Music, Art, Coffee and Mistakes

By Seamus Anthony

tl;dr – I am turning this somewhat stalled blog into a self-indulgent, typo-ridden, criminally-under-edited, potentially-irregular, hyphen-happy journal-style blog of my continuing journey as a musician and artist. And you can’t stop me. So there.

Privately, I sporadically write journal-style ramblings to help me work things out. I’ve always considered (accurately) these to be unpublishable; too scrappy and irregular, not unlike their author.

Meanwhile, I have long written things – more polished and ‘value’ orientated – for public consumption, most of which I am utterly embarrassed about now. (Hey, I needed the money.)

Lately I’ve been doing neither … but over Christmas this last couple of weeks, at the various parties and gatherings, a part of me has been sitting back witnessing my mildly-to-fully-inebriated self rolling out my favourite stories about my life, in all their well-practised and undoubtedly inaccurate glory and thinking “you know, maybe you should write this stuff down”.

And, you know, maybe I should.

As well as that, I have been thinking and thinking and totally over-thinking about how to go about marketing my music and my nascent visual art and the idea of writing about it seems to make sense. (It also possibly makes no sense, but it’s ok, I am comfortable with that kind of cognitive dissonance. It potentially defines me actually: I’m nothing if not a wooly ball of contradictions getting batted around by a playfully giant kitten who clearly doesn’t realise how damn sharp its claws are.)

Further to this, much to my better half’s chagrin (however you say that), I remain resolutely, if somewhat ineffectively, ambitious, and I’d like to go forth and make something happen yet in this life and you know, ‘win’ at some stuff. Basically, I find it irritating to make music (and now, perhaps inadvisably, art) and to write words only to have a tiny, miniscule fraction of the population of the planet give a shit. Especially when I know that this is purely my failing, not as an artist but in terms of the effort I put into it. We listen to a lot of radio in our house (Triple R mainly, which is an excellent Melbourne-based public radio station) and my kids, who are still young enough to assume (mistakenly, of course) that I am a God Who Walks Amongst Men, have both independently paused thoughtfully while munching toast only to ask through a mouthful of jammy goodness: “Dad, why don’t they play your music on the radio?”

I wish I could have honestly said to them “Because they’re all jerks, my love,” or “Because I don’t care for the attention, sweetie,” but the truth was not this and so I had no option to say to them “Because I don’t try hard enough to make that happen, actually”. And given the rhetoric I spout at them along the lines of “talent and brains not being enough, nope, no sirree Bob, you have to work hard, harder than everyone else” kind of makes me feel like a bit of a hypocrite.

Which of course, is on the agenda to be fully and consciously realised by them in due course. But I would dearly love to provide them with a different failing to rub my face in, one that I am more comfortable owning. Like loving Neil Young’s Crazy Horse guitar solos way more than is probably healthy, par example. Or my absolute comfort at telling them in no uncertain terms to tidy up all of the things while resolutely making no such effort myself.

So that’s what I am doing this year (technically next year; thought I’d get a head start).

What the “that” is that I am doing is probably not very clear to you, which is because it is not very clear to me. However, writing tends to help me clear up the old noggin somewhat, so with any luck typing away will make things clearer … ok… what I think I mean is, I am going to write about the process of making things (music, art, coffee, mistakes) and the process of trying to promote the things (the music and art, not the coffee and mistakes) and hopefully it will be interesting to someone, even if that’s only me.

I suppose I will publish it to this blog, seeing as it used to be a thing. Actually, it’s “been” and “not been” a thing a few times over almost ten years. Long enough that I kind of despair of many of the old blog posts, to say the least.

But what the heck.
I yam what I yam,
I was what I was,
And like I said: I needed the money.

Hi, I'm Seamus Anthony. I am an author, artist and musician from Australia. Here at Rebel Zen, I document my journey as an creative artist and human and in doing so, hopefully help you in your own progress through your life of creativity. Go get your free E-book by me: "Taming The Monkey Mind".

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