This Friday, Jackson James Smith will join Tinker, David Baker and Taylor Moss at The Seed Project, the first event of the 2014 season at QPAC’s Melbourne Street Green.
The young blues songwriter shares five tips to make a difference with music.
1. Have another passion in life. Whether it be fighting for the rights of those without, striving for peace, wanting to make people feel love, understand compassion and unconditional care, the list can go on and on. But if you have good intention and you want success, make music that isn’t always just for yourself or about yourself and an audience will connect through the diversity of your written notions.
2. Practise your craft. This should almost go without saying and yet there are a plethora of musicians who have brilliant ideas and all the right words to say, but forget to work hard enough in a multi-faceted manner and the popularity they deserve can suffer because of a lack of motivation.
3. Be painfully honest. There are directions to take to be more eloquent about powerfully emotive topics, but never soften your work and bend writing around the imagined will of an audience because you want people to purely like what you might have to say. Honesty can be more confronting in some ways, but it will also always drive a message home more potently and convincingly, and at the end of the day that’s really what you and the people listening to your music want.
4. Share and support others music. This is a great point because it can easily apply to musicians and non-musicians. It is such an obvious thing to do for music enthusiasts and musicians alike, mainly because in this day and age it is ridiculously easy to share around your interests, although it is quite common, especially for smaller bands and musicians to only be helped by a very select people to get their music out and circulating. If you like a musician or a band, take that extra minute and the chain effect it can have for them could be beneficial in ways you mightn’t even realise.
5. Understand that all music interests is a unique perspective. People’s most common answer to ‘what kind of music do you like?’ is that they like lots of different music in different genres. Which is great, but realistically people often get caught in a narrow mindset towards music outside of their comfort zone or genre they are accustomed to listening to. Before the urge to throw out negative comments towards something comes up, stop them in their tracks. Complaining about music isn’t fun, being open to new ideas and concepts are what change the face of music, it is what makes a difference over time. You can learn something new each day from music as much as you do in other areas of life, be creative within, and with your choices towards the outside world too.
JacksonJamesSmith plays The Seed Project this Friday June 20 at QPAC’s Melbourne Street Green.
Jackson's debut EP, ‘Simple’s Better’, will be released on July 10.
