it), but now there’s a million facsimiles of her lighting up the app since her songwriting course, all with very pure voices, pure guitar tones, pretty faces and shareable, universal lyrics - yes, lovely, and an intimate look into songwriters developing - but it’s obvious what works on tiktok…stuff that’s smooth and easy to listen to, people who are likeable.
My favourite music has always been ‘difficult’. Where are the pained musicians, the musicians who aren’t easy to listen to on a phone but stir something in you when you see them live, in a dimly-lit, atmospheric venue, the musicians who aren’t ‘commercial’, the shy musicians who can’t face taking constant videos of themselves but have important things to say, the 'something different’, the Rage Against The Machines, the PJ Harveys, the Sonic Youths, the cracking, pained voices, the people who can’t afford songwriting courses, the poetic, difficult lyrics that really, really make you think?
Well. They’re not on tiktok.
And if they are, it’s because people have picked them up outside of tiktok, like my good friend Hana Stretton. She hasn’t posted once, she just made something really good. It’s still possible!
It’s fine if you want to do tiktok and enjoy it. But when it eclipses everything, it means everyone starts trying to do the same thing, and it also means tiktok will never have an incentive to pay you.
There is always a reaction, though. I’m waiting.
I held a songwriter’s circle last week. I was telling someone there all about how stressed I was doing the amazing things Another Sky used to do, and how I couldn’t even enjoy it because I was constantly being told it wasn’t enough, that there was always this threat of everything ending held over my head if we didn’t ‘blow up’. Well, we didn’t blow up, and we didn’t end. And sitting in a circle of musicians sharing stuff in a beautiful studio my band built ourselves matters more to me than any of that stuff ever did. It’s clear that everyone still carries on making songs, even if they don’t use tiktok, even if they make no money from it. I dunno. If you can’t do tiktok, wait it out. Don’t give up.
The other thing I loved about songwriter’s circle was that it was IN PERSON! It’s so, so lonely having a music career online. It separates everyone.
Anyway, all in all, the system continues to pit musicians against each other. Tiktok is a hyper example of that. We are lonely islands competing for likes, feeling like shit when we don’t get them, seeing an endless feed of endless musicians doing better and never, never, never getting paid. To me, that’s a dystopia. It’s what we were all afraid of with social media. And I think that it’s our job, as artists, to rebel.
my captain stood beside me
he gave me good advice
he taught me to surrender
so I just might save my life
- Nora Brown, ‘Southern Texas’