On making art for your living in an algorithmic world
As you’re probably aware, Shannon and I just finished an intensive period of first preparing for and then executing on a small but high-stakes west-coast tour. It went great! But, may I just say something? One big takeaway for me was that — and this is not necessarily something new, just something I think I forget and relearn each time we have to do it — talking about what we're doing all the time is fucking *exhausting*.
It's so incredibly hard to get up the energy for seemingly the thousandth day in a row to try to get people excited about Our shows! Our album! Our new 80s kids songs! Or, failing excitement, just to cut through the noise and even land upon someone's consciousness at all. Everyone is so constantly overstimulated and overwhelmed.
Shannon and I are just humans making art. That's what the draw has always been for me: to think deeply about the world and my place in it, and to contribute my little bit to helping it make more sense, and hopefully to help bring moments of respite and joy and community to it for other people.
And, ironically, that last bit is the reason I try to be good about talking about what we're up to — because we are doing what we do not for our benefit, but rather for everyone else’s.
Don't get me wrong, we're doing it for us, too; this is how I work out my thoughts and keep myself sane, and I think that's true for Shannon too. And it’s how we support ourselves.
But the part where we put it out into the world and work to engage a community of people around it: that's entirely for people who are not us.
It would be much easier for both of us to have comfortable day jobs with predictable paychecks and vacations and just to do music as a hobby; that's how most people do it. It sounds lovely. And, don't get me wrong — at least a few times a year, when things are particularly difficult, one of us will suggest to the other that maybe we just get jobs at Starbucks. We call it "Barista Season." It always passes.
But the path we've chosen instead of that is to place a bet on the idea that we're not alone in feeling how we feel, and that there's a community to be found there, and that this community could even perhaps be healing and healthy in some measure for the people involved in it.
And there is! And it is! And it's wonderful! And, also, it takes constant nurturing. Shannon and I are not optimized as artists for a TikTok-paced world (and thank god); our work requires more deliberation than that. There's not a perfectly-timed serotonin release every 15 seconds; the point of what we do is to create a space where you can spend some time and interact with the work on a molecular level. (Yes, I just felt the need to touch upon how listening to music works. Because I think a lot of us are starting to be trained out of that!)
It's an uphill battle. People's attention spans are atomized in this moment. Shannon and I are well past the age where you're supposed to stop acting like this, and the algorithm is certainly aware of that. The interactions that Shannon's songs prompt in people tend to be personal and introspective in nature, as opposed to being engineered for a quick reshare and hopeful virality. And all of these facts are getting thrown into a cultural blender that's being operated not by humans but by computers, programmed to addict us to a neverending stream of short-form expressions because that's what benefits the owners financially. Trying to talk online about your work as a pair of 50-year-olds making synthpop concept albums and multidisciplinary theater performances is a shitshow.
I just thought it might be helpful for someone else for me to share a little background about where Shannon and I are at right now in our work lives. What it’s like to be on this ride. Yes, we have a little momentum at the moment. Yes, we have a lot of irons in the fire. We are working so intently right now, and talking about our work a lot right now, because things are really fucked up in the world right now and ART HEALS. And our work is the thing that we have to offer that might help someone a little bit as they try to figure out how to deal with their existence on this overwhelming planet — which is, after all, the reason we’re doing this work in the first place.
How are the pace and character of online life in 2024 affecting your artistic work and practice? What’s working? What’s not working? It’s worth pondering. And if you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them.
Steadily — jamie