The first student question after my now annual hometown Odyssey show at UIC was about vulnerability.
The student commented that the character and effectiveness of what I do hinges on how vulnerable I make myself to the audience and wondered how the performance that day, my 381st, compared to my first.
As often happens with these performances, this is something I'd been thinking about recently. 2024 has been a year to gather and reflect upon my Odyssey experiences that stretch back over 20 years, really now 30 if you consider that my improbable journey to Ancient Greek and Modern Bard-dom stems from a book I read in 1994 or 1995.
As I think about the arc of my Odyssey journey, I can see that vulnerability figures heavily in its successes. And failures.
In composing and bringing it to life, I remember embracing a sort of naive vulnerability, probably the sort that Telemachus exhibits at the beginning of the epic. I didn't know any better, didn't understand that I should probably protect myself, my creative psyche. So I just went for it without understanding how much of myself I was leaving exposed to possible injury.
I think this was consistent with how I was leading my life at that point: modestly heartbroken and finding my way in the world.
When I ran out of steam on the Odyssey in 2006 and took a 4 year break, it was because I didn't know how to be safely vulnerable in performance. Not just performance of the songs, but the presentation of them, the whole of my interactions with the audience. And it was hurting me, pushing me into an unhealthy and unhappy place.
Rebooting my Odyssey in late 2010 as a full time professional musician was possible because I had experienced enough real heavy heartbreak on the winedark sea of my life and had my vulnerability reaffirmed in my personal and creative relationships. This allowed me to perform with the right amount of risk and gradually embrace vulnerability again.
The big break was in 2014: I remember very clearly a show at University of Vermont, one of the first that came about because of my comprehensive and sustained cold email campaign to essentially every college Classics department in the country. In front of a class of students, I permitted myself to talk about the musical and intellectual insecurities I had around my Odyssey. My vulnerability opened the door for an electric connection with the audience. A light went off: I had to get back to that initial spark of vulnerability that I planted in the creation of my songs but I had to do so with the confidence that I could do it safely.
And over the next 10 years that's what I've done. Now for me everything in every performance is about being as vulnerable as I feel up for that day: the singing and playing, the discussion, the disclosure. The risk taking. It's all in the service of showing the audience what this story and performance means to me in the hope that it will resonate with and inspire them. To be honest. To be vulnerable. To feel something unmitigated about being a human.
Being a human is, at its core, about being vulnerable. About being mortal. Careening through a brutal world that is more often than not unfair and rarely just.
But if we can crack ourselves open and allow others to see our human vulnerability, we stand the best chance of finding love and light, of being that ember buried in the ashes, waiting to bloom in fire once more.