Forgive me for my spelling and grammar. English is not my first language reading is fine, talking better - and singing in English is almost perfect.
I live in Denmark - Danish is my first language. Living in a small country with one of the smallest language's in the World, there is no way around it when I want to get my words and tunes out there.
Being seen - being heard - being listened to.
That is the dream for me as an independent artist - to get out there - speaking about life itself with sorrow and pain, sunshine and rain - telling the stories from everyday life in poetry and music.
I guess it is the Dream for any artist - you can sit home alone and create new stuff - you can enjoy when you succeed inside. But at the end of the day the dream is for someone else to look at your painting, read your poem or listen to your song.
Because suddenly when that happens you are no longer alone with your Art.
The times that we live in right now are difficult for everybody - no one walks free.
Anxiety, stress and fear of the future are a part of all of us - Artists included.
So what does an Artist do when there is no possibility of getting your art out there in real life?
The Artist starts creating even more - writing another book and another - hoping that some day the world will be ready to receive.
Being independent is not about wanting to work on your own - wanting to be alone. It's about wanting to get out there in the world and find people who are the same - and in my view those people are everywhere.
They might not be in the established industry at first - but we shouldn't forget that inside every star is an independent artist.
For me being independent is about being myself - working every day to take that one step further - to get that one more listener - one more reader.
And every time that happens - I feel less and less alone - being independent.
Bruno Skibbild is a singer/songwriter/author who resides in Denmark. You can connect with Bruno by clicking the link below.
I was given my first guitar at the age of 14 and it felt like an old
Tobiah Thomas
friend. Songs flowed and I began performing then in local folk clubs in the North of England. University intervened and I began writing in earnest in my late twenties.
.
Love and loss have long been a theme of my music, born out of difficult personal circumstances that saw me grow up not knowing my birth father and losing my first husband, Julian, at the age of 26.
I’ve found the creative process – both writing and performing – to be very healing because it allows me to connect and express my feelings with others who have shared similar experiences. I always knew that I was helped through that difficult time, but it was only recently, when I wrote the title track of my latest album, Are We Angels, that I made sense of it all.
This song speaks of those small, random acts of kindness, often from complete strangers, which helped me so much through my
bereavement. I had been married to Julian, who was also a musician, at the age of 21, for six years and we moved to London from Plymouth to break into the music business. But an undiscovered congenital heart problem led to his sudden and devastating death. He died in my arms.
Julian always bought me a dress at Christmas. It was our tradition and I wanted to continue it the Christmas following his death. I collected the dress from the shop on Christmas Eve then realised as I walked away that I hadn’t paid. I rushed back but the shop owner ushered me out and wouldn’t take payment. As I walked away it began to snow, big flakes like confetti, just as it had snowed on the day my husband died. It was then that I realised the dress was a gift and I had a smile on my face through the tears.
I wrote a song about this called Golden Christmas Time which I often include in my concerts, and will be releasing this year as a Christmas single on December 4th.
Golden Christmas Time
My songs are very visual, about experiences in my life or a story that has caught my imagination. Lyrics are important – I could never write a song that didn’t move me. Quite often, a complete song will just ‘arrive’ in my head, which always amazes me, and I think, ‘Where did that come from?’ Sometimes a song will take time to fully emerge and a good example of this is Apples- the Long Goodbye. Originally about the seasons and cycles of the year, it became about waiting with my beautiful and inspiring Mother who is in the final stages of dementia. She gave me the love of singing and telling stories and Are We Angels is dedicated to her.
Shoulder to Shoulder courtesy of YouTube
During my career I was signed to Chrysalis Music, where one of my songs became the subject of a tussle between Janet Jackson and Will Smith: both wanted to record it. He rang to plead for the track and called me a “happening up babe” – which was ironic as 30 minutes before the call I had been up to my eyes in jelly, helping at the local school’s Christmas party!
I was signed earlier to a top manager Brian Freshwater (Joss Stone, Foy Vance), and also worked with talented and influential musicians and producers, including Egyptian percussionist Hossam Ramzy, Rod Argent, Derek Bramble( David Bowie/American idol) and Robin Black (Cat Stevens, Paul McCartney, June Tabor)
Are We Angels, mixed by the afore-mentioned Robin Black,
features a group of celebrated musicians including the cellist Caroline Lavelle (Loreena Mckennitt/De Dannan), twice All-Ireland award-winning piano accordionist Colette O’Leary, Rowan Piggott on fiddle and Simon Callow on keyboards who also play with me live.
The opening track Kiss Kiss celebrates those fragile uplifting moments that should be treasured and recounts the legend of Native American mothers forced to march from Georgia to Oklahoma, a poignant and plaintive track that resonates strongly with my audiences. Coldest Night of the Year captures my own sufferings in my 20s. People really connect with my songs. We have all felt like the girl in Coldest, the loneliest person in a crowded room as we struggle with grief or sadness.
I love all animals especially bears and all profits from the album are being donated to the charity Animals Asia, which is committed to ending cruelty to (Asian) animals, a cause close to my heart. I never knew my birth father but treasure his one gift to me, a teddy bear. I first heard about the terrible treatment of the moon bears through a Wiltshire artist was holding a charity auction of her pictures for Animals Asia. I was so moved by their plight that I immediately wrote a song called Moon Bear, which I sang at that event.
It is so lovely that every track on Are We Angels has been played across the BBC and FM stations and has been featured in the press and on TV including, The Irish Post and London Live TV. A track is also featured on the prestigious FATEA 2019 Winter Showcase Sessions album:Adventure, which is free to download. CLICK HERE
I love playing in wonderfully diverse venues that include ancient churches, medieval halls and historic houses and was recently invited by the National Trust to the ancient site of Avebury, 500 years older than the neighbouring Stonehenge in Wiltshire, to give the first- ever concert in their restored Chapel. It would be a dream to include some special American dates on our 2020: Secret Places Tour so, if you’d like us to come, please get in contact!
Are We Angels features nine original songs, written and produced by TOBIAH and recorded in her cottage studio overlooking the Sussex downs, with all profits going to charity.
Tobiah would love hearing from you. You may reach her at the links below.
There is no shortage of articles, blog posts and even whole websites dedicated to exploring the fact that the music industry is changing fast. Most concentrate on two things: the rise of technology and the demise of live music. Both of these are things I will mention later but I want to focus on a positive aspect to the rise of technology that is relatively new too... I got my first guitar when I was about ten, and after learning the usual four chords, soon lost all interest in doing things the “right” way, and in learning to play other people’s songs. This meant I was not the kind to lead a campfire singalong... in fact for most of my life the very idea has filled me with horror! No, I very soon discovered that making up my own songs was
much more fun and much more interesting. I had no idea what I was doing of course, but soon found that I could come up with words that fitted a chord sequence in a new way which gave me a lot of satisfaction. Since childhood then, I have never stopped this activity. What HAS been missing until relatively recently is recording, and performing in public. Looking back now, I think this was probably down to shyness and anxiousness that others might not think my songs were as brilliant as I did! In thirty years from the age of 20 to the age of 50, I think I performed my own songs in public no more than three or four times. Guitar playing and songwriting became very private activities for me and the knowledge that the songs would not be performed perhaps allowed me to explore depths of personal honesty and chord weirdness that would have been unthinkable if they were ever to be exposed to public scrutiny. So... my fiftieth year... was a strange one. In January 2012 I was living in Abu Dhabi where I had been for a decade. I was single. I had money, a respectable job, a lovely flat and two beautiful cats I had adopted in Saudi Arabia several years before. By December, I was living back in the UK, married, completely broke, jobless and living in a small rented flat with just one of the Saudi cats remaining. It took some adjusting!
One of the few advantages of the UK was the delicious warm brown ale that the English do best. My local pub was full of a very eclectic crowd of people, but I was pleased to see a wide age range and felt quite comfortable there. One evening it turned out there was an open mic night. My earlier instincts kicked in and I thought it would be dreadful... but it wasn’t. I was knocked sideways at the quality and variety of the performers. More surprising was the respect and appreciation shown to one or two of the musicians who were even older than me...and to be honest, not that great. My show-off attention-seeking gene suddenly kicked in and I resolved to come and show what I could do the following week. As the day approached I was amazed at how nervous I felt about it all. I practised for hours, and kept changing my mind about what to play. However, the evening came and I took my guitar and put my name on the list. I am sure it wasn’t a great performance! My fingers trembled and my voice wobbled, but I did manage to do three original songs and halfway through the second one became aware that people were actually listening and paying attention. Unexpectedly, this gave me confidence rather than greater self-consciousness and I actually started to enjoy myself. When I had finished, I found myself chatting and exchanging music gossip and ideas with a whole host of others who were there. People as young as 17 up to others in their 60s were equally interested and interesting. Several of the people I met that night have remained good friends, and I really felt I had tapped into a social network that I would find very satisfying. In less than a year, I felt able to try to get gigs on my own. Just corner-of-the-pub and restaurant gigs, and mainly requiring covers, but still letting me cut my teeth about performing in public – and actually paying just enough to be able to live a little more comfortably. I often felt a bit conscious that I was the oldest person in the venue... but again, I found that nobody else seemed to care about that if they liked the way I played, so I stopped worrying about it! When I recorded an EP of five songs, I could only afford three
hours of studio time, so I asked two friends who were much more experienced musicians than I was to learn the songs, and we recorded everything in one afternoon. I really didn’t know what to do with the finished EP but having asked around I did send it off for local radio play and review. The response was amazing to me. Hearing my music on the radio was very encouraging and gave a new confidence to go further. As a songwriter, I think I was always able to fit clever sounding words to a tune. What I lacked was anything interesting to say, and so fell back on the clichéd themes of love and loss of love that is the norm. I never really believed in that stuff though, and my efforts sounded horribly insincere to me. It really wasn’t until I was in my forties that I started to think I might have something to say about things that might be of interest to others. I learnt to comment but not explain. I avoided the pronoun “I” and told stories in the third person even when they were in fact very personal. I think both these tricks can lead to a more comfortable listening experience for the audience. Self-confessional music can be wonderful when done by the likes of Joni Mitchell, but can also be slight squirm-inducing and tedious when lesser artists try it. Especially perhaps when they are older.
So this is where I come on to my main theme. One of the things blamed for the decline in the music industry is the developments in technology that have been so extraordinary in the last fifteen years or so. As it became possible to listen to music on the internet without paying for it, the listening habits of many also started to change. However, it is this same technology that has made it possible for many artists to get their music heard. Simple home studios can be set up very cheaply and the resulting recordings can easily be good enough to be presented to radio stations and so on. Neil King who runs FATEA in the UK, often mentions that his mail bag is filled with new music from people who in previous years would rarely have considered sending it in: older people, family people and people from diverse backgrounds. Now, the decline in live music as a mainstream activity for the majority of younger people is undeniable. It is increasingly a niche activity. Music no longer defines youth “tribes” as it did from the 50s to the 80s. The stars of today and the future are not musicians or even DJs – but online playlist curators. Social media interaction and online gaming are what many young people use to define themselves as different from their parents’ generation, and those are the places they will receive their main influences from. It’s true that some young people are as obsessed with music as my generation was, but they are more likely to be musicians themselves and to be actively making music. A large audience made up simply of interested listeners and fans is becoming increasingly hard to find. People just don’t go out so much – for various reasons – and spend less when they do. It is very noticeable that the majority of people involved in the world of acoustic folk, blues and roots music are middle aged or older. These days, when performing, at 56 I am sometimes amongst the younger people at the venue! The quality and skills of some of the younger musicians coming through is utterly mind-blowing, but they too are having difficulty finding opportunities to play to their contemporaries, relying on the old codgers who will still buy tickets and CDs to provide some sort of income. As a case in point, just this week I attended a sell-out gig by a local band who are all extraordinary musicians and are doing some very original but upbeat and quite poppy material. The age range in the band is 24 – 28 years old. Two of the band are teachers at a music academy and about a third of the audience was their students. The other two thirds probably averaged between 38 and 45, with many my age and older. The reflections from the light show on the large number of bald heads was dazzling! The result I think will be a severe decline in the number of musicians who can actually become professional and not rely on other paid work to make a living. Maybe for a few years when very young, it is fun to live in a van and have only enough money to survive each day...but it really isn’t fun when you’re older – I’ve tried it. Even some of the most popular and in-demand musicians lead a precarious hand-to-mouth existence today. This is where technology comes in again to assist. I have decided that I am far too old for a full time career in music. My life is too complicated with other commitments, and I like online shopping too much! However, this no longer means that I can’t get my work heard. I can be part of a large community of like-minded people of all ages, and all around the world. Many of the people I have got to know online, through following their music, or through radio chat threads etc have become real friends in the analogue world too. I can have regular interactions with some of the musicians I admire and respect the most... and have also been able to form real friendships with some of them too. I can record and get my recordings out there to people more
easily than was ever the case in the past. I can also have total control over what I record. I curl up on my sofa with a cat or two and network mercilessly online, constantly on the lookout for opportunities. I keep up to date with what other musicians in my field are doing, and can use the reactions of others to what they are doing as a guide to what to encourage and what to avoid in my own music. I have never written with an audience in mind. I continue to write for myself, but it’s very satisfying in middle age to find that there are others who “get” me and like what I do....and they’re not all the same age as me! Technology means that it is much easier now for older- and perhaps less photogenic – artists to be active in the music world. There is no longer an urgent need to get a record label deal, an agent or a manager. (Although if anyone fancies it, I’d would love to have all three!)
Interview by Grace Augustine Being an author has allowed me to meet many people from all walks of life. Four years ago, I hosted a Wine/Music/Books event at Fireside Winery, just south of Marengo, Iowa. That was where I met Joanne Jaytanie. I also met a very talented musician, Jordan Danielsen, who made me a groupie with one song!
Jordan Danielsen and Jef Spradley
A native of Denver Colorado, but raised in the Iowa heartland on the banks of the Muddy Mississippi, Jordan grew up with guitar in hand and a harmonica around his neck. He has spent over a decade hosting open mics, performing in wineries, casinos, pubs, restaurants, festivals, and everywhere imaginable from Madison, WI. to St. Louis, MO. A wandering loner at heart, Jordan has spent much of his musical career as a solo act. However, he has also played with some of the finest musicians in the Midwest, created two full-length albums, and has done some touring as well. In 2011, Jordan released his debut CD, Night Alone in the City, an album very diverse from start to finish. It's chocked full of soulful horns, electric guitars, acoustic ballads, blues, and a tiny bit of hip hop. Jordan's lyrics tell the story of his life growing up in Davenport, Iowa, and at times borders on the hilarious. 2014 brought the release of Old Soul, an album much different than it's predecessor. Jordan spins his musical tales of rivers, road trips, and great grandfathers in the Civil War. Sleek piano, organ moans, and a haunting fiddle make this collection of songs very soothing yet exciting and take you along for the ride. The same year Jordan began touring with a young musician out of Houston, Texas by the name of Jef Spradley. Jef plays a small stripped down drum set while singing some pretty amazing harmonies. The two together put on an entertaining show and one not to miss. Always on tour and never without a song in his throat, Jordan writes from his life experiences and reflects his personality through his music. With many more songs to record and endless gigs to play, he continues to strive for new audiences every day. He also does some awesome covers from other musical legends. I can't end this post without sharing with you my favorite Jordan Danielsen song. Check out his website by clicking the link below.
