Songs For The Struggling Artist

There are about thirty artists in the classroom that is not designed for a lecture but is being used for one anyway. We are required to attend this information session in order to be eligible for our local arts funding. It is a two hour Power Point presentation about how to fill out the grant form. About an hour into it, the facilitator asked “Are we having fun?” and the silence was deafening. The facilitator is very personable and he’s working so hard to make this content less deadly than it is. But telling thirty artists how to fill in forms for grants, mostly between $1000 and $5000, is not scintillating presentation material. I’ve been sitting in presentations like this for over twenty years now and every single one of them is like this. Or worse. They are a colossal waste of artists’ time, no matter which borough or organization is sponsoring them. Whether it’s the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council or the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, Queens Council on the Arts or the Brooklyn Arts Council, they all r

This week I found out I had reached the #4 spot on the Singer Songwriter charts in Queens. This kind of success doesn’t come around very often in my life so I thought I’d share what I did to make it happen. You know what I did? Absolutely nothing. Not one single thing. Last week, I got a notice that, since I hadn’t logged on in so long, Reverb Nation was going to suspend my account. So I logged in. That’s all I did. I didn’t upload new songs. I didn’t change my profile pics. I didn’t upload a video. I didn’t enter a contest or message my “fans”. But a few days after I logged back in, I got the notice that I was in the top ten of singer songwriters in Queens. However this achievement happened, it had absolutely nothing to do with me or any action I took. To read more of How I Became the #4 Singer-Songwriter in Queens visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 381 Image of my Reverb Nation Account (including my rank at #4!) Song: Sleepover by Emily Rainbow Davis c 2007 To support this podc

As you might have surmised, I listen to a lot of podcasts. I used to do a podcast recommendation of every episode of my own podcast. While True Crime isn’t my top genre, sometimes it can satisfy the itch for an involving, multi-layered mystery. There’s not always a solution or resolution (which I do not find satisfying) but the journey there is usually very compelling. There are a lot of great shows beyond Serial – which may have kicked off the popularity of this genre. I’ve gotten into stories about corruption (Dead End, Trump Inc), drugs (The 13th Step, Document), theft (Last Seen, Believe in Magic), and, of course, murder (Bone Valley, In the Dark, Suspect). I believe there’s a sub-genre in the murder True Crime scene – Wrongful Conviction. And while I’m not sure I’m ready to swear off True Crime podcasts or even murder themed True Crime podcasts, I do think I’m done with the Wrongful Conviction podcasts. They just make me so angry! They are infuriatingly full of cops railroading young people into confessi

Over a decade ago, my friend wished I could be there to sing her baby some lullabies so I recorded some and wrote one specifically for him. Then I burned those songs onto a CD and put them in the mail. I did this for a fair number of my friends with babies for a fair number of years. Then some of the parents of those babies wished they could listen to them on Spotify and so I put them up there and they became available for anyone who wanted them. Now, hardly anyone has a CD player anymore, so I send new babies a link. It’s somehow not as special but companies like Spotify made it this way. My music has been on Spotify for something like seven years now. Of all the albums up there, the lullabies are the most popular and my friends who listen to them there like knowing that I get a little payment every time they listen. That’s not something that happens when you listen on a CD. The payment on Spotify isn’t much (between .002 and .005 cents per play). I made $43.24 last year (from all the streaming services, not

Sometimes you have an awareness of the historical quality of the moment you’re going through. I had a very clear sense that things would never be the same after the eleventh of September, 2001. I could feel the day being engraved in the land, in our memories, in our timelines. But a lot stuff doesn’t FEEL significant while it’s happening, especially childhood events, even if people TELL you a moment is momentous, sometimes it just all blends together in the fabric of a life. I’ve lived long enough now that folks are making historical period dramas about eras I remember. It is super weird to see production teams get this wrong. Or to watch styles be elevated from a niche corner to a dominant style. (“No, 7 Lives of Lea, we did not all wear mesh, tiny tank tops and chokers all the time in the 90s. Your research included too many promo shots from the WB.”) But sometimes, the events are so far in the past, I question my own memory of them. I know I am often wrong about what year a pop song came out, for example,

When I was in high school and dreaming of being an actor, I read a lot of the major acting texts. I read Stanislavksi. I read Stella Adler. I read Uta Hagen. I read Sanford Meisner. I was particularly enchanted with the Meisner book and tried to square it with the Meisner exercises we’d done at the Governor’s School for the Arts. They didn’t QUITE connect and I could never really apply what I learned to actual shows but I was captivated and all these texts seemed to strive for a more authentic, emotionally honest style of acting. A lot of acting training is concerned with this authenticity. A lot of acting training takes itself very seriously. I took it all pretty seriously. I took myself pretty seriously, truth be told. And then I started working as an actor. The concerns of working actors have very little in common with acting training. For the most part, the jobbing actor becomes less concerned with whether or not you can tell someone their shirt is brown with authenticity (Yes, this was an exercise I did

After I finished writing my novel for kids, I realized I was not particularly well versed in what kids were reading these days and so set out to read all the contemporary middle grade fiction I could get my hands on. Top of my list: The Secret Keepers, The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, The Bromeliad Trilogy, The Girl Who Drank the Moon and Miss Ellicott’s School for the Magically Minded. There’s a lot of great stuff out there. And they tend to be real page turners compared to a lot of adult books. One of the books I encountered on my search was The Screaming Staircase, the first book of the Lockwood and Company series. It takes place in a world where children work as ghost hunters because adults can’t see spirits. It’s somehow both Victorian and contemporary and has the charming quality of being a workplace story for kids. I know the youth love a ghost and here kids can see them and hear them and fight them every night. I liked it. In theory. But I wasn’t compelled to read more than the first one for

After reading a bit about the history of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (because of questions that came up after watching The Empress), I learned of another Empress Elisabeth (AKA Sisi) project in the pipeline. The film, Corsage, was reported to look at the darker side of the empress, dealing with her fatphobia, her tightlacing and obsession with her extremely long hair. After the overly romantic fantasy version of this woman in The Empress, I was ready for a thornier Sisi. I thought this new film might be a more historically accurate version of events because of the inclusion of these less attractive aspects of her personality but as I watched it, I didn’t need to read more history to notice it was just as made-up as The Empress, if not more. The thing about The Empress was it was clear to me why they made up the fictions that they did. A love story between relative equals is a lot more attractive than the Emperor marrying a young teenage girl. It is a beautiful fantasy to imagine an empress wanting to help th

I’ve been thinking a lot about this thing someone said to me when I was in graduate school. I’d just performed a role I’d always dreamed of playing (Imogen in Cymbeline) and at the cast party was propped up on some chairs resting the ankle I’d twisted during the show. A faculty member came up and complimented my performance (those compliments are lost to my memory) and then said, “I don’t know why you’re wasting your time directing.” Let me give you some context for this very odd compliment. I was there in that graduate program as a directing student. I was less than one year away from an MFA in Directing. My class had only one director and it was me. This particular faculty member, while not someone I studied with, was married to my advisor – that is, my primary directing teacher. In praising my performance, she was also dismissing my entire purpose in being there. To keep reading "Why are you wasting your time directing?" please visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 374

By the time I signed up with Patreon, I’d had about thirteen years of fundraising experience. Having started a theatre company in 2001, I’d explored all kinds of ways to fund our work. In the beginning, it was just writing letters and asking for help. (Weirdly, still the most successful method.) Then, as the internet became more integrated into our lives, we watched Charity Donor Portals come and go out of business and then crowdfunding kicked in. We ran campaigns on CrowdRise and Indiegogo and probably a few others I’ve already forgotten about. These were all for my non-profit theatre, not for me personally. These were funds which only rarely benefited me in a financial way. But in those days, there was not yet a reliable way to get support for me, as an individual artist. I could raise funds for projects but not for my ongoing support, not for my writing, for example. Patreon came along as a way for folks who were making things on the internet to get paid for the things. To keep reading Can Businesses Do th

A writer of my acquaintance recently had an op-ed published in the Washington Post about theatre and what should be done about the death spiral it seems to be in. In the piece, she proposed some ways to fix some of the problems the field has found itself in. She named the difficulties, the history and offered a solution. In watching the response to the article roll in, I was struck by how those who were opposed to her ideas seemed to think the proposal was a plan that was about to be put into place. They seemed to think this was a thing that was about to happen. (One thing she suggested was to give funding for big arts institutions directly to artists instead.) There were cries for the loss of these institutions, for the loss of jobs, for the impossibility of artists taking responsibility for their own budgets. It seemed like they thought this writer was a wizard and was giving notice of what she was about to do with her magic wand. They seemed to attribute great powers to this writer, to imagine she could, w

While I am a big fan of having an artistic practice, (the kind where you just do your art, whether you’re in the mood or not), I’m also a big believer in the power of staring out a window. I think a full artist’s life is a combination of the two – periods of dedicated work or practice and periods of staring out the window. I fear, in our (metaphorically speaking) productivity obsessed world, that the staring out the window piece will be (or has been) lost. One of the reasons to go to an artist’s residency in a beautiful place is that it gives you new windows and new stuff to stare at through them. New ideas may come with new perspectives like that. I imagined, when I went to Crete, that if I did nothing else, staring at previously unseen landscapes would be of great benefit to my work. To keep reading Productivity and the Arts visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 371 Song: Come to My Window Photo by me, Emily Rainbow Davis To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts

The barista at one of my local coffee spots noticed I’d been gone awhile so when he asked, I told him I’d been in Crete at an artist’s residency. He’s from Cyprus so we had a good old chat about food and language and weather and then I went outside to drink my coffee and write. Mid-write, a man walked up to me and said, “Did I overhear you say you were at an artist residency?” “Yes,” I said. “Oh, what kind of artist are you?” he asked. “I’m a playwright,” I said, which is, of course only part of the story but for the purpose of this artist residency I was at, it’s the simplest answer, so I told him “playwright.” To keep reading Wait, A Playwright Is an Artist? visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 370 Song: Pagliacci Image by Anna Kolosyuk via Unsplash To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review! Rate it wherever you listen or via: ⁠https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglingartist⁠ Join my mailing list: ⁠www.emilyrainbowdavis.com/⁠ Like the blog

Because my play is about Cretan history and the neighborhood I live in is full of Cretans (and other Greeks), I figured I should apply to my local arts council for some hyper local funding. That is, New York State or New York City funding would be too broad, I would need Queens funding. So I went to the Queens Council on the Arts’ website and all that was there was a little box for putting in a password. There was no website there or anywhere. I went to their NYC gov page and it led to several defunct social media pages. Was the Queens Council on the Arts no longer operational? I felt like I should have heard something if this were the case. Isn’t this news? To keep reading The Mysterious Disappearance of My Local Arts Council visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 369 Song: Take the Money and Run Image of QCA from Spectrum News To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review! Rate it wherever you listen or via: ⁠https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglin

At this evening of art, artist after artist talked about feminism as a key to understanding their work. “Ok,” I thought, “I’m in a safe crowd. There’s no reason to soft pedal the underlying feminist ideas in my work when I talk about it. I’ll just lay some things out that I usually obscure a little bit.” So, thinking I was in a feminist crowd, I talked about some feminist stuff and explained some of its feminist underpinnings. How quickly I discovered that I had misread the room! Immediately, I got pushback about an underlying conceit in The Dragoning. (A show, by the way, that while it IS feminist in its mission, I’ve never explicitly labeled it as such.) The next thing I knew I was trying to explain that yes, men do kill women. And at absolutely terrifying rates. (How I wish I’d had numbers right then – but now I know that, globally, it’s six women every hour.) All night long, I’d been hearing feminist, feminist, feminist but as soon as an actual feminist issue came up, the room seemed very different. How d

In the past, I’ve made my own residencies – with the assistance of my friends’ generosity of space. These self-styled residencies have always been highly focused and productive dives into a project. But this time, at my first official residency (i.e. not one I made up) I found something quite different than the ones I invented. Funnily enough, I found this group residency not nearly as productive as ones I’ve done on my own. What with so many activities and long leisurely meals and field trips and lectures and presentations, our days were so jam packed I could barely squeeze my daily writing practice in, much less dive deeper. There was so much stimulation, so many interesting people, so much to respond to, I found it difficult to drop into the kind of quiet I need to make words into something significant. You might think this trip, this residency, had been a failure if you were measuring by productivity but it occurs to me that residencies like this one may be for something else. To support this podcast:

You might be surprised to learn this if you only know me through the blog (or podcast) but once upon a time, I could be counted on to create a bubble of good time around me. It’s one of the reasons it’s not a terrible idea to invite me to your party. (Remember when I asked you to invite me to your party a few years ago? Back in the before times?)  I may tend toward rage, fury and righteous indignation here on the blog but out in the world, I’m generally a reasonably nice and pleasant lady to be around. Having been isolated for so long (even before the pandemic, due to the migraines) I sort of forgot what my own personality could be like. To read more of Emily Is Fun visit the Songs for the Struggling Artist blog. This is Episode 366 Song: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Image by Emily Rainbow Davis from Mudhouse Agios Ioannis Crete To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review! Rate it wherever you listen or via: https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglingartist Join my mailing list: 

There are so many reasons  I’m glad to be alive in JUST this moment. There are abundant stories to read or watch. I can listen to music anywhere I go. Podcasts are a thing. Migraine medicine is really taking giant leaps ahead. It is a richer world in terms of diversity and representation. So much progress has been made. But as my 50th birthday looms ahead, I find I am also in a kind of mourning for the world I grew up in. Sometimes I feel as though I have been dropped in a strange future and expected to thrive, when the truth is, this strange world grew up slowly alongside me. I may feel like a stranger in it, but we must have grown into this together. To support this podcast: Give it 5 stars in Apple Podcasts. Write a nice review! Rate it wherever you listen or via: https://ratethispodcast.com/strugglingartist Join my mailing list: www.emilyrainbowdavis.com/ Like the blog/show on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SongsfortheStrugglingArtist/ Support me on Patreon: www.patreon.com/emilyrdavis Or help me

I used to be the kind of person who tried not to take any medication. If I had a headache, I’d try to avoid taking anything for it out of some sense of nobility or stoicism. Maybe I thought it made me strong to suffer? Maybe I thought it somehow made me a better person? Now that I know that some of those headaches were probably migraines, I understand that this was exactly the wrong strategy. Pretty much every migraine medication works better the sooner you take it. This tough guy approach of resisting medication is very common in this country. I think of former Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (remember him? Oof) who recommended aspirin and toughing it out for any kind of pain. It’s odd, because on one hand, sure, we are an overmedicated nation. The story is that we take pills for everything and use medication for things we shouldn’t. There is an opioid crisis, after all. But simultaneously, as a nation, we have a strong skepticism about medicine. We’ll take unregulated supplements, unrestr

At some point in my youth, my school brought in these Kid News Shows that we would watch at the start of the day. Logistically, I don’t know how this was possible as we were still in the AV cart era and there surely weren’t enough TVs for all the classrooms. Maybe it was a weekly experience? I don’t know. But I remember these kid reporters. They always seemed a little absurd to me, like, they were playing reporter and taking it all a little too seriously. It felt a little like dressing up a pet in a costume and then making it read the news. It was kind of cute and also a little off. I was listening to a podcast recently that brought those Kids News Networks to mind. It’s a podcast about internet culture and is very much not made for me. I listen to it because, sometimes, it can explain internet mysteries I am just too out of the loop to understand. Mr. Beast, West Elm Caleb, BYU Virgins, etc – these are all things I have (sort of) learned about. I like knowing things. I’ve listened to this podcast for a coupl