Kambiz
Mirzaei

Today I have lived half of my life in Canada. There is something unsettling about saying that aloud. At some point, without any ceremony, one place becomes where most of your life has happened.

It is a muggy summer evening, and I am standing somewhere along Lakeshore Boulevard, looking out across Lake Ontario while I wait for my ride. The city is behind me for a moment. Across the water, the Toronto Islands are fading into the evening light, ferries moving between the shore and the islands. I remember my first ride there decades ago—the smell of the air, the view of downtown from the islands, and the strange feeling that an entire world could be so close and still feel unexplored.

Then, for no particular reason after all these years, the thought arrives: Maybe I should have stayed in Iran. Maybe I should have stayed and made film music with Jamshid Andalibi.

It is an odd question to have after so long. Canada has been home long enough that, by any ordinary measure, there should be very little left to reconsider. Yet some roads remain visible even after you have stopped walking them.

I came to Canada in 1997. Music was not a career I was leaving behind, nor one I was planning to build. I simply did not know what place it would eventually have in my life.

What I wanted then was relatively simple: safety, independence, stability, and perhaps, in time, a chance to help my family in Iran join me.

Pharmacy seemed perfectly capable of giving me those things.

I had a different relationship with music. I didn’t want anything from it. I thought it would come into my life on its own, when the time was right.

Looking back, what I see is not a conventional musical career so much as a sequence of openings. One thing would appear in front of me; I would enter it, feel it, learn what I could, and eventually something else would catch my attention. The first of those openings came in Tehran, with a neighbour, a Ney, and a keyboard.

A Neighbour, a Ney, and a Keyboard

It was a few years after the Iran-Iraq War. I was out of university and almost finished with my five-year obligations for health-care services in remote areas and military service. Whenever I could, I took my Technics five-octave keyboard with me. I had it in Dezful, where I took lessons from Seroj Sarkisian during my weekend trips to Ahvaz, and later in Shadegan.

That keyboard was my first serious upgrade since I had begun trying to understand music as a child. I remember my first moment of fascination with it standing on my toes at a house wedding, trying to follow the keyboard player's hands all night. For many reasons, my serious musical discoveries came relatively late, in my early twenties. The reason for that could make another story.The war had ended a few years earlier. I remember that time because I had been sent to the front line in Kurdistan on a mandatory student assignment, trained as a paramedic, but the ceasefire meant I was released and sent back to university earlier than expected.

Much of the music that had been suppressed after the revolution had not returned, especially pop music. Looking back, it would never really return in the way it once was. Traditional Persian music occupied much of the public space that remained.

Jamshid Andalibi and his family were my parents' neighbours and soon became family friends. I moved between my own apartment and my parents' home.

The Ney was Jamshid's universe. Mine was becoming increasingly occupied by Western music, pop, progressive and psychedelic rock, piano practice, exploring electronic instruments and drum machines, the new generation of keyboard workstations, and the pleasure of figuring out what the technology of the day could do for music. Back then, that was the frontier.

Jamshid had a Korg 01/W, a workstation keyboard that contained a 16-track recorder inside a single instrument. He wanted to understand it. I liked figuring keyboards out, so he asked me to work it out for him.

Rather than explain every function, I put a few tracks together and showed him what I had discovered. I was not thinking about a musical career. I was simply trying to understand an instrument well enough to explain it to another musician through a simple piece of music I had put together.

Jamshid heard it. He asked: Did you do all this? I said: Yes. Then he asked whether, if he gave me a melody, I could build something around it. I did not know.

I said I could try.

That was the conversation that changed everything. A piece of music I put together on his Korg 01/W became my true introduction to the world of professional musicians.

What came next was the Ney.

Breathing Different Air

At the time, traditional Persian music was not part of my listening diet. You could not escape it in Iran—it was in taxis, on television, on the radio—but I did not seek it out. My ears had been shaped much more by Western music.

So when Jamshid’s melodies arrived, I did not hear them as tradition asking to be preserved or modernized. I heard them as a puzzle.

What do I do with the sori and korons? What can live around this melody? What should remain untouched? How would a bass line wrap around it? How far could I move the arrangement before the Ney stopped sounding like itself? Which instrumental path should I choose for this production?

Almost everything I tried seemed to work seamlessly. Usually it was my own playing that needed adjustment, just enough to create the impression of a professional player.

The technical question gradually became a musical one: Could the Ney breathe in a different air without surrendering its identity?

We worked one melody at a time. I wrote two pieces independently for Ney. He liked them enough to include them, and the material gradually became Paeize Neyzar.

With Safar Rafteh, I wanted to move the Ney away from its familiar placement, toward something less folk-defined and more national. With Gerdaab, I went further. I wanted to throw the Ney into ‘world music’ rather than keep it within its familiar boundaries: electronic strings, an orchestral direction, guitar at a time when guitar was still banned. I was not trying to make a statement. I heard the combination in my head and wanted to hear it exist and Jamshid agreed. For him it was more about increasing Ney’s reach.

This was new ground for Ney so I did not expect much from the album. Two or three hundred listeners, perhaps. Lots of criticism. That seemed more than plausible for defining new boundaries for a Persian traditional instrument. “Many won’t like what we did conceptually,” I thought to myself. But I knew it had to exist.

In Pejvak Studio, working on the first track with Hassan Asgari, the mix engineer who already had credits for mixing some of the prominent Persian artists tracks, we were finishing the placement of Mehrdad Arabi’s Zarb and Farzad Andalibi’s Daf on tape. I remember another guy in the studio saying out loud, “This music is out of this world.”

It stayed with me.

By the time Paeize Neyzar was published, I was already in Canada. I had left the work behind in Iran. Jamshid later told me what the response had been and that it had become his best-selling album, even though he did not get the budget required to record live strings and live piano instead of my demo lines. I had been thinking about making something that worked, not what would happen to it afterward. Once a piece of music leaves you, it develops a life you can no longer control.

And somewhere in that first chapter sits a road I did not take. Had I stayed in Iran, perhaps Jamshid and I would have continued working together. There were possibilities around film music. Jamshid was approached by some industry leaders of the time who wanted to work with us.

Perhaps I would have taken that road.

I didn’t.

Jamshid passed away in March 2024. The title “Paeize Neyzar” was used for his one-year memorial service in 2025 at Rudaki Hall.

Canada, Before I Knew What Music Was Becoming

When I came to Canada, music did not disappear. Before I received my pharmacy license in 1999, I was already living in a one-bedroom apartment on Redpath Street, an upgrade from the studio apartment where I had studied for my pharmacy licensing exams, trying to establish a life in a new country.

I had a computer, a broken guitar which travelled with me from Iran, some old poetry, a few new ideas, and enough curiosity to keep building. Music was still there, but it had no obvious place in my new life. I was not thinking about a career in it. I was simply looking for a creative outlet.

Eventually I put up a small website with some of my old poetry, thinking that for the time being this might be my only practical expressive channel. I did not know who would read it. I was not expecting anything to come from it.

Then I saw Shahrzad Sepanlou singing Bolvare Mirdamad one day. It was on a Persian TV channel.

What caught my attention was the fact that she cared about lyrical depth in a Persian pop song. That was refreshing. I remember thinking, and saying it aloud, that there was something in her artistic sensibility I could work with. People in the room heard me.

Then, unexpectedly, she contacted me.

The first email is dated September 24, 2002. She found me through the website I had built, looking for lyrics for her upcoming album.

At the time, I had no idea I was entering another musical chapter.

I wrote Baa To along with ten other lyrics in one night after she emailed me. I had never written lyrics before. I did not sit down and decide that I was now a lyricist. I had never done that with composing or arranging either. I wrote the lyrics because they needed to be written. I liked Baa To more than the others, felt it was coherent, made a few compromises where rhythm and lyrical form required them in the chorus, and sent it over.

She liked it.

The song was released in 2003.

Something shifted. My field of exploration.

I had found another language of music: lyrics, a continuation of the poetry I had been writing since I was a kid. The possibility of writing songs opened something different in me. I began thinking not only about how music could carry a feeling, but how words could shape it. A three-minute song carrying a few lines of lyrics could stay in the collective memory of a nation for years.

For a while, I followed that opening without knowing where it would lead. Most of the time, the lyrics came first. Harmony and melody followed together, although sometimes the order reversed itself. When somebody commissioned something, the process changed. An assignment created a direction. But when the work was mine, I wrote first and thought about singers later.

I did not have one vocalist who could sing all the lyrics and melodies I wrote, and that turned out to useful. It allowed me to stay immersed in my creations without having to decide beforehand what the voice of an entire project should be.

Looking back, I hear longing everywhere. Sometimes the frustration of absence. Sometimes the fantasy of reunion. Sometimes a beloved who remains deliberately undefined. Maybe I never felt at home in any geography. In my lyrics, I am searching for where I truly belong.

I was not analyzing any of it while I wrote.

I wrote what I felt. Then I listened back and felt what I had written again.

I thought I had found my language. I did not yet know how many languages music was going to ask me to learn.

The next opening was Aadamaaye Kaaghazi.

The Wynford Apartment — Aadamaaye Kaaghazi

Between Redpath and the Wynford apartment, life entered.

A revolution, a war and an immigration can shape a person permanently, but life had more surprises for me at the personal level. This project became part of how I coped. I remember the apartment more than I remember the equipment: sitting there, listening to the songs grow, sometimes feeling more than I could contain. A new crowd, new relationships, a new chapter just starting. The music was helping me heal.

Aadamaaye Kaaghazi grew out of the Wynford condo apartment on the 29th floor beside large floor-to-ceiling windows. The city was my backyard. I had lost a year in my life. It was mixed with some reflections, feelings, and resolutions. A bit rushed, maybe. I was not myself for a while

What had started as songs and lyrics on pieces of scattered papers and a computer was becoming something much larger. I began building a recording environment around a Digi 002 interface, M-Audio BX5 monitors, XP-80 Keyboard, a computer assembled with help from my brother Kamyar, who’d recently entered Canada with the rest of my family, Pro Tools, a digital audio workstation, and an NT1A microphone. Eventually I rented a U87 microphone and a few Universal Audio hardware preamps when recording started.

I was still figuring things out as I went. I wanted to do serious recording for the first time. I learned by reading, listening, experimenting, making mistakes and trying to understand why something worked when it did.

The project took more than a year. When the demos were finalized, live instrumentalists and vocalists came in over several weeks. I got to meet amazing musicians during this time. Some of them still in touch. I recorded most of the album in the apartment and eventually took the project to Silver Birch studio for mixing and mastering.

I used several singers because I did not have one voice that could sing the lyrics and melodies I wanted to make. That did not particularly bother me. In fact, it gave me another kind of freedom. I could stay inside the world of the songs without having to decide that one voice had to define the entire project.

There were musicians who wanted written parts and others who preferred to work by ear. I wrote what I heard in my head and tried to communicate it in whatever way worked best for the musician in front of me.

The record was becoming a world: guitars, bass, cello, violins, taar, flute, piano and some programming, with more than twenty singers eventually coming through the apartment to audition. There was a good energy around the project. Many singers and musicians responded positively to the idea of using raw, minimalist, experimental arrangements around deeper lyrical expression as an alternative to the Persian pop music of the day. I still have the audition sessions somewhere on my drive. They are part of my audio memory album.

Shahrzad sang two songs, both recorded at Silver Birch, since the album had already been moved there for mixing and mastering when she arrived in Toronto. Aadamaaye Kaaghazi kept me busier than ever, and that got me through some rough days.

Ghadre To was one of the simplest songs in the project:

برای نفس کشیدن هوای تو رو میخوام

I can only breathe in YOUR air

I hear those words differently now. They feel more nostalgic, more distant, more emotionally exposed than the person I have become.

I still hear things in that record that I like. It wandered away from mainstream pop. It had its own instincts. It was raw. It didn’t follow a commercial path by any means. I also hear what I would change: the way I treated the bass line, some of the alignments that, to my ears, took movement out of the groove, some effects, and some more.

That made me want to understand mixing, mastering—everything related to sound, from start to finish.

Learning to Hear

The work eventually gave me a problem I could not solve simply by listening harder.

Before the final mixes were ready, I took the album to Los Angeles. I visited Avang and Taraneh Records and played it for people whose ears I trusted. The reaction was encouraging but clear: the record had something, but the mix could be improved.

I knew something was off, but I could not diagnose it.

That was an important realization. First you have to learn to hear the problem, but hearing a problem and understanding it are not the same thing. Learning how to resolve it was something I would learn during the years to come.

I had not mixed Paeize Neyzar or Aadamaaye Kaaghazi. A sound engineer had done the mixing on both albums. My role had been production and arrangement, playing the keys, and some songwriting.

Now I wanted to understand what was actually happening inside the sound, and no one could change my mind. “But this is not your job,” they would say. It was not about whose job it was. For me, it was a new technical puzzle that needed to be solved by me. It couldn’t be more difficult than learning biochemistry or pharmacology. For me, it was. I was wrong.

Those technical questions became part of my musical education in studios around town, through discussions with mixing engineers, courses I took, and of course a whole lot of educational videos.

During this time I wrote the lyrics and music for Az Man Taa Man for Shahrzad. It came out as a single in 2006 and later appeared on her 2010 album, Yek Rooz, with arrangement by Giampiero Scuderi.

My serious mixing journey began around the middle of the 2000s. By Lahzehaa, written in 2012 and recorded in 2014, I felt I had moved beyond being an amateur mixer. Mastering took several more years.

I had not set out to become an engineer. I wanted to hear better. I wanted to understand the relationship between sounds and how I could manipulate them to move closer to the raw material I needed for my own artistic expression.

And somewhere in all of that, I was also a full-time clinical pharmacist, with on-call shifts after hours.

Yonge and Finch apartment — The Live Bands

After 2008, I moved into a new two-bedroom condo in the Yonge and Finch area. I had a Yamaha Tyros II arranger keyboard for inspiration and a bedroom studio. At one point I was expected to play keys in a developing band. It was just a for-fun project, and the drummer was a no-show.

So I was looking at the drum set in the middle of the rehearsal space for a few sessions when curiosity hit again. I began learning drums. Because, well, it was fun.

Meanwhile, I was still writing for Shahrzad. I wrote the lyrics for Maa, a duet performed by her and Faramarz Aslani, and for Meshkee Yaa Talaayee, both arranged by Farzin Farhadi. To and Farda already had melodies when I wrote their lyrics; Maa and Meshkee Yaa Talaayee did not.

Around 2011 or 2012, the Persian rock band 1507 began after a bass player approached me at apartment 1507 in North York looking for a Persian rock band to play with. I liked the idea, so I started writing again. This time, rock songs. I had been listening to rock music since high school, when my uncle gave me a set of headphones and a Pink Floyd cassette tape. So I was not new to rock music and multilayered lyrics.

I kept writing until I got some demos ready for the band, which came together easily. I had many arrangement ideas. But a band changes authorship. You are no longer alone with what you hear.

I deliberately let the live arrangements become, for lack of a better word, democratic. Sometimes another musician would hear something I had not. Sometimes the experiment went nowhere. That was part of the reason to have a band.

I also played drums with two jazz bands during that period, which put me in rooms with experienced musicians and exposed me to another musical language and some new musical voyages. I was in my live-band-experience era.

1507 played university gatherings and bars, played at the Government Club, and eventually performed at Tirgan Festival in 2015.

For me, the important part was not simply playing the shows. It was the experience of putting musicians together, shaping arrangements, rehearsing, listening to what other people brought into the music, and learning what happened when something I created alone had to survive in a room with other musicians.

Lahzehaa was recorded track by track rather than as a conventional live-band performance.

The band eventually ended. That was not a verdict. It was simply the end of that particular environment.

I lived it and moved on. Now I was putting together the whole picture: the life cycle of a musical journey, how it started as a creative idea, was recorded, mixed and mastered, distributed and played live, and then met reactions, audiences and the practical work of keeping it alive in the world, including social media. I completed the cycle.

Helping Other Artists — A Natural Next Step

After 1507, I spent years doing more work for other people: ghost writing, mixing, mastering, production. Over time, that became hundreds of mixes and masters, with those projects eventually reaching millions of streams.

Every project brought a different challenge, a different voice, and another opportunity to understand sound and production more deeply. And more importantly, the human side of artistic interactions.

Gradually, another question appeared.

If I continued along that path, I could spend the rest of my musical life making other artists work sound better. A career. A space in which I would have to sacrifice my own creativity.

Perhaps too easily.

Another Venue — The Lost Ambient

Time was passing faster than ever; I was becoming a dad. We were living in a house now, and I was completing my basement studio. For the first time, I was feeling content, and this led me to The Lost Ambient—an unexplored territory, close to where I had started with instrumental music.

This time, sound colours called me toward calmness, toward a space rather than a story. After all the stories I had gone through—from life to music productions—maybe it was time to settle down in a meditative realm and simply reflect for a while.

My work in clinical informatics pharmacy and later as an informatics specialist was already filling most of my time, so this was not going to be a conventional album project.

The Lost Ambient developed over roughly nine months. I completed it before my child was born in 2019. It contained nine pieces.

It was bringing me back to my own space in art.

Then I began testing the waters again—carefully bringing some of my own creative ideas back into the world and seeing where they might lead.

Testing the Waters

After The Lost Ambient, I was out there one more time, looking for a team of collaborators. I hadn’t been in touch with other artists for a long while, only responding to commissioned work and referrals once in a while. I was away from the “scene” and had never really built up the kind of momentum a musician would normally have around their work. I was isolated by choice.

I talked to many artists in different countries online and attended some gatherings among the business insiders on Clubhouse. Something had changed. Maybe it was me. I wasn’t sure enough to call it.

The groups seemed divided, conversations were often argumentative and, in many cases, not particularly constructive. Things felt more business-like. The friendship and trust I remembered from when I was in Iran either didn’t exist anymore or had been pushed to the margins.

I didn’t give up. A few tracks came out of that search:

Deep End Chill, Lachin, Contrasting Enigma, and Sunset House Fusion opened another instrumental language. I liked it, but I would miss writing lyrics.

Jaaddeh, Bogzaar Bogzaram, Jaadoo, Vaghtee Khaabee, Dotaa Vaazheh, and later Har Chee Hast brought music and lyrics together again, but questions around collaboration made me think more carefully about my boundaries. These projects were all different, and they were part of the sum of my exploration—simply who and what was available to me at the time to shake hands and shape our creativity. What I learned from them was remarkably consistent.

The labour-of-love collaborations with seasoned musicians that worked best for me were built on an informed mutual trust in each other’s work. If, gradually, the project became something one person wanted to make their own, those collaborations usually stopped there for me. When that balance was there, something good could happen. When it wasn’t, there was usually no reason to force it.

Research first, mutual respect for each other’s craftsmanship and taste, and the right to veto the job in the end became my rules of thumb for this group. Amateur and paid projects were treated differently.

If it rolls, it rolls.

When the Machine Arrived — Is Artificial Bad?

After I did Tolooe To, a song from the 1507 era with Rastin—a very pleasant collaboration—another question appeared in 2024.

I began wondering whether AI, newly arrived, could fill some of the gaps in my workflow. Could it fill in for a vocalist? What about session players? Could it give me another way to hear an idea that might otherwise remain unfinished?

I first tried training AI with my own vocals. It was not good enough. I could hear that the singing techniques were there, but the result was still far below what I could get from an established singer.

Then came Udio, ElevenLabs and Suno, sometimes together.

An AI singer could technically sing better than an amateur singer in some respects. But the overall studio quality was not there. There were problems with vocal character, emotion, Persian phrasing and pronunciation, artifacts, and the unmistakable sense of artificiality.

Suno was not dramatically better overall, but to my ears it offered more convincing expression, particularly in Persian. Particularly then.

I released Naneveshteh, Doori and Marz in 2024 using AI singers. My first experiments with AI, these releases were labelled as research projects. I wanted AI music in my timeline because it was new and worth exploring in my mind, despite the criticism surrounding it. I was not trying to make a statement about its impact, nor was I trying to anticipate what it might mean for anyone else.

I was simply curious, and I shared the results.

At the same time, I thought it was too early.

So I stopped and waited.

With newer versions of generative AI in 2025, I began to hear perhaps a ten-percent improvement in vocal and instrumental quality. With my studio work, I could push the vocal toward perhaps sixty to seventy percent of what I would expect from a rock singer’s studio recording after all the tricks. Maybe I could get by non-critical ears.

Still not enough.

But enough to keep going.

So in mid-2025 came Saayehaa, right in my music lab, the first Persian AI rock band.

Maybe they could sing some of the 1507 songs, or some of the many songs I had written years ago and stored on my portable drives that may otherwise never get heard.

And they did.

Saayehaa

I thought it would be more interesting to play the game of creating different vocal characters—different voices, different personalities, different colours—while keeping the music mine.

Saayehaa gave me a way to do that. They were my AI version of 1507.

I could create a singer without having to find one. I could decide what that singer sounded like, how that voice behaved, where it sat in the music, and what kind of personality it seemed to have. For the first time, I could build the vocal character around the music rather than build the music around the available singer.

That mattered to me.

Saayehaa became four different vocal characters: Parham, Raha, Pedram and Kamran. They were not simply different voices. I began to think of them as different performers, each with a particular colour and character. At the time, I couldn’t have imagined that Raha would soon be singing a duet with Rastin.

The technology was part of the palette. It was not the artistic identity.

I could still say that Saayehaa sang the song or played the guitars. I chose rock because it already has a lot of distortion as part of its sonic character. Artificiality could live inside that sound more naturally. In its own way, it was already close to what AI-generated music had to offer. I would write the lyrics and melodies, and jointly arrange the pieces with the band.

The project grew beyond an experiment. There were commercial releases, blind listening research, and eventually the possibility of revisiting some of the music I had made years earlier. I avoided Spotify for the non-human singers because I thought the rules might change soon and they did later. At that point, Navahang was my only choice. Some of the 1507 songs came back into the picture.

Music that had originally been created for a real band could now be heard through a completely different kind of band.

By then, I had stopped being particularly interested in the argument over whether AI was “real” music. I was more interested in what it could become and how I could use it to express the feelings wrapped inside my lyrics and melodies.

I expect the technology will eventually remove some of the production pain that has slowed me down for years and shorten the distance between feeling something and having people feel it.

I don't mind being the person behind the music. Actually, that is who I am.

Words are tools. Sounds are tools. AI is a tool. Instruments and a singer’s voice are tools.

Underneath all the work is something much harder to define: a message or a feeling that needs expression, and an expression that needs to trigger another feeling in someone else. Something to remind us who we are away from all the noise.

That is the part that has remained unchanged.

Saayehaa was heard widely through Navahang, one of the places where listeners inside Iran had a chance to hear it.

AI Shaking Hands with a Human

The next logical question was whether an artificial voice and a human voice could inhabit the same Persian song convincingly with the available technology.

The idea arrived while I was deeply inside the creative process. I was writing Omid for Saayehaa when I thought: what if this could be a duet—an AI singer and a human? I did not stop to decide whether it was sensible. I just did it as soon as Rastin agreed.

The mix was challenging. I had to work with Rastin’s voice to make it live beside Raha’s. His feeling remained dominant, while Raha’s higher-register hits became her particular highlights.

The point was not simply to have a human singer carry the emotion while the artificial voice filled the technical gaps. I wanted to see whether the two could actually belong to the same musical world.

Could a human voice and an artificial one share the same song without one making the other feel out of place?

That was the experiment.

The Road Was Never a Ladder

Was this a music career? Maybe.

Ney. Arrangement. Songwriting. Lyrics. Production. Mixing. Mastering. Drums. Bands. Ambient music. Collaboration. AI. Saayehaa.

But that is not how it felt from the inside.

From the inside, it was closer to surfing a series of waves.

Something appeared. I moved toward it. I stayed until it stopped calling me. Then something else appeared.

I have never been particularly interested in planning ten years ahead in order to gain something from art. I understand planning for life as it relates to day-to-day errands and structure. What makes me think is planning a life around what a personal or societal belief defines as success. What drives people to do that? Is it fear? The picture of an underachiever in the mirror? What makes them sacrifice their best currency, time, to gain to an extent that they have to leave it all behind? Is it for the kids? Would their comfort make them more humane? From pharmacy I wanted the ability to run my life. From music I wanted something harder to quantify.

I wanted to write the lyrics as they come to me. Hear the sound I was hearing in my head. Explore the musician in front of me. Try the instrument that had just appeared. See what the new technology could do. Solve musical puzzles and immerse myself in the experience.

Sometimes a person reaches a point where the easiest thing is to stop. There are always reasons. The timing is not right. The resources are not there. The audience is not there. The work is not popular. The right people are not around. You are too old. You are too busy. You have another job. A family. You need more recognition first in this game.

Some of those things are true. Sometimes you really should stop.

But sometimes an excuse can be perfectly reasonable and still be an excuse.

We have become remarkably comfortable measuring lives through fame, money, power, influence and recognition—even through social media metrics. None of these is inherently meaningless. But what exactly are we measuring as value? Why choose a collaborator because of visibility rather than compatibility?

What happens to the art when the audience becomes part of the qualification for making it?

A musician trying too hard to climb the ladder may miss the scenery.

And sometimes the scenery is the reason you were walking in the first place. For me this was not a game nor a ladder.

The Butterfly

I sometimes think about an ordinary butterfly going from flower to flower.

Nobody sees it. Nobody photographs it. Nobody cares enough to question its motives. Nobody knows how many flowers it visited.

Would we call that butterfly successful?

I am not sure the butterfly needs the word.

It moves toward what attracts it. It experiences what is there. It moves on. Perhaps it contributes something it will never know about. There is a lightness there—life, a non-sticky, child-like curiosity.

There is no résumé at the end. No ranking. No audience waiting to certify that the journey was worthwhile.

The flower was there. The butterfly was there. For that moment, that was the whole thing.

Perhaps that is why I have always been suspicious of planning too far ahead for an experience in music. If I decide today that tomorrow I will go out specifically to smell a flower, something about the flower has already changed.

Planning in the creative world can change an experience before it happens. It can take it somewhere the depth of the unexpected might never reach, interrupting the kind of learning that, for me, comes from not following other people’s paths or the common routes toward what society defines as success.

I have turned an encounter into an appointment.

I would rather discover the flower.

That does not mean I reject ambition. It means I do not want ambition to become more important than the thing that made me move in the first place.

And perhaps the same is true of a life.

We speak about success as though it were a permanent human truth, as though there were a definition waiting for all of us and the only problem were reaching it.

Success belongs to time. It belongs to culture. It belongs to whoever happens to be doing the judging.

A hundred years from now, what we consider enviable may seem peculiar. Perhaps the most successful person in another century will be the one who can meditate for eight hours without checking a screen. Perhaps fame will look like a strange psychological condition. Perhaps so will the pursuit of power and wealth.

And then there is what remains after us.

Money changes hands. Power changes owners. Followers disappear. Fame becomes obscurity. Even the work we leave behind is vulnerable to reinterpretation.

We will not be there to see the verdict.

So perhaps the only part of success we can actually experience is the life while we are living it. The life that does not take shape by and for the presence of others.

Not because achievement has no value.

Because life itself may not be a destination.

Perhaps fulfillment is what happens while we are walking. It happens inside the moments, when time stops.