Hey guys. I haven’t put out nearly as much music on my Substack as I planned to these last few months. Even though it was my main motivation for signing up to the platform and is supposed to be my primary focus here, I have neglected it somewhat in favour of my other creative interests (writing essays, fiction, etc) on my main Substack page ‘The Common Centrist’.
There are several factors behind that and most of which I don’t really want to get into, but mainly it’s down to a lack of motivation and self-belief in my musical capabilities. I have always wanted to work as a songwriter but, since graduating university, I have suffered my longest and most tenacious bout of writer’s block I have ever had in the domain of songwriting.
Musical writer’s block has almost never been an issue in my life as even at my most self-doubting I have always been able to write something. But this recent episode of self doubt has lasted months now and I can’t seem to write anything I am happy with.
As I said, self doubt was never uncommon, and I frequently have episodes where I bounce between unbridled optimism where I think I can make it as a songwriter if I work hard enough and periods where I think I am kidding myself and become tempted to never play music again.
The last time the latter happened was during the early part of my third year studying music. I became so convinced that I would never be able to write my own songs that were viable, that I decided to go ‘all-in’ on being a cover artist. I was going to only play covers as an acoustic function musician and aim to make a modest wage playing small venues for the rest of my life.
I built a module project around this persona, setting it as a career goal to aim for. The module was about career objectives and professional practice. For the presentation that I was being marked on, I framed it around a ‘fake it til you make it’ approach.
Part of that meant biting my tongue regarding my substantive disagreements with the social orthodoxy of radical progressivism in the music industry. If I was going to break into the industry, I’d have to work with people and established organisations that adhere to the Woke ideology. So, my plan at the time was to me a closeted dissenter: keep my mouth shut and my head down to avoid being targeted by ‘cancel culture’.
But more to the point, I was going to act like a modern musician and play the social media marketing game. Be a slave to the algorithms, ‘find my niche’, ‘optimise engagements’ and all the other cliches of social media marketing one hears. To do that, I needed ‘content’. Yuck, I hate that word.
So I planned and recorded a ‘Showreel’ (available on my Facebook page here) to market myself as an acoustic cover artist to the venues I would be trying to sell myself to via my social media feeds.
In that showreel, I performed excerpts of several songs from my repertoire and edited them together into what is essentially a video business card. All the songs were performed during a video shoot in the University’s largest studio (Studio K) with professional lighting, high definition cameras and the incredible sound system in that room. That was an amazing experience and I am so thankful to all the incredibly talented student sound technicians, filmmakers and stagecraft experts who did all the real work that day.
But ultimately, I hated myself for the ‘fake it til you make it’ crap. I felt like a fraud; a phony. It led me down a long and dark path of existential crisis and philosophical introspection that I didn’t come out of until I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s essay ‘Live Not By Lies’. From that moment, I decided I would adopt the essay’s title as my life’s mantra and never allow myself to be inauthentic in any way if I could help it. Needless to say, I stopped playing the social media marketing game entirely.
I still do some work as a cover artist in small venues, pubs etc. They’re great little gigs and an easy way to make a little extra cash. But I don’t really market myself that much anymore. I’ll occasionally email the link to my showreel to the odd venue that I see advertising for music acts to perform, but that’s it.
Anyway, here is one of the song excerpts I performed that day. I came across it on my computer where it had been sitting unused since that module finished. I was going to put out videos of all the song excerpts but stopped uploading as soon as I submitted my work for grading.
In my opinion, Hallelujah is one of the greatest songs ever written. Leonard Cohen was a songwriting and lyrical genius but, as with Bob Dylan, I often find myself enjoying his songs more when they are covered by more vocally gifted artists. The versions of this song performed by Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright are two of my favourites and where I take most of my performance inspiration from.
If you like this song as much as I do, I recommend this epic cover [above] by Rufus Wainwright and 1500 backing singers as part of the ‘Choir! Choir! Choir!’ sessions. There is nothing quite like hearing so many people singing in unison and it's the closest thing to a religious experience an old atheist like me can have.
I hope you liked my cover, one day I’ll record the whole song. Hopefully I’ll start writing my own music again soon and I can get back to sharing it on Substack as I intended.
Until then, thanks for listening… Pete Brennan - Songwriter (Cover Artist).
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