This morning, while I was driving to work, I heard a clip of Adele announcing her tour dates to support her latest album, and she made a humorous reference to the fact that she cannot say “hello” normally anymore, because the popularity of her song by that title has added layers of meaning to what was previously an ordinary experience. This is a striking, though far from unique, example of the way in which the songs of artists frequently escape from them and take on a far larger meaning than they wish. Although Adele appears to be good-natured about the ubiquity of her #1 hit, not all artists have enjoyed the popularity their hits received. A couple of examples of this will suffice. Once, while watching a VH1 countdown of one-hit wonders, the story of Imani Coppola revealed that the singer-songwriter threw up in her mouth a little after first hearing her lone crossover hit “Legend Of A Cowgirl” on the radio, and stopped performing the hit soon after it went off the charts, more concerned with her artistic freedom than complying with the difficult demands of stardom. More recently, in looking at the reflections of people about the late Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland, someone remarked having driven him and finding him unhappy to hear his radio hit “Plush,” saying that stars in general hated to hear their radio hits, something that greatly puzzles me, although more recently I have a bit more of a guess as to why that might be the case.

At the end of the recent fun show our congregation hosted [1], I made a comment to a few of the young adults that I was chatting with that it would be a while before I would want to hear the song we performed again [2]. The reasons for this are fairly obvious. When one is practicing for a performance, particularly on somewhat short notice, the amount of time that is required to sing and listen to the same song over and over again to memorize the lyrics and the proper timing is fairly intense. This is all the more true if one is part of a band that is on tour to support an album, when one has to sing the same radio hits over and over again because the fans want to hear them year after year, while also spending time making music videos and performing those same hit songs on various television shows. After a while, most people would probably not want to hear those songs again, especially if one has to keep performing them as part of the implicit bargain between a performer or band and the paying audience that implies that for the price of admission fans will get to hear what they want to hear, which is usually a popular song. I know that when I go to see a band live [3], I have songs that I am looking to hear, and my success at hearing them has been a bit uneven. When I heard Jewel live almost a decade ago when I still lived in the Tampa area, she managed to sing pretty atrociously through her set without singing the two songs of hers that I most wanted to hear, “Standing Still” and “Stand.” On the other hand, I was happy to sing along with my favorite Guster song, “Satellite,” when I heard them in concert, even though it was not so big of a hit that most of their fans would have been upset if it had been dropped from the set list. Sometimes artists get tired of singing or playing a song, even as their fans have favorites that they want to hear over and over again.

This is a problem that is not limited to music alone, but is an issue with artists as a whole. For an artist, a particular book or song or painting may be emblematic of a moment or a period in time that has a confined beginning and end. For example, I have written thousands of blog posts in the 5 years that my blog has been in operation, and some of them are quite painful and unpleasant to read because of the personal matters I am reminded of by even seeing the title of the blog entries. Yet the material has been written and can be read and appreciated by people long after what has been written in them is painful and unpleasant to recollect. If this is true for a fairly obscure person like myself who has achieved no particular fame or notoriety in the wider world, it is certainly even more true for those who have received a great deal of fame and popular success. When someone becomes a fan of a given work of art, it no longer only has the meaning that was ascribed to it by the creator of the art, but it now has different meaning for the person appreciating that art. As a teenager, for example, I would often fall asleep to the gentle sounds of Donna Lewis’ debut album, Now In A Minute, with the hit singles “I Love You Always Forever” and “Without Love,” and the haunting and melancholy piano ballads “Simone [4]” and “Silent World.” I do not know what meaning these songs have for Donna Lewis, twenty years after she first released them. I do know, though, for myself, that the songs have a deep personal meaning because of the context of their works within my own personal life, given my extreme sensitivity to the deeper resonance of music within a life full of dramatic incident and my own congenital reflective and melancholy temperament. Not only for musicians, though, but for other artists, a successful novel can be a burden, because people want to read more books with the same characters and more material set in a given world, even after an author has said all that they want to say about the fictional world that they created.

In many ways, being an artist is a somewhat frustrating sort of experience, yet the frustration is an inevitable result of the glory that results from creation. After all, when one creates, one often seeks insight or understanding about what one has observed or experienced or mused about, and that creation in turn affects the lives and thoughts and behavior of other people. Once a piece of work leaves the mind and heart of its creator, it becomes imbued with all kinds of meanings that the creator did not intend, or may not even want, from those who have become familiar with the creation. And a work can acquire new contexts, entirely unintended by its creator, long after the work has been released, taking on a life of its own that can either bring credit or blame to its creator, or a mixture of both. At times a work may come to stand as an artifact of a given time because of its popularity or its significance, and the original aims and thoughts and expectations of the creator may seldom enter into our understanding of a given work, while the creator may champion works that are not as well-regarded and disregard those works that may have been thought of as slight or unimpressive but nonetheless managed to strike a response chord among the larger world. Those of us who create out of the material of our own lives or our own world do not know exactly what will draw interest in a wider world that we imperfectly understand, nor do we have very much control over how other people appropriate or interpret our work. All we can do is create, and do our best to patiently live and explain our intents and goals and aims and manner of living in the hope that at least someone will listen and respond appropriately. Sometimes all we can do is send out signals, and seek to pick up on the signals of others, as best as we are able.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/12/13/once-i-was-seven-years-old/

[2] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/word-crimes/

[3] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/concert-review-guster-kishi-bashi-03312015-portland-or/

[4] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/simone/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/i-never-had-the-chance-to-say-goodbye/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/summer-night-air/