Do You Really Need a Label?

No…not that type of label.

Oh how we love to categorize things. Being labeled an artist is a useful human construct, a way to organize your inherent, or learned, skills into a neat little package. Artist is a label you assign to yourself, or one that gets assigned to you by those who identify your skills. It’s just a label, but it’s one to which you attach deeply routed meaning.

The brain undergoes a period of rapid development at birth, continuing for the first years of life. During this time, new neural connections are forming more rapidly than at any other time in our lives, and during our mid-childhood years, the brain starts to prune used ones. This becomes the basis for our understanding of music, and how it moves us. This is not to say that we can’t learn to appreciate new music as adults, but the basic structural elements are incorporated into the very wiring of our brains when we listen to music early in our lives. — from This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin.

Just like the basic structural elements of music are stamped on your brain, so too are the basic elements of what it means to BE an artist. Depending on who, or what, you were exposed to early in life, you unknowingly constructed a narrative of what it means to be an artist. You begin to piece together this story early and, as you age, you continue to add layers to it as you absorb new artists and their stories. Then, you unconsciously propel yourself down a career path, expecting your own experience to match the story you yourself have…