What is the role of an artist?
There are a million answers to that question, and the best one is likely personal to you.
Vincent Van Gogh famously said his role was to “bring the wretched a brotherly message,” helping people see that they’re not alone and that life can be deeply beautiful. Nina Simone said, “my job is to somehow make [people] curious enough or persuade them by hook or crook to get more aware of themselves and where they came from and what they are into… and to bring it out.” For the great mystic poet Rumi and sufi dancers, music was a path to reaching God.
I’ve written before about how being an artist to me is a state of mind, a way of thinking that encourages you to approach the world as a canvas, with knowledge of your agency in it and creativity about what you can do with it.
At the base of all of these definitions, there’s a common theme: Art as a medium through which people can experience and love the world more fully. There’s this adage in Broadway shows that actors talk until they have so much emotion they need to sing, then they sing until they have so much emotion they need to dance. Maybe that’s a bit of a caricature, but it’s indicative of the way music and art can be the fullest expressions of our emotions and experiences.
It also means that as an artist, you have a responsibility. Your responsibility is to observe, to listen, and to love, so that you can channel it all through your art. In other words, it’s your job to adore, to adore people, things, ideas, places, experiences — from the mundane to the transcendent. It’s on you to find the craftsmanship present in the world and to bring it forth — the obscure colors in a decaying brick, the hidden sounds in a crowded room, the unspoken emotion in a surprise encounter between friends, the ornamental creases in the corner of the smiling eyes of someone you love.
I was thinking of that this morning when someone shared a live video of the artist Fred Again performing his song “adore u” (shout out community member Lara Frank for the share!) If you’re not familiar with Fred Again, he’s a British producer and electronic artist who studied classical music, taught himself to produce, trained with Brian Eno, made songs with the likes of Ed Sheeran and BTS, and then launched his own solo career with a massive following. Coming up, he made an epic amount of music, as much as three songs a day or more at some points.
Fred Again produces music predominantly on his laptop outside in the world, from cafes to subways to public parks, because that’s where he gets inspiration from. Sometimes it’s explicit: He sees a skateboarder doing a kick flip and literally flips a sample. But other times, it’s more subconscious: He sees a dad and child having a lovely moment and tries to capture that emotion in his music.
For Fred, he sees his role as an artist as being “obsessed with taking fleeting moments and exposing as much beauty as was in them.” (You can discover more about his career here).
The song “adore u” is like that. It’s about adoring someone who adores life: “When you pray you’re answered / you walk through life just like a dancer.” I’m not personally big into EDM or club culture — I’m a dad of three who struggles to stay up past 10 pm. But this morning, hearing that song and watching the way they perform it and how its received brought me incredible joy. It reminded me that finding things to adore is a choice I can make every day.
In a famous letter to a young poet in 1902, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.”
Read like that, those words can seem harsh. It sounds like he’s blaming the reader for a lack of creativity or something. But at the same time, they also feel true. It’s on you how you experience life. When you’re stuck, look deeper, find things to adore, and then channel that into your music. If you’ve done that, then the outcomes don’t matter. You’ve performed your job to the fullest, and made the world that much better.
Find something to adore and the rest will follow.
So… what do you adore? And how is it finding it’s way into your music today?
