Happy New Year, lovely humans! I’ve been floating through my New Year’s Day here in New Zealand quite slowly, reflecting. This post took me a good emotional couple of hours to write. Welcome to a new year, a new decade, and the opportunity to re-invent yourself (if you wish), or at least reflect on the ways you’d like to work on being a better human. It’s honestly one of my favorite times of year, because I especially love working on becoming a better version of myself, thinking about my goals and aspirations. Before we get too much into goals and resolutions though, I’d love to reflect with you about this past year, about 2019 – sharing my own experiences and hearing about yours. I want to hear what you’ve accomplished this year! Tell me what you are proud of about your 2019 in the comments so I can celebrate you 💜
2019 has been an absolutely wild year in Rachel-land. I think if you’d told me a few years ago I would accomplish so much in one year, I honestly wouldn’t quite have believed you. I feel like it’s deeply important for me to share this reflection with you on what this year has contained for me. More on why it’s so important for me to do this later in the post (be ready for some feels).
In 2019:
I traveled to Atlanta for my first Whisperings Solo Piano Artist gathering, which was extra special because I had just been accepted as an artist to Whisperings Solo Piano Radio a few months prior – something I’d been hoping and aiming for since before my very first album even released. On that same trip, I performed a concert to a packed room in Seattle, and right before the trip I’d given a solo house concert in Auckland. A few weeks after returning back to New Zealand from that trip, I began my monumental project The 52, which led to me composing, recording, and releasing 39 pieces of music in 2019 (actually 42 tracks since some weeks were double-releases). That also meant custom-designing and creating 39 pieces of artwork myself to go with those releases and really polishing up my Photoshop and graphic design chops!
As part of The 52, I’ve stepped outside of my ‘comfort zone’: I released my first interpretation of a classical work, released my first cover songs, wrote for cello for the first time, co-wrote pieces with other artists for the first time, wrote and performed my very first vocal track, wrote my first multi-movement work, and additionally have pushed myself to find new types of moods and inspirations and settings to give my music new context.
Then, only a few weeks after The 52 began, I travelled back to the states to start my most epic tour yet. I performed two house concerts with Scott D. Davis at his home in Oceanside, California – we’d had the great good fortune to connect at the Whisperings Solo Piano Artist gathering, and immediately knew we needed to create and perform together! During that stay at Scott’s house, he and I co-wrote and recorded Stormstruck, filming my most ambitious video project up to that point. After Oceanside, David and I went on to an amazing exploration of New Orleans, where we spent the weekend at the Zone Music Reporter Awards Show and associated events – an awards show where I was nominated for the highly competitive ‘Best Solo Piano Album of 2018’ for my second album, Encounters of the Beautiful Kind. After New Orleans, I traveled to Texas and performed another concert with Scott in San Antonio, and David and I spent some much-needed time exploring and enjoying Austin and catching up on our work for The 52. Following Texas, it was on to Tennessee to spend time with Joseph Akins – we spent a few days exploring the Smokey Mountains and Asheville, NC together before performing concerts together in Knoxville and Murfreesboro. THEN we popped over for a few days with Philip Wesley, who I’d also had the delight of meeting for the first time at the Whisperings Solo Piano Artist gathering. Philip showed David and I around Nashville and we just spent some great time getting to know each other before David and I were off again! This time to Miami, Florida to hop on a cruise ship to perform as a featured artist with Audiosyncracy at Sea. Beautiful time with wonderful people, and three fantastic concerts, it was definitely an extremely special experience!
A few short weeks after returning home to New Zealand (and scrambling to get back on top of composing to keep up with the weekly releases of The 52), we packed our home in Auckland again for a tandem house concert with Kris Baines. In the following months, David and I dug in deeply to the roots of my identity and essence as an artist to do a complete re-branding. This involved lots of deep, conceptual work that led to a completely re-worked artist bio, a logo that reflects my deep values and history and personality as an artist, an entirely re-built website, as well as new artist photos and an in-depth professional interview video about The 52 created with Nik Rolls / Polygraphic (my most ambitious video project yet!). In that same season (the final third of this year), I finished the sheet music/digital songbook for my Halloween album Well Past Midnight, and David and I launched a playlisting project/brand.
THEN, the unthinkable happened. In the middle of this grand project and all of this amazing, glowing forward growth, I had a catastrophic sudden hearing loss in my left ear and was entirely unable to listen to any music or play the piano (or tolerate sounds of any volume or length) for the month of October. See my blog for more on this, Part One and Part Two. With the love and support of many beautiful humans (thank you so so much, you know who you are), I managed to keep The 52 afloat through that difficult period and pull out the other side of it to continue the challenge of the project.
Finally, at the end of the year, I traveled back for several weeks to visit the states, this time with no concerts or events, but only to spend time with loved ones – continuing my weekly releases all the while. There was a window before I left when, get this: I had ten days to compose eight pieces, and then three days to record those pieces. This was due to my ear injury on the one hand and my plane ticket to the US on the other. I managed it somehow!
And that pretty much brings us to today.
One thing that’s not obvious from this narrative listing of my experiences this year is the many MANY amazing humans in music I have had the good fortune to connect with this year. I have made so many wonderful friends, who I can’t WAIT to see again and spend more time with. It turns out music attracts some real top-notch people!
In short, my year has contained:
- 11 concerts
- 42 tracks of music composed, recorded, and released with their matching artworks
- 16 weeks spent traveling (that’s 30% of my days in a year!)
- A complete re-branding, including:
- a website rebuild
- new artist photos
- a brand-new logo
- newly-written artist bio
- Two envelope-pushing video projects
- A new playlisting project
- A desperately scary month where I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to tolerate the sound of my piano again
Holy crap.
That’s a lot.
That’s a HECK of a lot.
And here we come to the meaning behind all of this. Because, yes, of course I’m proud of what I’ve done and want to share that with you.
But there’s a deeper emotional experience that has been tracing tear tracks down my cheeks as I’ve been typing this.
For much of the second half of this year, I have been feeling disappointed with myself. Like I’m not accomplishing enough, not doing enough. Like I am not succeeding at this challenge I have set for myself.
Because, you see, despite all that I HAVE done, there’s so much more I WANT to do. So much more that I see NEEDS to be done. In some cases, depending on who you ask, things that must be done to be ‘successful’ as an artist. My ‘to-do and goals’ list has been miles larger than my ‘done’ list consistently this year, and you know what? If I’m honest I should say I hardly ever look at the ‘done’ list, I hardly ever let myself celebrate those accomplishments. I stare at the to-dos still lingering on my list and ask myself what I could have done better, where I could have worked harder or longer. Sometimes that’s led to me lying to myself and telling myself I’m a failure. Because I haven’t done ALL of the things.
But I look at this list now (really it’s the first time I’ve properly looked at it all), and I feel this incredible flood of emotion. Because this is SO MUCH. Anyone who works in the music industry will tell you, releasing 52 tracks in a year is some special kind of insanity. How could I be feeling like a failure, like I’m not working hard enough, when I look backwards and see that these are the fruits of my labors?! So yes, I feel incredibly proud and happy with what I have accomplished this year. But I also feel so sad because I’ve spent so much time telling myself I’m not good enough, that I’m not working hard enough. And you know what? That’s not good for any human to hear. Nobody deserves to hear those messages, not me and not you.
So that’s me. That’s what my year has been like. How about you? I’d like to prompt you: please take the time to look back on your own year (or month or day or decade) and reflect on what you have done. Let yourself sit in celebration of the beauty and progress YOU have made this year. And if you feel up to it, tell me about it in the comments so I can celebrate you too 💜
PS – I absolutely couldn’t have done this without my life-and-business partner David Mason right here beside me, keeping the wheels on the track when I wasn’t able to, planning tours and travel, taking care of ALL business, financial, and administrative tasks, doing ALL of the website work, spearheading and designing the sheet music/songbook effort, stepping up to care for our home and life upkeep, wrapping his arms around me to hold me together when I felt as if my being might just fly apart, and just generally creating space for me to focus on the music. And MORE! Thank you doesn’t even cut it. But THANK YOU, YOU BEAUTIFUL BEING! I love you to the moon and back!!