Creative work is more accurately a machine that digs down and finds stuff, emotional stuff that will someday be raw material that can be used to produce more stuff, stuff like itself - clay to be available for future use.

Yeah, it's pretty hard not to be completely cynical these days.

All you needed was a couple of instruments and a few chords and you could be on an indie label.

I'm not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.

Is giving in to the photographer's presumably natural impulse to compose and light well sometimes okay and not okay other times?

The wage for most musicians is a modest amount, and that includes me some of the time.

As music becomes less of a thing--a cylinder, a cassette, a disc--and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again.