Music of My Heart

Things are getting messy out there. Anxieties are high. Being online at all feels like it needs to be followed with a therapy session. 

Thank goodness for music. I was livestreaming earlier this week, and the topic of music came up, and I thought I might write something about my experience with it and how it has helped me become a better artist.

I subscribe to a service called Epidemic Sound that allows me to use their music under all my livestreams as ambient background tunes and on my speedpaint videos I make for all my art pieces. I often listen to their catalog while I work. I've discovered so many wonderful artists on that platform, and deeply enjoyed my hours-and-hours-long collected playlists! 

I've come to deeply appreciate contemporary acoustic guitar, solo piano, and gentle indie folk pop. I prefer music that doesn't have lyrics. I have always been attracted to what used to be called "Musak" which then seemed to mature and evolve into the more composed and creative "New Age" categorization. So my tastes have always leaned toward instrumental pieces. The work of Isobelle Walton, Daniel Kaede, and Eric Feinberg and Nylonwings have all fed my soul in different ways.

But simultaneously, I've deeply enjoyed singer-songwriters who told stories through their music, and have discovered many deeply enjoyable artists like Victor Lundberg, Loving Caliber, Candelion, Gamma Skies, and Cody Francis.

In the end, having good music playing around me while I work has been an important part of my development. In most costume shops where I worked, I often listened to music using headphones (too many people liked too many different genres of music to find a perfect fit), and it saved my sanity in many cases. The music of Nickel Creek, David Yazbek, Allison Krauss, Annie Lenox, Tuck and Patti, Renee Olstead, and Groovelily. I had a variety of artists I listened to. And they were all over the genre board. 

Nowadays I have a tendency to focus my interests into a more focused genre range, but everything I've heard and obsessed over has been deeply influential on me and shaped me and what I prefer to listen to today. 

And listening to music is entirely necessary sometimes. It helps me partition my attention toward doing tasks that need doing, keeping myself from indulging in my social media addiction, and generally uplifting my spirits to counteract the dark. It fills the space around me, and keeps me grounded while simultaneously lifting me up and out toward a liminal space that's focused on the moment at hand. It helps me concentrate. It helps my imagination unfold. And it makes me feel better. It is, in some ways, an integral part of my art-making process. 

I didn't always use the music I use now to help me make my art. When I was learning how to draw the human figure, I was going on YouTube to find figure modeling sessions I could use to help me get experience. The channel I found (Drawthis!) was full of videos of timed poses set to music that was mostly a genre called "House", specifically mostly "Tropical House" (like the artist Ehrling) which is a kind of dance club music that I wasn't familiar with. But it had an energy about it that was electric. And mentally stimulating. (YouTube eventually freaked out about the figure drawing and the channel ended up moving to Vimeo, which then also freaked out so I guess the best alternative is to actually attend a live figure drawing session like the ones at the Redwood Art Association by the Redwood Model Collective.)

I watched a LOT of those videos, and I did a lot of drawing. And now, every time I hear that genre of music, I get the itch to draw and create and study. It focuses me and gives me energy. And while I could listen to the same genre during my livestreams, I realized that perhaps the kind of art I was doing lent itself more toward a folk, earthy, less urban and slick packaging. And listening to music that was less frenetic was less exhausting. 

All I can hope for you is that you find the music that has a direct line to your heart and soul, and that it inspires you to create and be expressive. And that I hope it's not artificially generated. Listen to the work of real humans, real people, with souls and hearts of their own. 

It can help make the mess out there feel less oppressive.