After Mountain View, we had a few more stops to make, but we were definitely starting to feel the pull toward home. The car got quieter as our internal worlds shifted directions, and I found myself taking stock of the previous weeks. Some things on my mind:
As independent musicians, the experience of traveling together presents unique opportunities and challenges, both often within the same moment. Each of us were pushed outside of our comfort zones on this trip - by the places we visited, by communities we encountered, even by each other. I take for granted sometimes how accustomed I am to doing my work on my own, and doing it my own way, as well. This tour placed me in collaboration with new people in new places, which sometimes challenged the way I’m used to going about things, and yet always seemed to open my mind to something new to take with me.
At the same time, though, there were moments I realized I am too flexible and accommodating when working with other people. I know that this comes from growing up with divorced parents, traveling between two very different home cultures, and from other traveling experiences I’ve had in foreign countries, learning different languages and participating in different cultures. It’s funny, I always considered this kind of flexibility to be one of my more favorable attributes, but it occurred to me for the first time on this tour: I’ve become so good at adjusting to different environments, sometimes I don’t stay true to the kind of environment I want to create and foster with those I collaborate with. I find myself more prone to fitting in with how others do things, but this is not always the right thing to do. Especially as a traveling musician, you need to have a sense of who you are and what you want to stand for as part of the culture you bring into different communities.
Finally, when it comes to the pure joy of making music and making friends, I feel we touched on something important. As I’ve mentioned, one of our main intentions for this tour was to learn some of the music of the regions we visited. A post from our house concert in Mountain View documents some of those songs. But the process, as a whole, got me thinking about the relationship between the past and the present, between the songs we write today and the songs so old we don’t even know who wrote them. What does examining and preserving the past help us discover and understand about ourselves today? And how do we balance that preservation with the drive to move forward with new ideas and expressions of creativity? There is so much heart, life, and beauty in the songs we learned and heard from the people we met; perhaps a true folk song, then, is as much a testament to life of the past as it is to life of the present moment. Time may change a lot about the world we know, but I’m starting to see how music - and all the folk arts - remind us of the things that never change about life itself.
jbbartram-illu
theartofmadeline
turnnoffyourmind
gummygunk