Making Time For Music Makers

Would you like to feel more connected to your community? Would you like to add value to any live event? If so, I want to encourage you to support a local artist. Buy their music, attend their shows, and include them in your events. With great pleasure, I’d like to introduce you to my friend Dave Von Bieker, a local musician that I’ve known for over 20 years. He’s graciously agreed to contribute this week as a guest writer.

-Jordan

It's been a rough couple of years for music makers.

We used to invest our savings to make our songs sound good enough burn or etch forever onto CDs or records. Thousands upon thousands of dollars. We would sell those pieces of plastic in hopes of breaking even for the chance to do it all again.

We don't sell many CDs anymore. Records are an expensive niche and a hard cost to recoup. Streaming brings my music to hundreds of new ears a month – for virtually no money.

So we took to the road and made our money playing shows. The same fans who paid pennies for our life's work paid much more to see us perform our songs live and take a T-shirt home at the end of the night. This might be how we make it.

The pandemic put an end to all that – at least for a time.

We picked up other work. We took freelance gigs and server shifts and went back to the steady jobs we used to have.

We tried to boost our social media accounts or livestream for free every day or land our songs on a hit TV show for that big windfall.

All of this takes time, of course. And time is what we need the most.

So why do we keep making music? Why bother with it at all?

Because music is magic, of course. You know this.

You have heard a song for the first time and heard your self in that song and heard your story told back to you in a way you could never articulate. You have sung along and felt a part of you come alive and felt time stand still as electric connection unified strangers.

Music does all of this and more.

And somebody has to make it and – like it or not – I am one of those somebodies. I have tried to not be, but that didn't work out too well.

The music is in me and I have to get it out. I can't explain it any better than that.

But there is something you can do for me and my fellow music makers.

The greatest gift you can offer me as a musician is time.

Time is fuel for us. It is more vital than a resonant Martin guitar or a pristine large diaphragm condenser mic.

All artists disrupt time. A painter can pause a moment. A film can stretch or collapse a memory. Novels can contemplate the past and imagine the future – sometimes at the same time.

Music takes this to another level. Music can't exist without time.

A song is sound along a timeline. Tempo determines how long that timeline lasts during every performance. Even lyrics are tacked to time. Melodies have meter. Phrasing – the way a singer plays with time – makes a song interesting.

Playing a song at double speed is not playing the song. Music takes the time it takes.

Unfortunately, time is expensive and I need a lot of it.

I need time to create, sure. But I also need time to ingest the world and then digest it.

I need time to listen. Time to sit. Time to pay attention.

I've had the privilege of learning the craft of songwriting from veteran folk-poets Over The Rhine. I can boil their entire songwriting workshop down to one directive; pay attention.

Why would I invest thousands of dollars and dozens of hours over several years to learn to pay attention? Because paying attention is really, really hard.

Time spent paying attention is not lazy. The music maker's brain is always humming. Always collecting beauty in what Over The Rhine calls our "butterfly net".

You could say a song takes an hour to write but that's not the full truth. It also takes a lifetime.

What does it look like to offer a musician the gift of time?

Forgive me when I have to duck away for 3 minutes to record a voice memo because the muse just interrupted our afternoon. I'm not happy about it either, but if I don't capture this, it will vanish forever. It has before.

I need to commandeer the car radio every so often and when I do I may get lost. Like, actually lost for a few minutes.

Frequent walks, long showers and hot tub soaks help me discover pockets of time. Nature and water seem to slow things down.

Remind me that it's not selfish to get away on my own for a few days every so often so I can hear again.

If you decide to engage with what I make, please give my work the time it requires – from the start to the finish. There is no other way to experience it.

In return for all of this grace, I'll keep myself open to what's coming next and when it comes I will make it ring out as clear as I can for you.

Every time you listen I will give you back the time you offered me.

My songs will all say thank you.

Please Check out Vonbieker’s debut album Long For This World - all of the streaming links and purchase links can be found here