Guest post by Salem Jones:

An artist's job is many things, but at the deepest level, it's to balance. Sure, it's a calling to express and to draw awareness but ultimately the deepest goal is to balance. It's not to be "revered", to be "famous", to be "known", fawned over or wealthy. (That's "celebrity", a whole different animal.) As for being a rock artist, something that I've been my entire life...Rock is a thundering proclamation. It's the circus, a loud lightning-lit dance, an explosive spectacle, and there can be purpose in that. But we are living in a time when the world is quite the crashing spectacle itself, a cauldron of growing confusion & chaos, and an (rock)artist's job - the aforementioned deepest job that we have - is to attempt to balance that.

So now is not the time for screaming hardcore displays of death, fear, and destruction, or any attempts to break physical sound barriers with one's own perceived might. Now is the time to step into being a fulcrum and to find and listen to our inner silence. To let the heart guide us to whatever needs to come out in service. When the world is roaring with chaos, and we are present to being a balancing fulcrum, chances are the sounds that we will bring through will be atypical to what we have brought through in the past. Don't fear that.

Hear the sounds of the ego dissolving. Be vigilantly silent, ever still. Just be. Let the inner worlds speak to you - perhaps through you if they choose - as if your life depends on it. If service to the needed balance is to come through you, it will. Be present to it. For it. Be nothing so that you can be everything you came to be, whatever that is...

Labels: all things vocal, artistic definition, Canadian rock, Judy Rodman, One Soul Thrust, rock music, Salem Jones