Emperor X (aka Chad Matheny) – HuffPost 12.12.11
Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?
Chad Matheny: That’s a really good question. I think, first of all, that that’s what you want to do, here’s a lot of really great music and other art stuff in the world and there’s a lot more awful music and art in the world. As affluence increases, which will happen over time, the real problem is sifting through bad art to get to the good. Just make sure what you’re doing is right. Don’t do it for lifestyle choice reasons. That said, there’s a great book called Letters To A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. He said it best. There are a couple of paragraphs in the first of a few letters he writes to this young struggling artist: “Do it if it’s necessary, if you’ve tried everything else and really tried to forget it and it keeps popping up, and you keep screwing up your life because of the necessity of doing what you do, then you should do what you do.” If you just sort of want to do it because it’s a cute idea, find something that’s necessary. Everyone’s life has some kind of necessity to it, just make sure yours is the arts, because if it isn’t, you’re going to screw yourself up and be really poor and miserable. The practical thing is have something else to do, don’t obsess on it all of the time. Make sure you have some other source of income that you can rely on to get you to the point where you can slide off of that source of income and rely on your art a bit more. Only recently have I’ve been able to do that, and that’s pretty tenuous right now as it is. Have something that doesn’t violate your principles that doesn’t make you feel awful, some kind of trade. And keep in mind that Baruch Spinoza, the great Dutch, Jewish philosopher, was a lens grinder until his dying day and never made much of a penny off of his writing. Have faith and be in the value of your work, whether or not it’s valued in your lifetime.
MR: One of the best answers I’ve ever heard to that question.
CM: If I can convince myself of it, then I’m in good shape.