Excerpt from Formation: Building a Personal Canon, Part I (page XV) "I have found a maxim. … you have to be willing to let go of your own story about yourself completely, to drop your whole idea of who you thought you were. That means everything you don’t like about yourself but also everything you cling to because you don’t know who you would be without it. This story is what’s tying you down. It has stopped working. When you know this to be true, it is not an intellectual realization. You feel it in your core. ...This arrival can be exhilarating. There is an open expanse before you, an identity waiting to be foremd. You begin to tell anotehr story about yourself … a decade or two later, this story in turn is no longer viable. ...it can also be more like cutting something out of your insides with a knife. You have to walk right into the fear and face it directly. It’s a few of losing your identity. Who will you become? Or it’s like climbing a mountain with only a little flashlight, all alone."
Screw identity. However a basic rule of marketing is that you should concentrate on one thing. Being able to do two or more things is confusing to the public. In short, become a brand name. Another problem is if you do A and B then your fans will be only those people who like both A AND B. That set is both smaller than the set A and smaller than the set B. All that effort to learn both A and B will reduce your audience. It's self-defeating as far as popularity goes. If you want to be popular, think AC/DC. They do one thing and one thing only. Brand name. Me, I don't need to care about money so I do "what I bloody well want to." -- Keith Moon
Exactly... If you want to make a living out of music, then it's not only about your perception of identity, but also about audiences. One approach would be to have maybe two or three different musical projects, maybe even with different people. That way you are not confusing audience, and you are playing different styles which you like.
