The Fantasy
Artists.
Some of the most sensitive, intelligent, perceptive people on the planet.
People who can move a room with a single line from a song, a stroke of a brush, one note on an instrument.
There is a conversation that keeps recurring amidst this wonderful tribe of people I get to call my colleagues that sounds quite similar, regardless of where in the world I happen to be, or what stage of our careers the participants happen to be in.
Some just beginning to release the first body of work, while others with international tours, signed contracts, and loyal audiences many would envy, under our belts.
Milestones once achieved, we imagined, would finally allow us to relax, lean back and enjoy the fruit years of hard work ought to have reaped for us, just like most other professions promise to.
At some point in this conversation, when we've moved beyond the polite introductions, it'll drift towards lesser-known truths usually not admitted as loudly in public.
This is when a particular sentence will rarely fail to come along.
"If only I could focus just on the work."
It's a perfectly understandable wish.
After all, very few of us picked up an instrument because we were fascinated by contracts. Nobody set out to make art with dreams of chasing unpaid invoices, navigating copyright law, or learning how to negotiate with people whose incentives don't necessarily align with our own.
We were drawn towards beauty long before we understood the forces it attracted without the same wish to protect it the way we do.
For the longest time, I found myself agreeing with a large part of the sentiment this sentence would bring with it.
Surely the highest expression of an artist's life is one where we devote ourselves entirely to the work itself while someone else handled all the practicalities involved?
It's only recently that I've started re-examining the exact contents of the wish itself. And my endeavour seems to have revealed what feels like a gap that needs to be addressed.
Because concealed beneath that innocent longing is a completely different hope altogether. That somewhere, somehow, someone else will eventually carry the responsibilities attached to a life of genuine creative freedom.
The manager, the agent, a record label, a mentor, an algorithm or even a particularly generous patronage of an audience who 'get it', and are capable of relieving us of the burden of becoming custodians of the work we create.
It is an attractive fantasy. I have found myself hanging out there often.
It is also one that the history of the arts has dismantled over and over again.
The Martial Dimension Nobody Talks About
One of the things that a mentor I recently started working with challenged me to think more deeply about, was what I have started to think of as the 'martial' aspect to the arts industry.
Now bear with — it's not the kind of thing I would have associated with my life's calling by default either, but there's a thread.
The idea lodged itself somewhere in the back of my mind because it gave language to something I had sensed for years without being able to articulate.
It also explained something that had puzzled me for much of my adult life.
Why, despite spending decades immersed in my art and modalities like yoga, meditation and psychology which ended up becoming natural extensions of the practice, had I always found myself finding refuge in martial arts philosophy?
At first glance they seem to occupy completely different worlds.
One asks us to soften. The other, to harden.
One invites surrender. The other studies confrontation.
One is associated with compassion. The other with 'combat'.
Over the years though, these distinctions have felt less convincing to me.
At some point, I noticed that the ‘martial’ traditions that have stayed with me were never particularly encouraging or interested in people who enjoyed a brawl, much less in the habit of seeking one out.
If anything, they seemed noticeably conservative about aggression as a sensible proposition, and suggested, rather counterintuitively, inner calm as an alternative instead.
What they asked to cultivate, was the integration of a part of ourselves into our identity that is a far rarer topic of conversation amidst artistic circles:
The warrior.
Honourable, skilled, forgiving and alert.
A human being capable of considerable strength who understands that it exists in the service of protecting what we love, rather than the assertion of domination in our space.
The more time I spend working in my industry, the more convinced I become that this archetype is precisely the one our art has hoped for us to embody all the while, without necessarily naming it in so many words.
We spend extraordinary quantities of time encouraging vulnerability in our work.
We celebrate openness. Tenderness.
We talk about authenticity, emotional honesty and learning to create from incredibly truthful to the point of painful spaces within ourselves.
All of that matters. Deeply so.
But what we speak far less often about, is the responsibility that comes with the moment when those gifts born through the entire arc of the process, are offered to the world.
Because vulnerability presupposes safety. And the latter, protection.
Debatable in some circles, but hear me out.
What the existence of increasingly prevalent missing links in that chain I mention (vulnerability=safety=protection) results in, is an arena that has another player in the centre of it.
Exploitation.
The world we live in today didn't necessarily manufacture that reality. But it certainly exposes it in ways we struggle to accept.
And the role we might be playing in it, even more so.
The Ones Who Figured It Out
"Music isn't about standing still and becoming safe. Great musicians are like great fighters."
Miles Davis wrote that in his autobiography.
While records are ample on his passion for boxing to enhance and maintain his instrumental skils, he wasn't just reaching for a metaphor. He was describing the lived reality of staying alive in the field — the daily discipline of someone who has decided to remain in motion, in contact, and uncompromising about what matters.
'The artist formerly known as Prince' understood this viscerally. His decadeslong battle with Warner Music Group over the ownership of his catalog became one of the defining stories of the industry. He wrote "slave" on his face and walked onto stages and television sets with it there for the world to see. At the 1995 BRIT Awards, his acceptance speech was five words: "Prince. In concert: perfectly free. On record: slave."
"If I can't do what I want to do, what am I? When you stop a man from dreaming, he becomes a slave. That's where I was. I don't own Prince's music. If you don't own your masters, your master owns you."
Regardless of how you feel about their specific approaches, the assessment was correct.
Prince had been around some of the most powerful representation in the business. The quality of his team was never a problem. The structure was— and it stayed that way until he understood it well enough to dismantle it himself in ways that made history.
"I believe a total unwillingness to cooperate is what is necessary to be an artist — not for perverse reasons, but to protect your vision.’’
‘’People don't realize how horrible it is. I think you've got to be hard as nails."
Those two quotes are from Joni Mitchell when asked about the industry's demand for compliance. She seems to have drawn the same line from the other direction.
These are not statements of humans who lost faith in music. They came from some of the most irrefutably brilliant artists in music history who understood, without flinching, the entirety of their job.
The battles in it were never simply commercial.
They were ethical.
And at some point, they understood that stewardship had become part of the artistic practice, and learnt to do what needed to be done.
The Saviour Fantasy
One of the earlier emails in my 6-day free training talks about a reality that tends to disappoint people when they first read it:
Subject: ‘Why a manager can’t help you’
Managers matter.
Agents matter.
Lawyers matter.
Communities matter.
Coaches matter.
I've been fortunate enough to benefit from every one of those relationships.
But what none of them can do is relieve us of the responsibility of becoming honourable custodians of our art.
Fight to protect it, if needed.
Our discernment, authenticity, integrity and boundaries are not things we can outsource.
The history of art is filled with creators who found the right representative at the wrong level of their own understanding, and paid for it. Not because the representative was necessarily dishonest, but because delegation without comprehension is not partnership. It's dependence.
Nobody is coming to save our art.
Not the perfect label. Not the influential manager who will finally "get" you. Not the viral moment or the playlist placement or the right manifesting practice. None of these things are completely useless and some genuinely valuable — but being substitutes for the fundamental skill of our own personal understanding never has been a realistic option to use.
There is a beautiful, childlike quality in artists that is celebrated by society and practitioner alike, that can overshadow a truth many of us miss amidst the highs and lows of that heady journey.
We need to start thinking of ourselves as the custodians-not the ones in custody.
Grow up.
That’s the shift.
We created our art. We are the ones who need to protect it.
Scrubbing Toilets
Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.
Zen Buddhism has always inspired me with its refusal to separate the sacred from the ordinary.
Yoga makes a similar observation through the idea of ‘dharma’ — not merely as purpose but with the willingness to meet the responsibilities that accompany it, no matter how pedestrian it might feel.
Get our hands in the dirt when needed.
I think all of us, artists or not, need reminding of the same.
Before the dream deal, answer the difficult emails. After the dream deal, answer them with even greater care.
Before success, learn to recognise manipulation. After success, recognise that it often becomes more sophisticated.
Before your audience finds you, learn to protect your attention. After they do, protect it even more fiercely.
Truth is, while I call all this the ‘dirty work’, I don’t think there's anything dirty about it at all.
I write, compose, produce, mix, market, ‘sell’ (ouch!) my art, and even coach fellow artists on how to build a sustainable practice doing the same.
I learnt the hard way. And it gave me a muscle of a different quality; not immune to the pain that left the scars to show, but appropriately trained as a result.
Learning to negotiate fairly, trying to understand contracts, walking away from unhealthy collaborations, building a genuine audience or having difficult conversations and doing the inner work to build a mindset that can handle all of this were never distractions from our path.
They are among the disciplines through which it matures.
And I have come to the conclusion after 30 years of doing this full-time, that this is what the honourable warrior has been trying to teach me all along.
Not to imply that the world is a battlefield we are to walk as soldiers in, but that every meaningful act of creation eventually asks us the same question.
Do I love this enough to protect it?
Will I guard it with the love of a parent?
The answer to those questions aren’t always found in the comfort of a meditation cushion, a vision board or in a manifestation journal workshop.
It’s in the simple but tough decisions sans applause that we have to dig deep to find the courage to take.
Decisions that go a long way in nurturing the environment in which our art can continue to exist.
The artist and the warrior have never been travelling different roads.
And the right teachers, the right team, the right tribe, the right audience, the right home for the work to be practised, received, and eventually passed on, is something that can only be built by someone who is ready to consider making peace with both as integral parts of their whole self.
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