Doing the Work

Just turned in an essay on Prince. Be out sometime next year. It contains this line:

Thanks to my background—raised by truckers, loggers, and small-patch farmers—I still struggle to get past the dumb trope of sneering at art as work. As if any given roadie hustles any less hard than any given logger. As if Prince wore out his hips working any less hard for any less people than my father kneeling to milk a cow.

Then today, while working ’round the clock on a music festival project, I googled something and wound up here. Frankly, I’d forgotten I’d written it. There were some parallels:

…anyone who thinks music is all soft hands in la-la land might wish to spend time lugging gear with a sound crew, or crawling the rigging after wayward lighting, or replacing the u-joint on a band van in a snowdrift at 3 a.m.

OK, back to work. And glad to have it.


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