bus journey to the gig location, packing up your gear before dawn,
occasional dates in between or after.
Many often think, as one friend recently commented, that our "artist life is so easy".
After all we just come up on stage & sing or speak or dance & all is - from the outside - so exciting, alluring and fun, make up and costumes,
and then money in hand or via bank transfer. Dream right?
Yes, I love travelling and I feel blessed and thankful I was given this chance to stay in Asia a bit longer (after a month hotel residency contract, that was in itself
a hell of a journey proving how tricky and difficult artist life can be...)
with some performances on the way paying my way through a different sort of 'winter'.
Yes I still can't believe after 14 years of being told I " would never sing", as doctors in the past gave my baby throat no chance, now I make a living by singing, and people seem to like it so much they invite me and thank me (bless them).
Yes I love meeting all these thousands of individuals from so many different countries, religions, colours, professions, ages; all the homeless cats and dogs I feed, all the weirdest dishes I taste, or teas I try to try pestering bored shopkeepers to explain to me in their broken English every single ingredient.
Yes, I guess I am lucky that way. Yes, I gave away my business life of more preplanned but also wonderfully safe nine to whenever-the-boss-says, and exchanged it for the most unpredictable unmeasurable incomparable life of a freelance gypsy ((though I still do sales work)) .
I know I have things to be thankful for: if only the kindness of all those amazing people
who BELIEVE and want me to simply keep on singing...
And yet, I am also extremely unlucky perhaps,
because I believe both my my song-writing soul and my passion for travel,
apart from the inborn insatiable unending inexhaustible curiosity for anything,
and further, and more, and again, and on the road one more time,
they both also feed on a desire to forget things I keep remembering...
No, this post is not a complaint.
Even if I will always repeat being an artist is NOT a choice, it chooses you, if anything.
I am thankful for having a chance tomorrow to sing at the opening of a new restaurant, because the owner for whom I sang in September in KL loved my voice so much he chose me as a "special star" for this event in Ipoh. To be here, I sadly had to decline a kind invitation from one of my Malaysian friends to spend this very unique holiday with her family in Singapore, and my singing salary will help me save for a few more weeks of Asian adventure. (I lost my return ticket, so have to stay on the hot continent,
somehow, till end of Dec)
Yet, if you, dear reader, now would like to congratulate me, please don't.
Because now, on Thanksgiving night, I am not with a family (sadly I probably never wouldn't...)
or dearest friends.
I type on my new best friend: a nameless red netbook, looking outside of the faceless hotel window, revising a list of songs for tomorrow.
No, it's not the case of greener grasses. There are things we chose, and there are things that are chosen upon us. If you can celebrate this beautiful day reminding us to give thanks for all our blessings with your loved ones, even if they are boring, and predictable, and uncle Sam keeps saying the same jokes he did over the past five years, cherish it. For some, whether artists or not, these jokes will never happen. They never did, there was never even a memory of uncle Sam.
And if you ever think artists are overpaid for that brief moment they appear in front of you,
almost like in a more distinguished sort of a circus, remember:
To sing like Amy W did, to write songs touching so many, helping so many,
to play so purely that you keep paying for albums and buying concert tickets,
to be such ARTIST in the deepest sense of this overused word you have to often spend years of loneliness, silence, tears, white wall in a hotel room, same dinner with a piano, misunderstandings and insults.
It is far from easy, because it goes right from the heart.
And yes, I did not chose it, but I love it.
Even if I may have tears as companions on this Thanksgiving night, I am thankful too.
Especially to all my friends who I know think of me when I enter another stage.
And one day, I hope, in between travels, shows, and all that chaos, a someone will sing me that song, and we will also have some house dinner routine, and some boring but so happy family life somewhere... :-)
Happy Thanksgiving All
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