Listening (mostly) to music (sort of), plus other stuff

I recently noticed two DVDs in a Little Free Library, and since both are of kinds of music I don't usually listen to, I brought them home.  I listened to one of them today.

The musicians are a local quartet.  I'm not enough of an aficionado of current music to know if they played rock, hard rock, alt rock, emo, or what.  I really did listen with as much concentration as I could muster, but I didn't much care for what I heard.  The singing was mushy so I couldn't make out a lot of the lyrics.  The instrumentation landed on my ears for the most part like an undifferentiated wall of sound.  Not really to my liking.

I did find myself musing, though, about what must have gone into the making of this DVD.  Someone or someones had to write the songs.  The group had to practice practice rehearse rehearse.  There was the expense of studio rental, the designing of the cover, and goodness only knows what kind of marketing the group or it rep has been doing since 2016 to get this collection into the public ear.  How many thousands of musicians manage to make one DVD?  How many fewer make a second?  How many fewer actually become known and successful?  It boggles the mind.

I guess I shouldn't be curious about any of this, since the path of a musician or group is probably not too different from that of a playwright.  I've been writing plays and having them produced around the world for 35 years, and can only claim a minimal - nay, miniscule - level of success.  I've done better than people who have written fewer plays or had fewer productions, but I am leagues and miles and light years away from what anyone would actually call real success, the kind that makes a title widely known and brings financial rewards.  And yet I keep writing, keep sending my plays out into the world, keep getting my little productions here and there.  I wonder if this group is still making music, writing their songs, rehearsing, maybe considering a second DVD.

Other stuff: Today I want to the art museum with a friend and saw an exhibit of work by an artist I was not previously familiar with, Amoako Boafo.  I liked his work a lot, so much so that I found I hadn't any taste for nor interest in any of the other works in the museum.  I just wanted to be absorbed for a while by the feelings his paintings evoked.  After the museum, we had lunch in a place I've known about for a long time but patronized for the first time today.  And I got off the light rail at a station I've never visited before.  So, despite the fact that I haven't completely lived up to the promise of this blog's title, I'm still looking all the time for how I can stretch and experiment and grow.