Papering The Walls With Song

There is a well known story about the hyperfinflation in Germany in the 1920´s. After mass
reproduction of money during WW1 the Mark became so inflated that people used
notes as wall paper - amazing to imagine Marks worth a million per note, lining the
walls where you sleep, breathe & love.

It is an analogy I think of sometimes as a modern musician - especially living in Berlin. Song has lost all its value, a strange irony, that something as precious as a song, has become a casualty of technological advance.

It is a brave new world for musicians. Everyone knows that the music business was in
free fall years before the financial crisis of 2008. My publisher groaned on the phone
to me recently - `its just not fun anymore ´. Well unlike him I never knew the careering
around in first class during the 1980´s (thank God).

But we are in a paradoxical time where music is easier to make (and that does not
mean the music is good), there are more bands and musicians than ever, and yet
to make a dime from a song is harder than it was, well, since pre-Beethoven.

So what do you do? You quit complaining and you get on with it, you roll, you man-up,
you find a way. Making music is a privilege, and if you need to make it enough you will
get it made, and if what you have to say has enough heart or just matters, then it will
find its own way.

There is a quote I love by Jonathan Coulton:

If art has an audience, and if that art is allowed to go wherever it wants to, it will eventually find its way to where it´s supposed to be.

It is the idea that once a song is written, it is set upon a journey, the destiny
of which is the receptive audience who awaits it.

Romantic notions aside, it can be quite overwhelming when starting out - the amount of noise on the net, the quantity of music put out. How do you get your head above water in a storm? But if a song is good it takes on its own life. That is what keeps me going anyway.

I look back on the last 3 years of Berlin, at all the fury & playing many gigs,
& lost nights, & yearning & and random beautiful meetings & encounters, friendships made & broken - and it is a full tapestry. And yet it still feels like just a beginning, and that is the
beauty - to be a part of the great debate, to be in search of the great idea, to embrace
the meaningless or sometimes purposeful days of our lives and feel humility as they
interchange, weave and wind, and somehow correct us, put us on our paths and lead us
somewhere. As Herman Hess puts it:

I look upon the gallery of my life and see that it turns not in trifles, but on the stars.

Anyway, for now I am just glad to be a part and to be living here. And to be
angry at the toxic red sludge & all our ineffable human folly...and  to be joyful that for some
reason I live in a time where, for some reason, I am papering my walls with songs.

P.S If anyone is interested to read a great book about what it was like in Berlin
in the 1920´s during the hyper inflation, check out Hans Fallada: Little Man, What Now?
A beautiful book about genuine human hardship in impossible times.