How NOT to Share Feedback With Artists

My search for performance coaches has not yet yielded a viable one. These individuals are highly accomplished and trained individuals whose fees are like sledgehammers, something someone making a living in India will struggle to meet.

Hence, I turned to my extended friend circle and asked around. Basically, I texted a select few friends to query if they had such a skillset, and if they did, I asked if they would be interested to coach me. In all fairness, it was not so difficult to find the likely candidates. Both the people I got in touch did have the skillset, one of them, said they could work with me. Yesterday evening, I had my first meeting with the one.

It’s a he. It’s a he who I have had a physical relationship with. It’s a he who has been there for me, by my side, in some of my darkest phases. It’s a he who has given me unforgettable experiences of various kinds. It’s a he who has been consistently welcoming toward me in the several versions that I have iterated myself through. I’ll refer to him as SP.

SP, in a nutshell, said that the most important thing that I need to do is to believe in myself and my potential. He wants me to be confident to ‘market’ myself and work on my networking skills. He thinks that one needs to have a certain blend of arrogance and indifference toward the world. Our meeting ended with the promise of a few more at the very least.

I was also left with an assignment. Somewhere in the middle of my narration of what I thought ailed me in terms of sharing the output of my creativity with the rest of the world, I mentioned that I have had a few traumatic experiences while attempting it previously, with some of them being with people what one would refer to as “friends”. He asked me to write down two such experiences, which will immediately follow this. I am to share these with him and we are to discuss these in our next meeting.

Traumatic Experience #1

Age: 21
Year: 2001

I had just recorded and mixed my first original song called Castle Without A Rock. The song/lyric writing, and all the performances (guitars, bass, drums, and vocals) were by me. The song itself was about the experiences that we (my close friends and I) had had around our first-ever concert as part of the New Year’s Eve celebrations for the coming of 2000 (Y2K).

The landmark album Parachutes by Coldplay had been released only a few months before, and the hit song Yellow was on everyone’s minds. The reason I mention is that I thought it was a masterful song arranged relatively simplistically, which is what I was attempting to go for in my song.

It was late afternoon on a mid-summer day. As soon as I finished a decent mix for the song, I exported it in the mp3 format, copied into a portable USB drive, and ran over to my friend’s place—our usual meeting place.

The house was that of a friend who was much older than the rest of us. He was a music connoisseur and had been collecting CDs and records for years. He had a high-end hi-fi at his place. On that particular day, we were three—the older friend, a younger friend (who since then went on to be a drummer in many bands I have played with), and I.

I excitedly announced what I wanted to share with them, and I figured out a way to play the song on the hi-fi. My friends did not demonstrate any excitement. In fact, halfway through the song, the older friend started laughing, which prompted me to stop the playback. In the ensuing conversation, I explained what my intent was (in terms of artistic style). I only remember getting more chuckles and laughter. At the end of my explanation, I remember receiving some critique (on the following lines) from the older friend:

“Such work will never be received well. You might as well as give up on writing/performing music. You shouldn’t set high hopes for being a professional musician.”

Years later, I would take courses on Coursera, with some of them being on songwriting and musicianship. One of the important aspects of every such course is the importance of learning to share feedback with peers. The entire focus is on the need for kind, constructive feedback, with strong advice against harsh and hypercritical ones. I guess my friend did not know this, despite him being a popular and successful teacher in accounting.

I don’t remember my younger friend sharing anything on the song. This despite him and me having been jamming regularly for several months and having dreams of being in a band and writing songs. Years later, I remember him coming around and admitting to how highly he thought highly of some of my later work.

This incident was followed by another traumatic incident with the younger friend’s family. These two incidents were triggers for my eventual move away from Thiruvananthapuram. The incident also started the gradual severance of the friendship with the older friend. Although I continued to work with and be friends with the younger one, things have never been really the same.

Traumatic Experience #2

Age: 28
Year: 2008

I had just released an EP of five of my songs on MySpace. Although I was sure of the quality of my songwriting, I was aware of my production and performances not being up to the mark for radio airplay. The songs were actually recorded with the aim of a submission for a talent hunt by the premier indie record label then. The idea was for me to showcase my work so that they would consider me signing with them as an artist under their label.

Back then, I was actively involved in networking in the music scene, being part of two popular bands on the rise. I also personally knew many active musicians and was friends with some of them. Internet chats were popular. I had just struck up a chat conversation with one of the scene guys on MySpace.

He was someone who I respected and looked up to at that time. He was funny and charming and was part of at least two successful bands. Later on, I’d realize that he belonged to a clique of musicians who were fortunate enough to know each other from their school days, with their collective might propelling them to the top of the indie music scene.

I remember thinking that I will ask his opinion as to how to go about taking my project on live touring, considering that he and his bands were doing that consistently for a few years. I had shared the links of my songs and asked him for his opinion. The lasting memory that I have of this conversation is him telling me this:

“Who is this fucking singer, man! He is so baaadd, oh my god. I have never heard worse singing in my life!”

I left the conversation with him and have never talked to him properly since then. This crushed me in ways that I can’t even describe. It triggered my reluctance to share my work with my friends and “scene guys”. It also created roadblocks for me to share songwriting ideas with my then band, which I partially overcame in the coming years.

Like with the previous incident, I experienced a life-changing traumatic event soon after. This time, I would almost lose my partner to near-fatal health complications during his visit.

He had come to Mumbai from New York City, with the intent of figuring out a way to eventually move to India to be with me. In the course of the next few weeks in India, and in the following months in the US, he would go through multiple devastating health events which would render him in a state of dementia, where he would not even recognize me or our relationship. This wiped out our bank accounts, and would eventually result in me failing my exams for the first time in my life.

The series of unfortunate events triggered the darkest phase of depression I think I have gone through. I would spend several months toying with the idea of suicide. Eventually, with the help of some close friends and the partially-recovered partner, I started taking medications for depression. I somehow found the courage and drive to give my post-graduation exams, and would eventually pass them on second attempt.

On the positive side, this incident also guided me to explore ways to improve my voice, and I eventually even found a vocal coach, who restored a lot of the confidence that I had lost. Eventually, I would find the courage to share my work with a select few friends, and most of them would end up having startlingly different opinions.

The band that I am in right now includes two such people. I remember having played my songs on the car stereo on a ride back from a rehearsal. I was only seeking feedback on my choice of guitar tones. After listening to a few songs, they would tell me how awesome these songs are, why I hadn’t yet shared these with them, and that they would love to work on these songs in a band project.

PS: The one thing that I realize after my first meeting with SP is that performance coaches (and performers, as a matter of fact) are those individuals who have figured out ways to overcome their self-doubts and negativity in a consistently replicable manner.

Pariahs at Parties

It’s almost two years since the first lockdown. Two years losing the joys that we all took for granted, with many losing multiple battles on the way. Life-changing for everyone, generation-changing for many. I wonder how many remain comfortable in their lives, having gotten through so much, which I happen to be one.

I am relatively less affected—and may be even somewhat positively affected—one would argue that this is a privilege. I have changed my lifestyle and have become far healthier than I have ever been. I have mastered the art of eating only when one has to eat, and have incorporated daily exercise in my routine. Hell, I even enjoy running these days, something that had been as unpleasurable as toast (rather than non-toasted bread) was once. For me, that is. I do admit occasionally to such crudeness, and today I’m feeling magnanimously humble.

The malapropism “social distancing”—which will likely remain the most appropriate among the indelible descriptors for this biennial period—has been a splendrous graduation party for the socially handicapped folk like me. Our world had become accepted. Our world had become the right one. Our world had become the safer one.

My current 30-month “phase” of depression—which can’t quite be labeled as such because of how individually/personally productive I have been during it—is currently manifesting only an as almost complete lack of social-ness. To be more precise, the lack of and the lack of desire for social interactions that can be avoided.

Social interactions for work—and not necessarily at work—within the confines of one’s roles and expectations, are acceptable. Those one must have when one is out on the road are too. Those that one needs to have, with a handpicked set of people who have somehow been demarcated from the vast swathes of humanity that were once friends, are acceptable too. But nothing beyond. Nothing else.

I ask myself why. And I have the most politically incorrect, crude, robotic answers. Podcasts bring in more condensed conversations with better production values—with a play-pause-rewind functionality and 0.5-4x speed controls. Books bring the wonders of thought, knowledge, imagination, and language, with the precision that human beings almost always lack in real life. YouTube videos go through more editing than a human could ever hope to do in conversations in their lifetime.

None of them involve the need to be face-to-face with people, breathing the same infectious air while adhering the conventions of interpersonal interactions. Let’s just admit it: real-life conversations at dinners and parties are mediocre at best—for quality, for focus, for entertainment, for knowledge, for comfort, for comprehension, for retention, for education, for refinement.

The pandemic is not yet over. Really, it isn’t. Especially for us. People like me should aim to systematically break down every attempt at breaking the current norm—by logic, reason, and science. And when we fail, when we decide that you ought to be more serious at fulfilling our social role—as siblings, as partners, as a friends—we will fail again.

Because we then suddenly find ourselves in these agglomerations of people, who revel in themselves and in their stupid anecdotes and experiences, sharing the compulsively often at the slightest of provocations, making themselves look life fools in the process, helped on the way by the excess food and wine than they help themselves to.

And there is nothing we can do but stare away from them, walk past them, ignore them. Hoping that they would think of something better to do than talk to us, and that they wouldn’t think “what a dork—what a loser”. We look at walls, leaves, and the sky, but all of these are finite. We look for the lone hammock in a corner somewhere and settle ourselves with a book, until a few ectopics from the agglomerations arrive at the conclusion that right by the hammock is a great place to smoke up.

And then we slip away and find ourselves a chair and hide behind the bushes by the pool, feeling the strongest wave of sleep that we will have for the next year or so. We read a bit, think a bit more, worry a lot, and doze off for a few seconds. Until it is time to have food—something that we really don’t want to have, but after having which we squirm our way out past more humanity, avoiding more stares and mindless conversations.

The social role that we once had has now become extinct, and with that, we have become even more so. Yet, we continue having the best times of our lives, alone and being brilliant. It remains to be at the cost of everyone who we choose to continue to interact with—or is it choose to continue to be a burden for? And that’s the price we will pay.

Our thoughts, especially the way they were decided to be shared, are most unflattering—easily categorizable as obnoxious, self-centered, egotistic. But we do have, to blame, the provocative situation of the agglomerations. Anyone’s guess as to how this situation is similar to or different from the aforementioned unprovoked sharings, the same that we try to run away from.

There Used To Be a Time

There used to be a time I’d chronicle how today goes and the past one went. There used to be a time when I did not know that my attempts at attempting to emulate the greats and failing miserably was embarrassing but rewarding. There used to be a time when Sunday morning meant a ride to a mall and a cappuccino and deep Black Forest cake. There used to be a time when the lack of certainty in what’s about to come received less titration—in fact it used to be acceptable and somewhat expected.

There used to be a time when I would not find myself constantly working on improving the things that I was not good at, which I was tired of admitting that I am not good at. There used to be a time when reading meant getting lost more than studying the art of what is being written about and how it is being delivered. There used to be a time when greeting relative strangers in the morning was something that I would not flinch from; dare I say I would look forward to.

There used to be a time when being able to listen to the songs of your choice while not being tethered to the place you were in was a luxury that only the shrewd ones chose to have. There used to be a time when birthdays were days that were special, something to be celebrated with friends over an opulent, indulgent meal. There used to be a time when meals were explorative, varied, and flavor-oriented and not cumbersome nutrition-delivery activities.

There used to be a time when walking around town was light and explorative. There used to be a time when the chase of glory was something sunk in so far deep that it was difficult to be aware of its presence. There used to be a time when the sound of coconut tree leaves lapping against the wind used to be sufficiently distinct for one to notice it and to associate with other memories. There used to a time when catching up, with the world, on cinema is something that was less of a chore.

There used to be a time when falling in love and staying in it was more joy and longing than a burden of expectation. There used to be a time when home was still something to stay away from, but still something worth looking forward to coming back to. There used to be a time when the shades of blue and green and red were something that you did not know changed if you went sufficiently far away from where you were when you had the misconception.

There used to be a time when the delivery of art, or the attempts of attempting to deliver it, were not such conscious efforts of delivery. There used to be a time when the light was bright and the was mind was light. There used to be a time when I used to long less for how things used to be.