♪ Opening theme music ♪
Hello, and welcome to this episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their
time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
♪ Theme music ♪
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Mark Erelli, who is an American singer-songwriter,
multi-instrumentalist, and touring folk musician
living in Massachusetts.
You can find the resources mentioned by Mark Erelli during this episode
on ArtsAbly website in the blog section.
Hi.
Oh, yeah. Okay.
Hey, buddy. Hi!
♪ Mark Erelli - You're Gonna Wanna Remember This ♪
I don't know where we were going, but Rosalita was on the radio.
I was drumming on the dash and she was whistling to the saxophone.
We never promised each other, but when you only have the summer,
It's almost like September 7th,
you're gonna wanna remember this.
It flies by, it's easy to miss.
Don't play, drink it in.
It happens once and it might not happen again.
The world's going to keep on turning.
That's just the way it is.
So you're gonna wanna remember this.
♪ Music ♪
Some old friends picked a weekend
to head up north and get out on the lake,
talk about the wives and kids
and reminisce about the glory days.
Years fly by and days are numbered.
Now we're old enough to wonder and just wise enough to know one thing.
You're gonna wanna remember this.
It flies by, but It's easy to miss.
Don't play, drink in it.
It happens once and it might not happen again.
The world's going to keep on turning.
That's just the way it is.
So you're gonna wanna remember this.
The last time don't always
feel like a last time.
So maybe put your hand in mine
and I promise tonight,
you're gonna wanna remember this.
It flies by, it's easy to miss.
Don't play, drink it in.
It happens once and it might never happen again.
The world's gonna keep on turning.
That's just the way it is.
So you're gonna wanna remember.
You're gonna wanna remember.
You're gonna wanna remember this.
♪ Music ♪
♪ End of the song. ♪
Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Today, I am with Mark Erelli, who is an American singer, songwriter,
multi-instrumentalist, and also a touring folk musician living in Massachusetts.
Welcome, Mark.
Thank you so much, Diane.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.
It's my pleasure.
Okay, so I know we have a lot of things to talk about because
your artistic life is really rich.
I wanted to have this opportunity to hear about your background,
where do you come from, what brought you to music?
I come to music basically through
high school musicals and middle school
musicals is where I started out.
Though I guess going back even slightly
before that, I grew up glued to MTV.
That was that MTV went on the air when I was a younger kid,
and I just was completely besotted with this, at the time,
very new marriage of visuals and music.
I was just a big music fan growing up.
Didn't know anyone that made music professionally
or at a particularly high level.
I didn't have any musicians to speak of in my family.
My grandfather would sometimes fool around on a little keyboard,
but it just wasn't part of my life.
I had a middle school art teacher who said, You should try out for the musical.
And I did, and I got one of the leads.
And it turned out I could sing, and I hadn't known that before that.
From there, I went from musicals and learning how to sing
to picking up instruments from there.
So a lot of times people ask me, How do you get started in this
singing and playing at the same time?
I didn't learn how to sing and play at the same time.
I learned one thing, and then I added one thing to it,
and I just kept going with that.
I started playing guitar when I was in college, started playing
campus coffeehouses, and I was a biology major
at the time, but just was really
taken with this musical/creative outlet that I had in addition to biology.
I just didn't know how to do it.
I knew at this point, I had met actual biologists, and they were part
of my life, and I didn't really know any actual musicians.
Though whenever any of them came to campus for a performance, I would somehow
find a way to hang out with them and just badger them with questions
about how one did this for a living.
When I graduated with a degree in biology, I still just didn't
really know how to balance music and art or how to do art.
I continued on in graduate school in biology.
I got a master's degree in evolutionary biology.
But all the while, I was playing shows and touring as much as possible
and cutting classes on Fridays to make it to gigs hours away.
Eventually, that led to getting a record deal out in Western Massachusetts,
where I was attending graduate school.
My debut self-titled album came out, I think, a month before
the defense of my master's thesis.
Not to paper over too many of the ups and downs since then,
but I basically never looked back since, that was just over 25 years ago
in 1999, and I'm still doing it.
It's a stupid question, but did the study you had in biology,
did it influence your way of writing, or is it totally separate?
Yeah, that's not a stupid question at all.
Usually, people phrase that question in a
way that I find a little harder to take.
Usually, people say, How did you move from something totally different,
like science, to something like art?
And then I have to go into my whole spiel about how it's all the same.
I think this is something that we
struggle with as societies, as cultures.
Yes, everybody is a unique snowflake with their own set of talents.
It is wonderful, and diversity is wonderful,
but we're all basically the same.
To me, that is a source of compassion and
a source of empathy, that commonality.
I think it extends to all the different disciplines
that we find ourselves engaged in.
Religion, philosophy, science,
creative writing, music, singing.
I actually don't see a difference in any of those things.
I mean, there's minor differences in terms of the approaches or maybe
the philosophical framework that you approach things with, but
they're all just ways of asking the same questions.
And so for me, in science, if you're going to say design an experiment
and carry it out and try and provide evidence supporting or negating
a particular hypothesis.
You need to be creative, you need to be hard working, you need to be persistent,
You need a lot of attention to detail.
You need to be flexible.
You need a lot of good luck.
I'm running out of fingers.
Those are all the things that you need to write a song, too.
For me, I found that the scientific skills
were basically the same ones
that I needed in my musical life as well.
That close observation and the openness
to the interconnectedness of the world
has served me well and comes up over and over again in my heart.
Maybe that allows you to switch from the singer to the songwriter,
to the producer to the sideman.
Can you talk a bit about how your career evolved?
Because you didn't stick to songwriting only, right?
You did a lot of different things.
Yeah, correct.
I started out as more of a conventional singer-songwriter, releasing records
under my own name, and I still do that.
But as much as I love singing and songwriting, I also have always
really loved the instrumentalists
that are maybe slightly less well known
but played a very formative, supportive role behind the front person.
I'm thinking of an an artist, a guitarist like Ry Cooder and his work
with John Hiatt, or an artist like David Lindley, who was very closely associated
with Jackson Browne for a long time.
I always felt as deeply moved and as interested
in what those people were doing as I was in the songwriters themselves.
I really wanted to branch into that stuff myself
and ended up through backing up
and accompanying my friends, my fellow independent singer-singer-songwriter
colleagues, I sidestepped into that side person, that accompanist role.
For me, I think a lot of times people
will say, Are you disappointed that
you're not doing your own thing when you're serving as a sideman?
I'm like, I am doing my own thing.
This is part of my my own thing.
I also have the best seat in the house.
Even people in the front row, I'm like 6 feet from the artist.
I don't work with people just for a paycheck.
I don't even really get those calls.
If I'm there working with someone as a side person, I'm there because I
love that person and I love their music.
For me, I get to stand 6 feet from
Lori McKenna or Josh Ritter
or Marc Cohn or Paula Cole or any of the people that I've played with over the years,
and I get to experience their art
from a very, very close perspective, and I get to know them
better as people, too.
It just enhances my overall love of music, and it energizes me for when I
pivot back towards my my own solo career.
Again, I think a lot of those roles
are only clear-cut or overly
delineated for people that are maybe looking from the outside in.
For me, again, it's all really just versions of the same thing.
As long as I'm making great music with people I love, I'm happy,
whether it's my music or whether it's their music or whatever it is.
I'm good.
Yeah, but it's a very good point that you're making.
It's like we learn from each other, we collaborate, we create together.
That's a very important process, too, and it can bring to your own career
a very enriching experience.
Oh, absolutely.
That doesn't just happen through the music either.
That happens both on stage and in the recording studio and off stage,
away from the music in general.
I see how the people that I work with
deal with adversity in their own lives
or deal with whatever challenge it is.
They get a call from their kid as they're going on stage that someone's
got to a car accident or they've had some career setback or some
particular challenge that they're dealing with.
I get to see how they react and how they approach that situation.
I learned from these artists in a non creative, non musical way, too,
just about how to approach life.
I feel like I learned so much
from my ancillary roles, if you will,
the roles where I'm not the main attraction.
Actually, I need those times
when I'm not the main focus,
mainly because I've always been an independent middle class musician.
I'm not this superstar that has enough resources to just make everything
as easy as it can possibly be.
I'm sure you're aware, as an independent musician,
you're wearing, I don't know how many hats
at any given moment, but certainly in the double digits.
As a side person, I have one job to make -
two jobs, really, to make this artist that I'm working with
feel safe and respected
and to make their music sound as good
as my contribution can possibly make it.
That's a lot simpler than having to be the booking agent and the publicist,
and the arranger or all that stuff.
It's delightfully streamlined, and I need a break from all the myriad of hats that
you have to wear as a the main artist, to just focus on the music sometimes.
It's a real nice breather for me.
Can you talk about your albums and also the process of creation behind each one?
Because I'm pretty sure everything came with a different context
and a different period.
Can you talk about that?
Yeah, I mean,
I don't know if I can go through all of them one by one because there's 13 now
of just records under my own name.
But you're correct in that
I am always trying to push myself
into some sort of new territory.
I don't seek out the new creative
territory as a marketing tool or
as a sign of musical restlessness, per se.
I just learn different things from doing different things.
I think that's how it works from all of us.
If you do the same thing over and over again, after a while,
that learning curve flattens out, right?
You figure out a lot of how it works.
But if you change it up a lot, you're always coming to things
with that beginner's mind that the Zen Buddhist like to talk about.
For me, branching out into different genres or different recording contexts.
Sometimes I'll record in a conventional recording studio, sometimes
I'll record at home, sometimes I'll record on location somewhere
like a Civil War Memorial Hall.
Whether it's different genres or different recording contexts or working
with different musicians, you just learn different things every time.
When you're doing that, the art is going in subtly different, vectoring off in
a subtly different directions every time.
If you do that enough times, you just get a much broader, wider understanding
of what it is to do art as a way of life and what it is
that I personally have to offer, you know.
So, I've done -
You can never say I've done everything
because you've never seen everything as,
I think, Bruce Cockburn, the wonderful Canadian singer-singer-songwriter
has a record called that.
It's true. Every time, it's different.
Even if you did the same thing every time, you would be different
every time you went back to do it.
Right? So...
I just look at every project
as an opportunity to learn
about myself, about recording techniques, about musical approaches, about genres,
about different people that I'm choosing to work with and what they have to offer.
I just find it endlessly interesting
and I haven't been bored once in 25 years.
That's the beauty of working in music, is that we never get bored.
You never reach the bottom or you never reach the top
or you can always go further in.
I think if you feel stuck at some point,
that's not a sign that you've reached the end of something.
It's just like something's wrong.
It's like you're not digging deep enough or you need to focus on your mental
or emotional health or some other aspect of your life that's preventing you
from digging further in.
But you'll never get to the bottom of any creative endeavor.
That's what I love about it.
What are your recent projects and the ones that you are
turning towards to right now?
Sure. Well, in 2023, I put out my most recent
solo record, which was my first
record that I had put out after revealing to my audience that I was diagnosed
with the retinitis pigmentosa, which is a degenerative retinal disease
that eventually leads to legal blindness.
And that record kind of thematically dealt
with a lot of the the emotional fallout
from coming to grips with that diagnosis.
And my fans and my audience were just wonderfully supportive,
both financially and emotionally.
They really showed up to support my honesty in that project,
which was really humbling.
After that project, I put out a third record with my Bluegrass band,
which is called Barnstar!, which I share with four other guys.
That was a project that we'd recorded before the pandemic and just hadn't found
a way to take back out because we're five guys that sing around a central mic.
So when there's a pandemic happening, it's a very unsafe
situation, very unsafe set up.
So we were just waiting till we could find a good time to do that.
So that came out this year.
And then as far as what's next, there's really a couple of things on the horizon.
This past summer, I did a series of shows with a string quintet.
I've worked with strings and string sections on records recently, but
they've been playing supporting roles.
I'll record the rock band basic tracks first, and then we'll add the strings on
as an after, not as an afterthought, but after the fact is what I'm trying to say.
But these shows with the string quintet, it was like, well, what happens if
we take away the rock band and the strings just are the band?
And it changes the context of everything.
And it was deeply moving and the audiences loved it.
And we recorded the final show, multitracked the final show.
And I've always wanted to do an official proper live album, but
I wanted it to be the right musical format.
I didn't just want to rehash what was done on the records in front of an audience.
I wanted to do something transformative.
It took me 25 years, but I figured it out.
We're going to release
this live string quintet record.
It's going to be the next project, hopefully in the first half of 2025.
Then hopefully in the latter half of 2025 will be the 14th or
the next studio album and the next batch
of new original songs under my own name.
Before we recorded, you mentioned that you're going to post a fundraiser?
Yes.
I'm going to be - The lot of the modern
independent artist is that
because of streaming, because of inflation,
because of changes in music consumption,
it's just not really possible to
make enough money from the release of a
particular record to fund the next record.
It can be done, but that record has to be wildly successful.
That's just never been my path.
I have a dedicated, I don't want to call them a cult audience, but they're
a small but mighty base of support.
Every time I need to do a new project, I kind of have to go back to them and make the case
for them supporting it in advance.
I'll be launching a kickstarter
in mid-October, I think, to support
the recording and the release of not just the live album, but
the next studio album as well.
That'll be a little bit of a different thing for me.
I've done Kickstarters and crowdfunding in the past,
but it was for one particular project.
This time, we're just doing both projects at the same time
because they're linked in a way.
Please share the link with us, so that we can share that with our audience.
Absolutely. Thank you.
Yeah, we'll do.
I have a question about the fact that
a few years ago, you were diagnosed
with retinitis pigmentosa.
I was wondering if it changed your way of writing your music
and perceiving your music in what we call disability arts, basically.
How do you see yourself in that world?
Yeah, good question.
I mean, it definitely - It changed it almost immediately
in the sense that my disability or
my diagnosis terrified me because
I think I'd always associated songwriting and what you need to songwrite
as it was a result of the powers of observation.
And observation is, it's usually implies that you're looking at something.
You're taking it all in visually.
So I was like, if I can't see things or
I can't see things with the visual acuity
and the scale of detail that I'm used to,
doesn't that mean that my songs
and my art will be poor for that?
And I grappled with that for quite some time,
and where I am with all that is that,
and I've learned this through the disability culture
as I've started to interact with that
subset of wonderful humans that there's other senses,
and seeing is only one of them.
It does enjoy a privileged place
at the top of the pyramid as far as senses go.
But it's not the only way to experience the world.
I'm not legally blind yet,
except at night or in dark backstage,
I can't see much of anything.
But for someone like
Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder,
do they have any less of a reach
of an artistic life than sighted people?
Of course not. They're geniuses.
I've come to the understanding, maybe in the only way that you really can,
which is to lose one of those senses or to take a hit to one of those senses,
to realize that there's other ways of experiencing the world.
Even in performance, sometimes you'll get people that feel like
you should be looking right at the audience, making eye contact
with the audience when you perform.
I've really pushed back on that.
I'm not getting any visual input back if I'm looking into the audience.
All I see is a black void.
It's terrifying at times.
You can feel so alone, even in a room full of hundreds of people.
I frequently will perform with my eyes closed.
I find that I can envision things in my mind that way that help me,
that help support the expression of what I'm trying to communicate in my music.
That's just as valid as being on Broadway
or being in a musical and
hamming it up for the audience and looking them in the eye.
As far as how I see myself in the disability culture, I'm still
figuring that out, to be honest.
My disability is an invisible one right now.
Unless I'm using my white cane, which I will use mainly in dark environments
or at night or in unfamiliar environments, I still don't take it out
of the house all the time.
If I'm not using that white cane, you can't tell.
I just look like a dude with glasses.
So...
But that puts me in this interesting position because I can "pass"
for "normal."
These are not words that we like to use, obviously,
but I use them to make a point.
I'm also a white male, so people treat me
like the thing that everything else
in society is judged against.
I don't say that to agree with it.
I just say that is like the white male patriarchy is
definitely a thing, and I benefit from that because of the way that I was...
I was just born this way.
I'm treated that way, but I don't have
all of the same capabilities that a person,
a full-sided white middle-aged male has.
I have this deep identification with disability culture and with people that
share disabilities of any kind, and yet I'm treated as "normal."
And so this puts me in the space where I feel
oftentimes obligated to step up
in the name of folks that may not be listened to,
that might struggle with similar things that I struggle with just
to different degrees or they can't hide it.
In in a way that someday I won't be able to hide it.
I'll frequently be backstage at a venue
and say, I can't see these stairs here.
I'm afraid I'm going to fall down these Can we put some brightly-colored tape
on the leading edge of each stair?
Or can we get a light in here?
Because of the way that I look, I don't think anyone has ever
said anything other than, Oh, my gosh, of course, yes, we'll get right on that.
I can see why that would be helpful.
That'll help everybody.
Yes, right away.
I have friends in the disability culture, in the disability community
who are female, people of color,
and they're like, Yeah, that's not
my experience for obvious reasons
of sexism and misogyny and racism.
So because of the way that I look and what I'm living with, I feel like,
at least at this point, one of the ways that I can help
is to just not be afraid to talk about it and not be afraid
to point out things that would help me because I know that they're going to help
other people that come after me, and those people may not be
listened to in the way that I am.
I'm trying to be an ally for a community that I'm a part of, almost,
in a way, an advocate and an ally.
Thus far, people seem to be, as I said, really open to hearing things from me.
I try and do it in a really respectful and congenial way.
I don't want to shame anybody for not
being able to, 100% of the time,
expand their level of consciousness to the entire spectrum of human experience.
I think we're all human.
We all forget and have blinders
on at some points in our lives.
I try and be nice about it, but I do have
to remember to speak up because I'm not
really just speaking up for myself.
Sometimes when we speak with people who don't know anything about disability,
they don't realize that one thing that will help us as disabled artists
will also help them as non-disabled for things that they do every day,
things like voiceover or things that are very simple
that are now today in our everyday life and started with the conversation about,
How can I help this person with disability?
We forget a little bit.
If maybe these colorful
bands that you put on the stairs will help more than someone
who has a vision or sighted issues, but
also anybody, because it's convenient to
have a really clear mark on these steps.
Yeah, it could just help someone who's old and can't see as well as they used to.
They may not really qualify as having a visual disability.
But yeah, I think that's been one of the most amazing parts of
getting to familiarize myself with disability culture is the degree
of problem solving and the degree of optimism that is required.
I find that truly inspiring.
A lot of those things, like you say, they've helped us.
I don't know if you've read a book by this guy, Andrew Leland.
It came out last year, The Country of the Blind.
Fascinating book.
I loved it so much that I gave it to literally everybody that I loved for
Christmas, and I found a way to reach out to him, and Andrew and I are buddies now.
But he goes through a lot of these technological improvements
that we take for granted.
LPs, records, vinyl records were a way to
push the boundary for getting audiobooks
for blind people onto fewer disks.
The disks used to only be able to hold whatever 10 minutes aside or whatever.
To read a whole book, you might have dozens and dozens of disks
that you had to work your way through.
So pushing the boundaries of that recording disk technology
gave us long player records.
I listen to those every day and I make them myself.
That kind of stuff I really love learning about.
Just the problem solving, optimistic outlook in general, I think is
just something that I really want to be adopting at all times if I can help it.
That's great.
I have one last question for you, and it's about people who might have inspired you
or motivated you in your career.
Maybe you have one or two people you're really thinking of in terms of,
this person really put me into the path and showed me some things
that I don't forget today.
If you had a few people to name, who would it be and why?
I know exactly who I would name.
All the formative people in my life have been teachers,
and I don't mean that figuratively.
I mean literally teachers.
I'm thinking of my middle school art teacher who not only
looked at my drawings and said, You're a really great artist, and
called me an artist for the first time.
My parents always love what I drew, but they love everything I do.
I didn't know what.
I didn't know what that really meant.
To have someone outside of the house recognize the value of what you do
and call you an artist, that made a really big impression on me.
That was the same teacher that encouraged me to try out for the musicals.
He also ran all the musicals at the junior high and the high school.
I did musicals with him all up from junior high through high school,
so it would have been six years with him.
Also in that time, I had a really influential high school
biology teacher who, like my art teacher called me
an artist, my my biology teacher treated me like an actual biologist
and encouraged me to conduct
myself like the classic naturalists
had done over the years to get outside and make observations and to share those
observations with others and try and use that to support scientific
research and conservation efforts.
And that biology teacher also was a really big fan the Grateful Dead.
It took me to see the Grateful Dead a couple of times and shared a bunch of
Grateful Dead concert bootlegs with me.
He really opened up my entire world to
the vast swath of Americans roots music
through the Grateful Dead.
I had teachers in college that were the same way,
that in both the arts and in science.
But those two early high school teachers were really important to me, and they
basically set me off on the twin paths
that I've merged in my life as an adult.
It's something that a lot of people share.
If you have a great teacher at a
very early age who gives you an overview
of what it is to be an artist, then you are set to become an artist later
if you're really taking this path.
Yeah, I agree.
I think even more generally than that, it's just there are teachers
that are better at "seeing kids"
and just dignifying their experience.
So whether they're writers or actors or artists or whether they
love math or whatever it is,
these teachers that really dignify kids
and say, You are this already, and you could continue to do this and take it
and evolve it in ways in your life that you can't even really envision yet.
Those teachers, that is God's work right there.
Both my My parents were teachers, so I come from a background
that really values education.
But this is probably a different podcast.
But I feel like the economic ladder
has been up-ended.
I don't know why CEOs make so much money, personally.
I feel like teachers, I can't think of another role in society that
is more important and should be valued economically as such.
But again, different podcast.
They've been invaluable to me as a person and as an artist.
I think a lot of us have, hopefully, we're lucky enough
to have people like that in our lives.
I agree.
Teachers are really, really important.
Plus, we are learning and teaching some people around us
without sometimes realizing it, but we are learning from each other.
If we don't have a teacher who shows us the value of teaching and learning,
then it's too bad because we are really losing this opportunity
of exchanging, which is beautiful.
Exactly.
Again, that's evolution, right?
You share how you do something or what's possible with someone else,
and they may not do it in quite the same way, or they may see like, Oh, well,
if you can do this, then you can also do this, and then they take it further.
That is how things literally evolve.
I feel like that's where me being honest with my audience about my disability
was really important.
I didn't want to put a lot of effort
into keeping that part of me hidden.
I wasn't embarrassed about it in any way, but it just would have required
so much work to not talk about it.
And by being honest about it,
there's absolutely going to be some kid somewhere
someday that might come across my music
or my story and says, Well, he did it. Maybe I can do it.
I know that because I came across other people's stories
and they inspired me in the same way.
Gosh, I hope I live to
see that and see how that happens
and see how that evolves.
That would be just the greatest gift to pass it on.
Okay, so thank you so much for sharing your story with us today.
I wish you all the greatest success in your next project.
Thank you.
Yeah, share with us some of the links that you want to share I'm sure
we will be more than happy to just share that with the audience.
Thank you so much, Diane. We'll do.
Okay. Have a great day.
You too..