Noah Budin

Noah and Mariah with Joshua Radin

My daughter Mariah won tickets to see Joshua Radin at the House of Blues here in Cleveland. Her prize package included the opportunity to watch his sound check and meet and greet him. Unlike the time she went to see Good Charlotte or The Promise Hero, she offered the other ticket to me. And unlike Good Charlotte or the Promise Hero, I was actually interested in seeing Joshua Radin.

I knew very little about him and his music, although I did spend the night before listening to him on YouTube. What I didn’t realize at the time was that Cleveland, specifically Shaker Heights, is his hometown.

Our meet and greet was brief. Since I didn’t know anything about him, all I said was, “Really looking forward to your show.” We shook hands, took a couple of pictures and left.

His music is good. His live show was terrific. And his band was phenomenal. Here’s one of my favorite Radin Songs:

He’s a good writer. He said in his show that he’d written his first song six and a half years ago. Um, I wrote my first song in 1973. His first song got placed into a TV show. Mine didn’t. Of course, I was 13 years old and my song sounded, well, like it was written by a 13 year old. But getting your first song on a TV show is a great way to kick off a career. That’s when he decided, he said, “to become a musician.”

So, I was trying to do the math and figure out about how old he is. I’d say 25ish. That means that if he went to the Shaker Heights public schools, he probably saw me perform. That would have been about the time I was a performing artist on the roster of Young Audiences of Greater Cleveland (now Young Audiences of Northeast Ohio), and I performed and did workshops in many of the Shaker Heights elementary schools.

So, had I known more about him when I met him, I would have told him all of this and given him the opportunity to thank me for inspiring him and planting the seed to become a professional musician. Or, maybe not.

Good work, Josh! You’re making Cleveland proud!

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This Friday, Feb. 25, is Rock My Soul Shabbat at The Temple – Tifereth Israel at 7:30. It’s an all-music Friday night service with a nine piece band. As always, it’s free and open to the public. It will look nothing like this:

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Here are two rules about opinions:

1) Don’t listen to other people’s opinions or take them to heart, and
2) Always listen to other people’s opinions and take them to heart.

If you have a dream, don’t let one person, or even a few people, tell you that you can’t achieve it. Persevere.

However, learn how to grow from the criticisms. Don’t take them as personal affronts to your character. But take them personally as an artist and rise above them.

I don’t mean rise above them and ignore them. Drink them in, digest them, and let them nourish your creative soul. Work harder (and smarter). Once you understand how to embrace your critics and improve yourself, then you can rise above them.

But, stay true to yourself. It’s your dream. It’s your path. Only you can decide how hard you want to work at your craft.

There is a tough dichotomy here: do we do art for ourselves or for an audience? Who do we want to please? I guess that depends on who you are and what you want to get out of all of this. Generally, I think if any artist is in it purely for the money, they won’t make it. That’s not who we, as artists, are. We are driven by something deeper. Artists usually produce art because we can’t not do it.

But who are we without an audience? For what or whom does our art exist? We can produce art for our eyes and ears only. We can write deep, dark introspective songs about very personal moments, events and feelings in our lives. But that becomes a kind of therapy or psychoanalysis. And that’s OK. But, you know what? I don’t want or need to see or hear your therapy or psychoanalysis.

How does one write a good song? It’s easy. Strong melody, strong lyrics, and make sure more people like than don’t like it. It’s like that joke about the sculptor who was asked how he can carve such a beautiful and realistic horse from a nondescript hunk of granite. It’s easy, he says, just chip away everything that doesn’t look like a horse.

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Welcome to my new and mproved website/blog!

When you go to noahbudin.com, this is where you will land. This page will change often — well, more often than the other pages. The other pages contain, more or less, the same information that was on the old site. This page is more of a blog which will also serve as my newsletter.

Please subscribe to get the blog in your email – it’s fee and easy. Look up. No, not there. Why would it be there? In the upper right hand corner of this page…see? Just click and follow the instructions.

If you subscribe, I will never show you this picture again.

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You are nose to nose with Thomas Jefferson. But his nose is 20 feet long. If he inhaled, you would disappear. From your perspective, not only can you not tell that you’re looking at the face of Thomas Jefferson, you can’t even recognize that it’s a face at all. You probably can’t even tell that it’s a nose. And if you’re Gutzon Borglum, you’ve lived with this project, this face, this nose for over 14 years. You’ve lived with it, slept with it, tasted it, and let it live inside of you. You must take several steps back from it to see it at all. You must travel far, far away, many miles, to see it as a whole.

And even then, your perspective is skewed. You’re too intimate with it. You see things that others don’t, that others can’t. And every time you look at it you see something different. An eye, that one day looked like the most perfect eye you’d ever seen, somehow now looks like Oedipus after the fact. That beautifully curved lip now drools. And so it goes, every day, every minute that you’re working on it, and even after.

And yet, you are responsible for putting the most perfect product out there. This is what will define you for millions of people for generations to come.

This is what recording is like.

Recording music in a recording studio feels much like what I imagine Gutzon Borglum must have felt as he sculpted the busts on Mount Rushmore. He (and his crew) had to become intimate with the granite. Every square inch had to have been surveyed up close, touched and caressed by human hands, breathed on. The scale of the project becomes completely skewed at that range. It was necessary to know the molecules in order to birth the monument.

You are intimate with your songs. They live inside of you, you birthed them and then you live inside of them. You know every note, every micro beat, every breath, every nuance. You listen to the same passage over and over, to hear if your pitch is precise, if the cymbal has the right tone, if the piano solo has one too many notes, if your breathing is true, if you formed the correct shape with your mouth. It is a skewed perspective.
There are so many ways to go wrong during the process of songwriting and recording. I’m amazed that people actually do get it right. But when it’s not right, it can be hard to listen to, even embarrassing.

And yet, year after year, people put out phenomenal products – recordings that move you, and recordings that make you want to move. Artists (and their crews) bring music into the world that is powerful, gentle, evocative, transformative.

Get nose to nose with your recording. Then step away. Stop listening for a while. Then come back to it. Listen to it from different angles. And always have more than just your ears on it. You need a safety net and a fresh set of ears can be that.

Give me your best possible product because I deserve it, and I will do the same for you. I promise.

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