by Chris & Jenna Badeker
I recently attended a music industry seminar in Nashville where a presenter said, “Artists are now living in the age of the slash.” They went on to say that for the vast majority of working artists, adding skills to our repertoire and titles to our resume has become a necessity. A way of life. Singer-songwriters are becoming producers/podcast hosts. Podcast hosts are becoming videographers/audio engineers. This isn’t to say there aren’t exceptions; monoliths of singular talent still walk among us. However, fewer of us can reliably count on having a voice or song that is “too good to ignore” to be the basis for a sustainable career in the arts. In an era defined by insatiable appetites for new content, shrinking attention spans, and a general devaluation (monetarily speaking) of music, many artists have been forced to get a little more creative and a lot more flexible.
My husband, Chris, and I are independent musicians who perform in the band Wild Harbors. Upon arriving in Nashville we felt immense pressure to make good on our decision to leave our full-time jobs and pursue a career in music. In trying to do so, we spent time with some amazing artists, received wise and gracious counsel, and began the slow and arduous process of assimilating who we were to match a perceived ideal. Sure, we were writing and performing original music, but in every other sense of the term, we were a “cover band”. We dressed like The Civil Wars, posed like Johhnyswim, and belted out songs like The Swell Season. We held ourselves up against the industry’s standards of success, tried in vain to replicate them, and felt crushed when nothing we did seemed to move the needle.
The well-intentioned process of trying to look, sound, and act like “real” artists left us feeling like anything but. We had watched our favorite singer-songwriters find meaningful connections with their audiences through self-expression and vulnerability, yet somehow the lesson we took from it was, “If I could be like that, people would like me”. The problem with posturing for acceptance is that when something you do finds success, it reinforces the idea that the only reason the work connected was because people associated it with something other than you. To put it another way, we had painted ourselves into a corner where our failures felt deeply personal and our success felt unearned and insincere. We couldn’t have told you, but we were burning out and we weren’t sure why.
Around the same time, some of our close friends began lovingly pestering Chris to sign up for the social media platform, TikTok. When Chris finally relented and created an account for our band, things started to gradually shift. Being new to the platform, it truly felt like stepping into the Wild West. There was no brand to manage, no expectation of what to post, and best of all, no audience! Left with a completely blank slate, Chris started doing something he hadn’t done in a long time. TikTok is primarily a video-sharing platform, so Chris began filming anything that popped into his head and posting it. It was silly and slapdash and a way to try out any idea we wanted with relative anonymity. Best of all, making these videos felt like an act of remembrance. In the first years of our relationship, we would visit roadside oddities and film goofy travel guide videos highlighting their various quirks and charm. By making new videos, we weren’t putting on a new hat so much as we were finding an old one and dusting it off. Before long, the notebook for “Video Ideas” became just as big as the notebook for “Song Ideas”.
Like any ongoing creative endeavor, recurring themes started to emerge and the scope and vision for our videos became clearer. Where we had once made silly videos about everything and anything, we now made silly videos about how it felt to be independent musicians trying to navigate the ups and downs of a creative life. We no longer needed to sit down and brainstorm funny ideas. As it turns out, there’s plenty to laugh about in the day to day life of a musician, so we gave ourselves permission to laugh about it. As we grew more confident in their purpose and value, we started sharing them outside of the relative obscurity of our TikTok account. I’m sure for a lot of our friends, it looked like two musicians had decided on a whim to start acting. In reality, it’s more accurate to say that we decided to stop acting. We stopped acting like serious artists. We stopped acting like professional musicians. We started being ourselves. In sharing her own story with me, my friend Leslie E. Thompson wrote, “I’ve finally, FINALLY, lost the desire to adapt my God-given personality to fit an aesthetic or construct and instead embrace it.”
How can I put it better than that?
What if living in “The Age of the Slash” isn’t a mandate to wear all the hats and do all the things? What if it’s an invitation to pick up the parts of our God-given personality that we jettisoned in our hurry to launch faster and climb higher? Who decided that knowing how to cook a Classic French Omelette isn’t a useful skill when writing a novel? Why shouldn’t crochet hooks, when skillfully employed by the poet, be just as helpful to the process as a pen? When children say things like “I’m going to be a Writer / Veterinarian / Painter / Singer / Fashion Designer when I grow up” it’s not because they don’t understand how the world works, it’s because they haven’t unlearned how creativity works.
Outside of self-imposed categories like “Actor”, “Singer”, “Podcast Host”, or “Illustrator”, I believe our brains are all too happy to lump the sum of our creative endeavors, no matter the discipline or medium, into a big bucket labeled “Play”. In this bucket, there’s no untangling which words belong in a song and which belong in a children’s picture book. There’re no walls keeping our ideas for a comic strip out of our ideas for a board game. If you’ve ever eaten baked beans, coleslaw, and potato salad on a plate with no dividers, that should give you a pretty good idea. Time spent playing with anything in this bucket creates unfelt, often unseeable, ripples throughout everything else in the bucket. The more time I spend writing throwaway jokes and corny one-liners, the less I tend to second-guess my intuition when writing a lyric for a chorus. The less I second-guess my lyrics, the less tentative I am when using watercolors.
As it turns out, embracing the idea of having an ever-expanding job title has meant paying a lot less attention to what those titles are and paying more attention to the kinds of work that feel satisfying, meaningful, and valuable to us, our band, and our community. It’s hard work to look at yourself and find candid answers to honest questions. Questions like, “What parts of who God made me to be might be longing to find a home in my art? , “Which aspects of my God-given personality have I abandoned out of fear of being rejected or humiliated?”, or “Who might be waiting, unknowingly, for me to make the kind of art that can only be made through embracing the entirety of my being with sober self-confidence, reckless abandon, and a generous spirit?”
Wild Harbors is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund the release of their new music, the continued production of their videos, and the recording of a new album. Pledging today will move the band one step closer to their goal of being an artistic presence that continues to draw bigger, more encompassing circles around terms like “Songwriter”, “Artist”, and “Band”.