Sustaining Your Creative Practice (with Steve Lawson)

Is the audience more than a gaggle of consumers? What role do they play in the creative process of an artist? Should they, as Rick Rubin says, "come last"? Are they always right? Or is there a more nuanced and sustaining way to approach this question? In this episode of The Gentle Rebel, I explore this question with Steve Lawson. I bumped into Steve towards the end of the summer at Greenbelt Festival. We rapidly got deep in conversation about his recently completed PhD, A Study Towards a New Model for Subscriber Audience Involvement in Improvised Music. Steve’s approach to music-making and creative practice has always resonated with me. Over the past twenty-five years, he has carved out a living as a solo improvisational bass player, developing a thoughtful and sustainable model for art that resists the common assumptions that drive an obsession with numbers and scale. His thesis turns that lived experience into a lens for questioning many of the assumptions baked into how we think about creativity today. https://youtu.be/BB362bVySiI Notes from our conversation... The Audience Comes With What happens if we treat the audience as part of the story that shapes and sustains our practice? A way of looking at the influential relationship between artist and audience is to create spaces where the rationale (the philosophical approach) can be presented, and work can emerge as part of a conversation with the audience. For Steve, listening to how people (who respect your work) engage with it, whether “that reminds me of…” or “my Dad just died and all I can listen to is you,” becomes so much more meaningful than having a reviewer who doesn’t know what you are doing or why, and place it in a pile of other CDs. What matters is how people relate it to their lives, and what it means to them. Creating spaces for this dialogue became central: a mailing list, website forum, Twitter, and eventually a subscription model through Bandcamp. Non-Algorithmically Defined Community Spaces This meant integrating community with the economic rationale for making music. The audience emotionally sustains the music and financially supports its creation, along with the maintenance of the space where both artist and audience belong as equals. When the audience has already paid for the music before it is made, there is no need to rationalise it with hype or spectacle. Instead, it connects with people who already share the philosophical approach. This is a form of patronage, supporting the artist because of how they create, not only what they make. Scenius (Brian Eno) Genius is not an individual trait but the manifestation of the collective intelligence of a scene. Famous names are simply the visible tip of a larger iceberg, as with Russian painters in the early twentieth century. Reception Theory (Stuart Hall) Audiences actively interpret media texts by encoding and decoding. They may align with the intended meaning (dominant reading), reject it (oppositional reading), or negotiate it. Instrumental music does not encode meaning in a concrete way. Its sense of meaning emerges cumulatively, with artist and audience encoding together. Decoding and recoding become a collective process, shaped by new work and ongoing observations. The Space of the Talkaboutable (David Darke) Great works expand the “space of the talkaboutable,” an invitation to discuss ideas and broaden horizons. While Darke sees this as arriving around the work, Steve sees the space as built first (through mailing lists, forums, Twitter, Bandcamp), with the work then released into it. Meaning is collectively encoded, decoded, and recoded in this shared space. “The Audience Comes Last” The PhD began with the desire to make better music. What became clear was how much the audience contributes to the process, and what happens when that is denied. Rubin’s statement that the audience should be ignored overlooks the wisdom, care,