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Watched the Netflix documentary of Nina Simone the other night. I love watching a good music doc.
In it she talks about learning and wanting to be the first African-American female classical pianist. Later in life, because of money she has to take job as a nightclub act.
Then she was discovered and continued to do music in this genre from there on. Always wishing that she could go back to the other dream.
As they played songs from this timeline in the story she even talked about how she grew to hate it.
If you listen to what she does it is like nothing at the time. What she knows to do and just the way she does things is so different from what someone else would have done with the songs. And it made me sad that she didn’t seem to get that.
When the time came of the civil rights movement she wrote a song called “Mississippi Goddam”. Leading up to this I thought I knew exactly what this song was going to sound like. I was wrong.
The song is fast. It is bouncy. And it is aggressive. I don’t think anyone could write the way they felt that she did here.
That’s why I say sometimes an artist can be too close to what they do to realize just what they bring to the craft. It just sounds like a song to them.
I think this is why musicians have such a hard time answering the question: What kind of music do you play?
Ask others. Have those that know you tell you what it sounds like and means to them.