“I am here to serve”, I say it in my head often, and it feels good because it reminds me that I can be useful. But I’m just a singer-songwriter, how can I serve folks? Live entertainers don’t provide food or medical services or shuffle papers in an office for someone in a suit, so what do we do to help keep our civilization going?
Our species has spent much of our existence sitting around the fire together in the evening, singing songs, telling stories, and being with our communities, but we’ve lost those experiences over the past few decades with too many folks staying home to sit in front of the television, or recently in front of Facebook and Netflix. We don’t even sit around the dinner table after supper to tell stories or sing anymore, and most of us don’t even sit together around the dinner table. We don’t commune as much these days, and I think a lot of people feel emptier and more isolated because of it. That’s where the live entertainer (and promoter, venue, etc) is useful, we remind folks to get back together and spend time sharing the same experiences and making friends and human connections. We provide the events and the places for folks to forget about their work or other hassles, listen to some live music, and be with other humans and not feel so isolated.
These past couple of years of performing (231 shows in 2014!) around the Pacific Northwest, I’ve seen people’s lives transformed and made happier at these shows, socialising with fun people, meeting attractive new love interests, enjoying new drinks and food, tons of laughing, and my personal FAVOURITE, singing along with huge smiles! These moments in our lives are much more rewarding than pressing the “Like” button on other’s people’s pictures on Facebook. We need to do more to remind folks to get off the hamster wheel and rejoin the fun part of humanity.
Entertainers create the music and the stories and the emotions that we can all connect with and share together in a moment. I think we might be needed more now than ever, nobody is going to get Ebola because we didn’t perform a show, nobody will starve because we didn’t sing a song, and our jokes won’t ensure the sales report will get delivered on time, but we help make people smile, cry, laugh, and maybe even more importantly, we help get people together.
I am here to serve: https://www.sjatr.com/shows
Best,
SJ