Let’s have an indie Friday, with not only a free download of an indie music CD, but a guest blog post from indie artist Mariah Secrest.
One of the great things about the internet is that you get to connect with people you might not meet otherwise. I met Mariah when I stumbled upon her really great blog post on Wrecked For The Ordinary, about making money off of Jesus. Regular readers of this blog know that I’m constantly musing (ranting) about the commercialization of Christianity, so it was an instant connection.
Mariah Secrest is an indie artist with a new EP called Green Light. She recently finished her philosophy degree from the University of Arizona and, in her own words, now busies herself “as a recording artist, editor for Wrecked for the Ordinary magazine, and acute observer of life.”
An indie artist has a unique perspective on the music industry, so I asked her to pen a guest blog post on any topic she wanted. So today, Mariah shares her thoughts on an often overlooked component of an artist’s music: you, the listener.

Musical Shapeshifting: How music changes from artist to consumer
By Mariah Secrest
Media can be a tricky beast. I’ve been on both ends of music journalism–as both writer and artist at different times. As I’ve moved more into the capacity of being the object of bits of press here and there, I’ve been struck with how much the entertainment world and the attention it generates can seem larger-than-life. We live in a ripe-for-hype culture, consuming art as an escape from the humdrum and thus regarding the ones who make that art as equally lofty, untouchable even. And yet the bigger the celebrity, the more we love to hear that they are “just like the rest of us.” For example, the other day I perused a magazine feature on The Office’s actress Jenna Fischer, and found myself pretty interested in her self-told narrative of daily chores.
“Cool, even Jenna Fischer cleans out her closet,” I thought to myself.
Really? That’s interesting? And yet it is, because we want to relate to all these dazzling media icons. They can make a movie or a hit song on the radio, and they clean out their closets. We clean out our closets, so maybe were we to summon the best of ourselves we too could make a movie or a top radio hit.
As I’ve witnessed writers and various media sources doing their job of elevating my own music to the public eye, part of me has felt skeptical of the attention.
“Really? But it’s just me. These are just some songs I scratched out with a journal and guitar on some lonely and sometimes broken nights,” I have found myself thinking. I have wondered whether media attention isn’t just a way to “fluff up” something basically simple with some lights and flair.
In tracing some of these thoughts, however, I have come upon a profoundly deeper understanding of the dynamic of art when it is shared with others. I suppose I had always assumed that what I created in my head and with my fingers and voice was the sum total of the work. Nothing about it changed after it left my hands, so to speak.
But lately I’ve been chewing on this idea in music of how listeners are such a key ingredient in the experience. Sometimes musicians (or any type of artist) hold back because they don’t believe they have that much to offer. But I’m discovering the beautiful truth that it’s what the consumer brings to it that rounds out the expression and gives songs their power. When they combine their experiences and storyline with bits of a musician’s songs, even more things are created in the exchange. They have this highly personal lens through which they filter all the art they take in, adding whole new dimensions to the original intent of just one songwriter’s take on it.
I’ll give what I have, and maybe you’ll see something there I didn’t know about because you’re looking at it from a different perspective. When that experience really locks in and joins bits of two worlds, that’s what makes it so “otherly” and complete. You know it’s from the deepest place in you and yet it is not entirely yours. It belongs to all of you who create and listen and experience, and you all get to share it. You realize you’re more powerful than you knew, but you can’t get arrogant because the power depends on others.
So maybe all the “hype” is really the power of community, the exchange of artistic expression from artist to recipient. It gains traction as it passes through the eyes, ears, and minds of others, and the end result is anything but empty.
When there are powerful moments like that in music, or in yoga or prayer or poetry or intimacy, there’s a part in the back of our mind that dreads its dissolution and our return to the humdrum of our finite lives. Maybe this time we’ll learn to rise above all the things that don’t matter–the distractions and annoyances and all the flaws. And perhaps we will get closer to that. But we all know that eventually the magic of that perfect moment will fizzle out as irreverent obstructions re-gain entry into our lives. The curious thing is that we call that–the rent checks and muscle aches and unfolded laundry and bad habits–reality. We nearly always use the term in a negative sense, as though all our limiting factors are the composite of what is real and unchangeable. The sooner we accept it, the less frustrated we’ll get when we have to accommodate for it.
But what if the moments of transcendence are actually the most real things that we experience–the song that finally gives words and a name to what’s going on inside, the sunset that stops you in your tracks, the hug that makes you feel safer than you knew you could? What if these are reality and everything else is just the broken shadow of a sin-filled world? Maybe if we accept that the beautiful and perfect and redeemed are eternal and our imperfections are only the shadow, we would be more open to the moments of experience. Maybe we would savor them more fully, and maybe we would more easily let them return to Heaven while we return to cleaning our closets, because we know that we’re headed to paradise, too.

You can learn more about Mariah Secrest on her MySpace site, or visit Wrecked For The Ordinary.
Get a free download of Mariah’s song “Pulse,” from her EP Green Light.
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