 ”Yes, but are you happy?” said with that kind of inflection, usually accompanied with a sideways head-tilt, is such an odd question.
Firstly, it always seems to imply, at least a little, that the person asking it already thinks they know the answer. Particularly if the head-tilt makes an appearance.
Secondly, as I have recently discovered, I am actually incapable of answering it. If I answer it literally, I am answering it dishonestly, and if I try and answer it honestly… umm, well I find it almost impossible.
People have asked me this question a couple of times recently, mostly related to the fact that I gave up my job in 2010 to run Song, by Toad full-time. Are you happy? they ask, presumably trying to figure out if I regret taking the risk, or feel like I should have stayed in my sensible, grown-up job, or sometimes to find an opportunity to trot out that tired old cliche about it being ‘great to be doing something you’re passionate about’.
I am a prickly fucker, deep down, so the ‘something you’re passionate about’ thing always feels slightly condescending. Oh, so you’re not making any money and you’re not really successful, but at least you’re passionate about it, right? At least you’re happy.
So, ungracious irritability aside, I have, as I mentioned earlier, discovered that I am incapable of actually answering that question. More worrying for the people who ask it (my mum, Mrs. Toad, etc…) I find I am incapable of answering it with a yes. But that doesn’t mean the answer isn’t yes, exac… oh, balls to this, let me explain.
The fact is that I am not ‘happy’ in the sense that I could ever say it like that. Not content, exactly. We’ve done amazingly well, I can’t imagine ever being able to go back to working for someone else, the label keeps growing, the sessions have been amazing, our bands are doing better and better, and my personal profile seems to be improving pretty steadily – in short, there’s pretty much no way to say that things aren’t going really, really well.
And yet for every amazing review we get, and all the radio play, I still find myself niggled by the shows who didn’t play our stuff, or by the reviews which never happened. Every single release we put out, no matter how well it goes, just serves to remind me of things we should be doing better next time. And it’s not in a dissatisfied way, exactly, just a combination of determined competitiveness, and the thrill you get from knowing that the next level is within touching distance. Because every baby step you take in this business leads you on to the next one, and being the kind of person I am I guess I am always more focussed on how we can improve, rather than what we’ve just achieved.
Another side of it is a refusal to really let myself worry about other people’s opinions. It’s not easy to do of course, but it’s something you need to learn when the inevitable bad reviews start to appear here and there. In many ways it’s a measure of success, because at the beginning the only people motivated to really write about you, label or band, are the people who love you. As you get more widely known, your records are more likely to be thrust into the hands of some random person who doesn’t care – a jaded hack, a random work-experience kid, someone who only really likes chip-tunes or trad folk, it could be almost anyone.
As I’ve pointed out before, bad reviews are really just one random person’s opinion, and not worth getting yourself wound up about. You should only be working in this industry because you personally believe in what you’re doing, and you have to derive enough satisfaction and fulfillment from what you do that if people slag your work off you still want to do it because you are proud of it yourself, and fuck the people who don’t like it.
The flipside of that attitude, however, is that you don’t really get to crow when things go right. If you train yourself to ignore the bad reviews because you are in it for your own satisfaction, you can’t suddenly start taking reviews seriously when they’re nice to you. Good reviews are commercially valuable, and they enhance the trust our artists have in us, so I am delighted when we get them, but for the same reason you learn to brush off bad ones, the good ones end up not really affecting your self-esteem or the value you have in your own project either. I suppose it’s a variation on how footballers are advised to handle their own press: “You’re never as good as they say you are, but you’re never as bad as they say you are either.”
So I end up in a situation where where when things go well I find it impossible not to think about how much better they could have gone, and when people say nice things about us it’s good of course, and I appreciate it, but it doesn’t exactly change how I feel about Toad things really. I already trained myself not to let that kind of thing affect me when people started to write bad stuff.
So I’m not happy exactly, because we can do better. We should be doing better. And every little thing you do you always shows you at least some things you can do next time to make it better. And for all the fun and games and gin and swearing, I still have a black kernel of competitive rage in the depths of my soul, and that inner demon needs to have a target. It needs a mission, something to be a little bit mental about – nothing outward, necessarily, or aggressive or unpleasant, just something to stoke the fires a little.
Back when I was in London it was trying to teach myself how to rebuild a canal boat from scratch. When I moved up here it was trying to salvage Mrs. Toad’s flat from her comical DIY efforts. There’s always something. I just need something to be mental about, I suppose. The result being that I am not what you’d describe as ‘happy’, and I would never use that word – it seems to imply contentment with where you are, as if you have arrived already and there is no work still to be done. I need to have something to be internally raging about, whether it’s the awful records ahead of ours in people’s end of year lists, the shows who didn’t play the music we released, other labels being talked about in hushed tones when it should be us goddamit, and so on and so forth.
So the answer, rather awkwardly, is that since giving up my job to do this full time, no, I am not happy or content at all. But that’s actually not a bad thing. I’m like a dog. I need a rabbit to chase.
