By Alan Currens – Part 1 of the “Musician’s Hierarchy of Needs” article from then soon to be launched website for The Bones Of Giants (TBOG). An all new podcast and blog! TBOG is a field guide for the entrepreneurial musician and will be launched in fall of 2020.
Go here to sign up and be notified of this blog/podcast’s exciting launch!
Alan is an owner of DMI & Mannequin Productions, LLC, a live entertainment company based in Denver Colorado that produces some of the state’s most sought after and well produced bands: Mannequin the Band, Colorado’s flagship wedding band and private event band. Rockslide, one of Mannequin’s sister bands, also a top-tier Colorado wedding band and Midnight Social, the wedding and event band with the most bang for their 7 piece size!!
THE HERO’S JOURNEY
With a nod to Joseph Cambell’s inspired creation of the hero’s journey.
The Artist’s Journey is something I personally cling to. Hearing it described by Steven immediately gave me the language I needed to describe and understand my life. It gave structure to all that I couldn’t explain in life.
I hope it does the same for you, but just in case you’d like something customer tailored to the artist who is a musician. I’ve written the following.
Our ‘regular life’ is a life in which we as artist struggle to find ourselves. It is our “quest” to find our inner muse, that part of us that seems to exist independent of us. Yet that part holds us up and defines us. Here are Joseph Campbell’s stages of the hero’s journey of our ‘regular life’ so that you have some bearing on what I’m saying.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL’S HERO’S JOURNEY
ACT 1
- Ordinary life
- Call to adventure
- Refusal
- Mentor
- Threshold
ACT 2
- Test, friends and Allies
- Approach to inner most cave
- Claims reward
ACT 3
- The road back
- Hero returns with magic elixir
The theory that resonates with me is Steven Pressfield’s idea that when we discover our purpose as an artist, the hero’s journey of our regular life ends… THAT is where artist’s journey begins. That is to say that the regular hero’s journey is our quest to find our purpose as an artist. I’m convinced this is true. Additionally, I would add that I think we have many hero’s journeys and many artist’s journeys.
From the instant we become aware of our artist journey we are no longer roped to the docks of regular life. We are adrift on our new journey, It’s fraught with angry seas and perfect storms, sea monsters and our own implausible and impractical thirst for discovery.
We have become artists. We cease to be burdened by the things that regular people are concerned with. Social status. Materialism. Mind games and toxic friendships. We are above… or perhaps removed from all of that and we are now resident to a subculture of humans called “artists”. To be even more specific, we are a subculture of that artist subculture, we are musicians.
Our artist’s journey more aptly referred to as “the musician’s journey“.
All of the things we used to cling to that have nothing to do with our musician’s journey melt away. Regular life becomes a 2 dimensional show. Boring, less interesting.
We begin to see in what I think of as a sort of 4th dimension. I’m not being meta-physical, this isn’t some mystic science. I just don’t know what to call it when we create intangibles like sound, melody, harmony and emotion.
All of the trappings of regular life lose their allure. People who support our purpose take precedence. And we begin what Steven calls the Artist’s Journey. It contains all of the same stages as the hero’s journey, but is dedicated entirely to our new purpose. What is our new purpose? That’s easy… it’s creating and bringing to the world our creations. Also, our talents, imaginations and ambitions.
Often, there is an overhaul in an artist friendship circles. Their clothing may also change as they seek to shed their old “regular self” and try to identify their new, “musician self”.
MY TRANSITION FROM REGULAR LIFE TO MY ARTIST’S JOURNEY
My own “chrysalis to butterfly” transition in my new world of music and music performance was rocky and misguided and I came out looking less like a butterfly and more like a bird that had been sucked through a jet engine.
My father dying triggered my first transition. It was first my all-is-lost moment (yes, you can have more than one). And when it happened I did what would become a habit for a few years, I ran. I moved like a pinball whose plunger had been pulled back and held there for a decade only to be suddenly released. I mean I was launched.
I hit the world at breakneck speeds, living as hard and fearless as I could for the next 3 years. My story (and the stories of others) unfolds within the pages of the book, The Bones of Giants, which I hope to release in 2021, but for now just know that I was woke.
As woke as I thought I was, I was equally naive and foolish. I threw myself into any musical challenge with no regard to geography or the effect my actions might have on anyone in my life. I lied about being able to play keyboards to get a gig. I stayed awake for days getting the basics covered and then made my way to the next challenge with little or no thought of what I left behind. My family thought I was flaky. I think some of my high school music companions thought I was brave, but others thought I was an idiot. I didn’t have time for any of it anyway, I was just running from the pain of loss and into the light. Hung up on discovering who I was.
No one told me the light was a fuse and I was chasing it right to the explosives.
Keep reading this new DMI blog series of guest blog from The Bones of Giants!
Article By – Alan Currens
An exerpt from The Bones Of Giants
Alan is the founder and co-owner of Mannequin Productions, LLC. A live entertainment company based in Colorado. The company produces, promotes and books some of the best Colorado wedding bands available.
Mannequin the Band, the companies flagship band, was founded in 2014 and has since skyrocketed to the top of the wedding and event entertainment field in the state. Other bands produced and promoted by Mannequin Productions are:
Rockslide, a 10-piece powerhouse group with 3 singers and a 3 piece horn line
Midnight Social, a 7-piece explosion of fun with 2 singers and a sax player
Neon Nites, a 5 piece mountain of talent
Also owned and operated by Mannequin Productions, LLC. is Denver Music Institute. One of Denver’s longest standing music schools specializing in online or in person: voice lessons, guitar lessons, drum lessons and bass lesson.
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