I can be anyone you want me to be. 

It’s my job. I am a chameleon. A session person. 

If a client asks me to jump rope, I ask what string gauge the rope should be. 

If they ask for “20s speakeasy guitar but played by Iron Maiden” (if anyone dared ask) I would serve it up with a wink, nod, and smile. 

The shapeshifter skillset has opened many doors for me in my professional life. I very consciously developed these skills as a young musician. I learned to play this way, not just because I’d become more hirable (although that certainly didn’t hurt), but because my musical self contains multitudes. I am an avid listener to many styles and I love the challenge of making myself at home in all of them. If I love it as a listener, I want to take it apart and see what’s under the hood. How is it arranged? How is it mixed? What is the guitar doing when the drums drop out? Once I know how it’s put together, I want to go play with other people and feel what it’s like to really be INSIDE that style. It’s not enough to know the guidebook phrases; I need to be fluent. I worked hard to be a multilingual musician because that’s how I am as a listener. I’m infinitely curious and can’t help wanting to learn everything about every aspect of every style of music. I love that I get to play neo-soul bass one night and honky tonk guitar the next day. Each diverse situation helps me feel fulfilled in my musical life and career. 

But I am not just a side person. I am an artist as well. The skills that make me a valuable asset on sessions and gigs can have an unintended downside to my life as an original artist. A studio musician fills a role and blends in. In any situation, they authentically deliver high quality parts that serve the song. 

The role of an artist on the other hand is to share their unique vision of what music can be, not just what music has been. They must connect with an audience based on that unique viewpoint. Artists are supposed to take sides. They also contain multitudes, but even the most eclectic of artists has some kind of a unified and curated vision, just by being themselves. 

Studio musicians and artists all start out as music lovers, and we all start out learning by imitation. We copy our heroes. For artists, our failure to pull off mimicking our heroes can lead to our original voice. For example, Howlin’ Wolf’s distinct “howl” was, according to legend, an attempt at copying yodeling from the country music he loved. But he was a blues man through and through. He fell short in a way that made something new, innovative, and iconic. In many ways, artists benefit from their own natural limitations and being unable to fully emulate their heroes. Studio musicians, on the other hand, train specifically to pull off their imitations and assimilate them into their playing. 

This is where my conflict lies. I have trained to be everything to everyone in my freelance life. When it comes to my artistic work I have to consciously choose my own limitations. If I am thinking of Willie Nelson when writing a new song, for example, it is hard NOT to pull out my cracked nylon string guitar, play a sloppy melodic solo, and deliver the lyric in a stilted, conversational way. I know my own intentions too well. My studio player brain tries to fully recreate my initial inspiration instead of pushing into the unknown. Every great artist needs to push past their influences and into the primordial soup of the unknown. I need to grab a spoon. 

I have recorded many songs and written many more. A large number of these recordings have embraced the idea of pastiche in some way. If the writing was inspired by the 1950’s, I made everything BE the 1950’s. This is how I learned and I love it, but I am beginning to move away from this safe harbor and into uncharted waters. I do still love the idea of retro and self-referential music as a listener. However, over the past few years I became very disenchanted with this tendency in my own work. There are many reasons for this. The biggest issue is that my songs, which spring from a place of earnest storytelling, aren’t  being told in my voice. They are my stories but I haven’t been vulnerable enough to give up the safety blanket of pastiche and tell them in my own voice. It was easier to became Les Paul or Dave Davies or Butch Walker or whoever else I was listening to at the time. It is still interesting music but it isn't my music. My connection to the lyric and message has been smothered by (well executed) retroisms. 

My live shows usually don’t have this problem. I perform my songs nakedly and as myself. I can’t hide behind flange effects or Beatle panning or slapback delay. I run on pure instinct. I tell each story and get inside each song. As a result, the music is better. I can’t be a showman and a sideman at the same time, so in these moments, the artist overshadows the craftsman. I am totally my artistic self. I’ve been reflecting on the tension between artisan and artist in my work for years. This is not a new dilemma for me, but I am at a new place with my work. I think I have a healthier perspective on a new way forward: 

Embrace my weird. 

As a studio player, uncharted territory is often jettisoned for safer, known quantities. As an artist I am setting a strong intention towards leaning into risk. The scarier the better. I know my influences will always come out, but now I will let that be a subconscious rather than conscious process. I need to explore the territory my musical instincts take me without reference. If I get into a flow state and go for something that, frankly, would get me fired from another gig, then I am probably on the right track. I don’t know if anyone can relate to this, but my most “innovative” work is the stuff I have no intention of releasing. These are random Logic Projects that are pure weirdness and blind exploration. My “serious work” can become overworked and limp in comparison to the fun experiments that never leave my harddrive. Those experiments are never pastiche. They sound fresh. They sound like...well...ME. 

I am not afraid of taking risks. I am just an artist and a craftsman in my career and each requires a different mindset. In my session work, a divergent artist mindset is appropriate less often than the craftsperson mindset, and vice versa. I know I have created a conceptual binary here that plays down the amount of creative risk taking that happens with seasoned professional studio players, and I have overstated the artisanal naivete of the professional artist. But these poles are the best way I can describe the apollonian and dionysian tendencies working in opposition within my creative self. They are not absolute but they are providing me with some much needed clarity. No one can ever truly separate the sides of themself in such a neat way, and not everyone will see their own working life in the framework I just described. I just find the visual of a divided artist/artisan self to be illustrative for where I am personally at. It helps me judge both my strengths and weaknesses in this phase of my journey and a possible way forward into making better music. 

These are the questions I ask myself as I demolish the median of the divided highway in my mind.