Wanzology

Mediocre

 Follow me, follow me where I go. No, you don't have to, uh,Hi!!! How are you doing? Welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY!!!

I am your host, The Wanz, and I am doing pretty well all things considered. Spent last weekend at the scene of the crime, as it were. The scene of the crime being college, my old college town and I was reminded of why I think the way I do, how that got developed. And, uh, more importantly, what good friendships feel like. They feel great. You know, you don't see someone for a while and you come away with this full feeling, god damn, that was nice talking to them. Damn. It was great to see them. That's what I just had this weekend.

You know, by the time I got home, I was feeling like really, really good and then I went to see Layla Hathaway and she and her band were amazing!! So much so that when I left that show, I felt inadequate, and when I say inadequate, I mean, I've been performing all my life. It's what I know. I was wondering why the hell I do it. I was wondering if I would ever be as good as she is, or her guitar player, Jubu Smith, who I'd never heard of before but then I looked him up and went, I have no idea why I didn't know who this guy was. Cause he's amazing. He's an amazingly expressive guitar player, an emotive singer, a really captivating writer. I was kind of wondering, well, what the hell am I doing? When I got home, you know what I figured out? I figured out that I was mediocre. Mediocre, meaning I'm okay. I'm not the best, not the worst. I looked it up. Mediocre, as defined by Cambridge English Dictionary:

“A person that is not very good at something or not very good at anything in particular; or, something that is not very good.”

Now that may have been a nasty thing for me to read right before I was going to bed, because it hit me kind of funny. To go farther, what are three synonyms for mediocre? Well, there's more than three. The list is decent, satisfactory, middling, medium, ordinary, passable, indifferent, and my favorite, so- so. What do these things mean? For me, they mean, I'm not as good as some, but I'm not as bad as others. Now, I'm not sure whatever it is that you do and how good you are at it, but I will tell you this, if you don't feel like you're very good at something, the odds of you actually doing it, or keep doing it, keep trying to learn how to do it, are very, very small. That's what I know. But I'm in the predicament of, this is what I do. Music is everything for me. Music is, yeah, it's one of the most important forces, besides oxygen, in my life and I love doing it. I mean, I love almost everything about music. Doesn't really matter what kind. I mean, even music I don't listen to or don't like very much, I can still find something good with it. But when it comes to me creating music, or performing music, now my little perspective has been bouncing around like a ping pong ball. Because my first instinct is to go to, “Oh, you were never any good in the first place. Even though you've been doing it all your life and you keep telling people that you're, you know, you love it and it's all good and all this other stuff. The fact remains that if you were good at it, you would be recognized or rewarded in such a way that it wouldn't be a question of whether you were better than mediocre or not.”

As I sit here, I'm like, dude, I sing the national anthem for a lot of the sports teams in this town, or I have. But they all have one thing in common, they never call me back. I always have to call them. So it's kind of like, “Hey, can, can I, can I play? Can I sing for you?” There are a lot of situations that are just like that.

The more I thought about it today before I sat down to record this, the more that I remembered, you know, you don't produce product like most other artists, at least not anymore. I don't write a lot. I don't record a lot. And the recordings that I do, I'm never really happy with because I keep telling myself I'm ‘learning’ how to do it. When, when does that learning stop and you actually feel capable of doing whatever it is that you're learning, cause that's where I'm at. I don't, I don't have an answer.

A couple of years ago, this was kind of really bugging me, I mean, it was eating me alive every day. I didn't know healthy comparisons in the entertainment business. You're always compared to somebody. I feel somewhat unique because I don't see anyone…anyone in the music industry, the mainstream music industry, who got their break at 51 years old, had a two and a half year run on a fantabulous song, but then when they did their own stuff, didn't have even minor local success, let alone worldwide.
And that's for a myriad of reasons, but the point is, is that before Thrift Shop, I thought I knew the music business because I read a lot and I watched a lot and I knew a lot of people in the business doing the thing and it hit me that, you know, it's been 10 years, now it's almost 11. It's been 10 years since that opportunity and in 10 years, I haven't been able to one, make my own way. You know, I'm not trying to be Macklemore. I'm not trying to be Ed Sheeran. I'm not trying to be Taylor Swift. I'd like to be a pretty successful local musician and that hasn't happened. So why hasn't it happened? I compare myself too much.

There's a, uh, local singer songwriter named LaRoy Bell. Now, Leroy had a really big hit a long time ago, still one of my favorite songs, but when I run into him again, about 10 years ago, maybe even before that, he is under the radar, but he's, he's got a three-piece band, a sold out show, New Year's Eve at like a 2000 seat venue. And when I see him up there, all I can say is, “Shit, I could do that.” So I go home and try, but I can't play guitar as well as he does, and I don't write content as well as he does. So I start working on my writing. And as I work harder on my writing, I start realizing actually, I lie, I actually start comparing myself to artists that I see on the national/international scale.

Well, I don't have their infrastructure. I didn't walk their path. I don't have their business dealings. I don't have their connections or their lawyer or their publisher or their record label. I'm just me. So what does that mean? Well, my magnificent magnifying brain turns it into a negative. Great. Now what? Well, I'm, I'm talking about it. What do you do? What is it that you do that you really like doing, but all of a sudden that's kind of poisoned by you're not ‘as good as _____ (fill in the blank). Is it golf? Tennis? Pickleball? What is it? One thing that the whole thrift shop experience took away from me, it used to be really easy for me to do music simply because I loved it.
Simply because I love showing off. I love telling people, you know, “I was a ‘ham’ before there were ‘pigs’!!”, because when I look back over my history, that's accurate. But now, ten years after the fact, eleven, eleven years after the fact, I now better understand what happens to artists when they kind of outlive their life expectancy in the business and they just kind of fade away, and you don't hear from them anymore. I have an idea of why that is.

With most artists, there are two or three songs that made an impression. Enough of an impression that even last night 400 people would come to see you. I don't have that. I'd like to have that. And I know I have to work to get that. So what about you? What is it or is there anything that the feeling of, eh, so-so hits you when you would really like to be better at whatever it is? What is it for you, hmm? I am struggling with this a little bit. And sometimes it's easy to put it to the side and not worry about it, not think about it and just go on and you know, what I always tell people is, “I don't know, why don't you try these three things:
• Start from wherever you are.
• Use whatever you've got, and
• Do the best that you can.

One of my nephews told me that a long time ago. And ironically, now that I'm thinking about it, I was kind of in the same position where I really questioned my abilities to write songs that might resonate with total strangers. And he told me, “I think you should start from wherever you are, not where you wish you were. Use whatever you've got, whether that be the abilities you have or hiring someone who has more ability, whatever, but use whatever you've got, and then do the best that you can.” Which sounds really easy, really sensible, very intelligent. It's just not always that easy. When you go see an artist who is insanely gifted, talented, you just know that they spent decades learning how to do what they do. And then you look at yourself in the mirror and you go, “Well, you've spent decades learning how to do what you do, and you're not where they are.”
“People don't talk about you like you heard people talk about her”, and this is where things get weird because that little comparison thing, it's not strictly on abilities, it transfers to job performance, it transfers to appearances, it transfers to knowledge. Not everybody is a nuclear physicist, nor would they want to be. Right?

So what about you? How do you deal with being mediocre? How do you keep it from making you feel some sort of way? Have you thought about it before? I have. The Bon Jovi song, Dead or Alive, there's a nice line in there that I always remember, “Sometimes when you're alone, all you do is think.”. It's a hell of a line. What do you do? I'll tell you what I do. I had a shrink who gave me this nice little tool. Evidence. Evidence meaning history. I mean, the one thing that I know about is me. Just like the one thing that you know about should be you. I know where I've fallen down. I know where I've excelled, I know everything there is to know about me. Just like, you know, everything there is to know about you, right? So, he challenged me every time that I had these thoughts of feeling quote unquote ‘lesser than’. He asked me, “Well, what is the evidence show?”, and my evidence goes back a long way! The longer you live the longer the record, that's just the way it is, the longer you're at a job the more they have to compare you with when you started versus where you're at now that sort of thing. So here I am at almost 63 years old, and I am comparing myself to people a third or less my age.

Not very bright. I'll admit it. Not very bright. How do I get out of this little conundrum, this little thought experiment of comparison and its little, uh, aftereffects? I already told you what my nephew advised me, and applying his path to mine, how do I do that? I don't stop looking at what I have been looking at, I just look more at me. Nothing's going to change unless I do something.

So if your life is feeling kind of mediocre, you don't feel like you're fulfilling your own best prophecy. You're not living your best life. If you're looking for solutions outside of yourself, one word, you're not going to find anything. You're going to find other people's experience, other people's stories about things that you want to do, instead of manufacturing your own story. I mean, I have a story. I've, I've, I've been around long enough. Maybe you've been around longer than me. I'd, I'd love to see that. But what I do know is that how to be satisfied with what I've already done is challenging. In the sense that turning it into fuel to make myself want to practice and get better at playing guitar or playing bass or taking apart beats and making my own or writing lyrics. Being mediocre is not a death sentence unless you don't try to put yourself outside of it. I mean, you can always come back to being mediocre, that's not a bad thing. That's not the bottom of the barrel, remember, it's in the middle and like I told someone this last weekend, the safest place in a canoe is in the middle of the boat. Not at one end or the other. And in a crowd of people, the safest place is in the middle. In the middle of the herd. Animals in a herd, if you're in the middle, you don't get picked off by a predator, right?

So mediocre, when you change how you look at it is pretty damn good! Consistent, comfortable, safe, for everyone. It's going to be different. But what I do know is we all have to do something in order to change wherever we're at. Life is a verb.

I am going to sign off questioning. What can I do for the rest of this day that is a positive contribution to my musical abilities. Remember? Start from wherever you are, use whatever you've got and do the very best you can. At the end of the day, no matter what it is you're doing, if that's not enough for anyone else, the problem may not be you, it may be them and how they affect you. So, segregate yourself and try again and see how you feel. Then you'll know. Better to have supporters than critics. Better to have supporters than critics.

When you live inside the four inches between your ears, you're both…you're both. So make the best of what you have, whatever it is you have, not what you wish you had.
You're enough as you are, being mediocre is a good thing.

That'll be this week, uh this week's episode of WANZOLOGY!! Still working on the website, actually tomorrow is going to be the day that I actually do research and figure out how to put all these pieces together. So stay tuned for not only a blog, but also a mailing list. How would you like to come see me talk WANZOLOGY and take questions? Would that be a cool thing? Might be.

But for now, I think I'm going to go do something good for myself and then maybe do it for somebody else. You do the best that you can because you are still the end all be all of you. And I wish you nothing but the best of things. I'll see you next week.

Peace.