I rarely go on Facebook anymore but occasionally some notification tickles my click-finger and I emerge 45 minutes later. My most recent trip down the rabbit hole either started with or lead me to (it’s hard to tell anymore) a heartbreaking post by singer-songwriter Corin Raymond. Illustrated with a photo of the entire contents of his pockets and piggy bank, Corin was encouraging people to come down to see him perform at our beloved Cameron House in hopes of raising enough to cover some immediate bills. The image of nickels and dimes was appropriate to the part of the tale where he was nickel-and-dimed to the point of overdraught by CIBC. That, on top of a cascade of other misfortunes and just plain life circumstances, had put him in this particular pickle and he was responding by proposing, yet again, to sing for his briny supper. We couldn’t make it to the Cameron that night so I made a direct donation to his PayPal account instead. If you know Corin – or even if you don’t and just want to help out a musician in need – I encourage you to do the same. Rather than just link to his PayPal, I’ll suggest you check out the music and merch page on his website to get to know him a little, then scroll down just a tiny bit to see his PayPal appeal and link.
Corin Raymond is a smart, talented, creative and exceptionally literate songwriter. Canada has an abundance of them – apparently more than we can properly look after ourselves – so his predicament is hardly unique. Were it not for my gainfully employed partner and some inheritance from mum’s passing, I might be posting my own appeals on Facebook. And all of this reminded me of a Corin Raymond house concert I attended several years ago when his Canadian-Tire-money-funded “Paper Nickels” album was new. A generous Parkdale living room with maybe 40 chairs crammed in – all filled with mostly local folks who’d paid something to support this artist, drink wine, eat homemade cookies, chat with neighbours, and enjoy a bespoke musical experience. At some point, either Corin (who had played Voyageur previously) or our host, Joanne, made mention of me and Six String Nation, which was very nice. As the concert ended, one of my fellow attendees came up to say she was a fan of Six String Nation. She was a teacher and was wondering if I did school visits. I told her I did (I’d already done a hundred or more by then) and would be happy to send her some more info about the presentation, technical requirements and fees if she was interested in booking. “Oh. You charge for this?”
”Yes, it’s how I earn a living.”
She seemed incensed at my selfishness.
”I thought with something like that you’d just do it out of the goodness of your heart”. She left without giving me her email. Now this is someone who had presumably paid for her ticket as I had and maybe even bought some of Corin’s merch so likely had some understanding of the precarity of the life of those working in the world of the self-directed independent artist. Perhaps the fact that my “art” had the look of education and was comprised of me talking and showing pictures meant I didn’t count as an “artist”.
That was back in 2013. Life for artists has been squeezed even harder since then. Never mind storytelling, everyone also expects music to be free, delivered on platforms that generate billions of dollars for their C-suite and shareholders and sustain global offices and staff. Public funding budgets keep shrinking and get more and more siloed, and corporate sponsors give very little and ask for a lot if you’ll just plaster their logo on everything you do. Various other start-ups and “disruptors” have inserted themselves into the gaps and promise to give you a way to “monetize your content” or offload your merch sales and distribution and they all take their cut. And if you’re not in at the very very very beginning you are quickly awash in the fading hopes of millions of others just like you hoping to collect another Instagram follower or earn $1.34 from your third party T-shirt sale.
Art is both inspiration and perspiration. The inspiration comes at least partly for free but the rest is work – often unpaid. I am forever grateful for the gift that Six String Nation has been to me. I remember exactly where I was standing when I had the idea. It came seemingly fully formed (though only in the way that dreams seem fully formed until you wake up and have to start trying to make sense of them to a bored spouse or disinterested friend). It was 1995 and the Quebec referendum on sovereignty was just months away and I was filled with a looming dread for what might become of our idea of Canada. I met the luthier George Rizsanyi, who was committed – at least for one project – to eschewing the more traditional exotic woods in favour of local woods from near his home in Greenbank Ontario and I was inspired by that commitment. The two ideas fused in my mind in an extraordinary moment in a hallway outside my cubicle on the second floor of York Quay Centre at Harbourfront and I spent the next eleven years working to make it happen – supported financially only more than halfway through the process by some sponsors and donors and some Telefilm development funding for a CBC TV show that never happened (more on that in a coming post). All the money raised went to travel and hotels and researchers and shippers and videographers and photographers and publicists and, of course, to George to build the thing. We debuted on Canada Day 2006 in front of 80,000 people and I ended the day realizing I was in debt to the tune of one dollar for each of those in attendance.
Since that debut, I have sometimes been paid very well to deliver my presentation about the project. As I used to like to say “I get paid $5000/hour… three times a year”. But that was when things were going super well. I’ve also been paid much more modestly on a more frequent basis (though almost never since the pandemic began) for schools and community presentations. And I’ve also been asked to do things “for the exposure” and have, many times, very willingly brought Voyageur to some club or another just to stand on stage, do a quick show-and-tell, ask people to visit my website for more info and book me for their kids’ schools, and put the guitar in the hands of a musician I really admire. I love every moment of every one of these encounters, paid or unpaid. It feels like what I was meant to do. It is very much a calling and my own gift for storytelling has grown through the gift of the stories embedded in the project and those it gathers around it along the way. There is a part of me that accepts that the gift that the idea was for me becomes the gift I share with others. But we also live in a culture and an economy that devalues those gifts and – especially as I get older – I need to be clear-eyed about how to treat my own gift and the gift that is Six String Nation.
In the coming weeks, I’ll share a really exciting development that I hope will address this recognition for the long term but I was inspired to write about this today because of a wonderfully worthwhile repost of an earlier piece by one of my favourite people on Substack, the Honest Broker, Ted Gioia. The original essay is entitled, appropriately, “The Gift”. In it, he examines with his usual thoroughness and insight the role of art and the artist in our society and the presumptions that have pushed so many creative people to the margins of the economy. I encourage you to read it, to think about it and to share it with everyone.
In the meantime, if you are one of my paid subscribers, I thank you so much for supporting not just this writing but the ongoing project of building, growing and sustaining the larger project of Six String Nation. If you’re a free subscriber, I’d certainly welcome you making the transition to paid – but if now’s not the time for you to do that I get it totally and I’m happy for you to accept these missives as a not-regular-enough gift.