A dream about a show about an artist

I had a dream where I was performing under low, soft light on a proscenium stage with stadium seating full of people.

I don't play bass. (However, I'll be damned if I won't use one and create something beautiful, so don't take me off the list of people to give your old, unused stand up bass to). Anyway, I don't play bass.

In this dream though? Killin' it.

Like you couldn't imagine...getting more and more involved, creating more and more intense music, doing things that have not been done. Beads of sweat reflecting light as they splash onto the instrument below me, over which I crouch and stretch like an ecstatic lover, plucking the strings of this bass like the very fabric of the universe itself. Seriously. Incredible. And the more I got into it, the more people left.

Yep. Here I was, pouring my soul into this instrument, transcending music, offering the performance of a lifetime and the deeper I got into the performance, the more people were leaving.

Heart break.

Finally, there I was at the end of my performance. Alone...or maybe there were a few people there.

So what is this? Is it that I feel like I'm giving everything I have, just to see it it bounce off of the masses? Is it that strange, unexplainable and unshakeable feeling of the outcast; even at my own shows?

Maybe it's Accepting that the music I've chosen to make is not what the popular market demands...Maybe my music isn't for this generation...

I know that it's certainly not because it's not any good.

At any rate, I know that if my music, my art, my life are of use to even a small fraction of the population, it's for them, and that it has it's place.

I know people stop doing what they love because they don't end up on the covers of magazines or paid millions of dollars. I have only this to say about that: If you don't believe in why you do what you do, and don't make every attempt at making it the highest form of expression that you possibly can, then stop. If you do, then don't stop, make it work. Even if your audience hasn't been born yet.