measurable/immeasurable
on paradox (since we're all adults here)
Happy Friday everyone!
Thank you SO MUCH for all your notes and comments about the first single from the new album, “Chant (Come with Me to Higher Ground),” and everyone who came to our live shows. What a gift to be squished all together in a sold out room, singing and laughing, in this furnace of a world.
I’ve been having some great conversations on how bizarre it is to release work onto the internet. I’m very business minded (maybe to a fault?) - no qualms here about press lists and promotion, asking people to support and share the work. And yet, the back end of a release is so totally weird - I can see stats on how many seconds people listen to the song, open rates/click rates, the very minutia of attention.
It’s like, we put it all this work into this video, it’s beautiful, then on the internet it’s just basically the equivalent of a dog eating a watermelon.
So, I’ve been reflecting on what I know of this paradox of measurable/immeasurable. Years ago I heard Maria Popova, writer and founder of Brainpickings/The Marginalian, point out that what’s so strange about social media is that it slaps a number, a measurement, on something that is innately immeasurable - value of art, the impact on the human spirit. How many likes would Mark Rothko get for those big old squares, or Laurie Anderson’s squeals? The labor of my thought and love is now distilled by The Algo, deciding for you what matters and why. No. Thank. You.
And yet, it’s not to say numbers or social proof aren’t important at all - an artist friend of mine likened it to his commitment to weigh himself once a week, but only once a week. The numbers on a scale, view numbers on a video - these are one measurement, but not the only one. I don’t need to stare at them.
I’ve also been writing fan letters. My colleauge Paris Hurley/Object As Subject invited me to think of all the artists whose work has shaped me, transformed me, saved me, and they don’t even know. Holy god, I thought. Time to tell these people!
Lastly, as always, I find some ground in metaphors from nature. My neighbor and writer Daphne Cohn reflected with me - how many seeds does a plant make and spread into the world? Dozens, hundreds, thousands? And out of this, just a few seeds take root and become fully grown plants. How bizarre then, this pressure on any single seed of our creative work. Like the plant, can I focus on legacy, not likes? Life itself, not single seeds?
Love,
Melanie
wind in my sails
One of my favorite pianists/composers, Phil Cook, put out a new solo piano album.
Rereading Elizabeth Gilbert’s classic, Big Magic:
That’s a paradox of course, but we’re all adults here, and I think we can handle it. The paradox that you need to comfortably inhabit, if you wish to live a contented creative life, goes something like this: “My creative expression must be the most important thing in the world to me (if I am to live artistically) and it also must not matter at all (if I am to live sanely).
It matters/it doesn’t matter. Build space in your head for this paradox. Build as much space for it that you can.The TV show, Dying for Sex.
Lastly, some particularly fun responses to “Chant” from listeners: “As a second-generation moss gardener, I loved the moss connection. I will forward it to my mom.” And another, alongside some space-ship emoji’s: “BEAM ME UP!”