#27 Why make music? with Maggie Tra

I'm definitely not launching a podcast today. Nope. Shhh. You are. A loose wide-ranging chat with DJ & producer Maggie Tra about music & community.

If you are a regular reader you’ll know by now that I am deeply On Being-pilled.

Right now, I’m quite taken with the idea of “living the question.” Fundamentally, this is the idea that instead of chasing answers, chasing solutions, and then feeling down and desperate when the answers don’t easily come, you might be happier and healthier if you can become more comfortable simply living in the question:

Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything.

Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

It is liberating to unhook a little from this desperate need to have answers, and to simply appreciate the act of living in the questions. To me, this sounds like choosing to live a life of sustained curiosity. We think of curiosity sometimes as a glib exercise adjacent to daydreaming when actually to be curious is to consistently pursue a state of not knowing the answers, of seeking to understand but not to “complete” the understanding. You can’t clock the human experience.

Maybe it’s good to acknowledge that when it comes to the biggest questions in your life - why am I here? who do I want to be? how do I want to live? - it’s not like you will just wake up one morning and magically find answers. Not to those biggies anyway. Questions of this magnitude don’t even actually have answers, They are just giant landscapes to explore, as you live your way into being who you are, over and over again. Maybe it’s a good idea to spend more time thinking about the questions themselves and whether you are living in the ones you’d really like to be living in.

Formulate a question that is rolling around in your life or in that boundary between what is personal and what is public or civilizational. Write it down, hone it, and make a commitment to it. Commit to having it over your shoulder, in your ear, as you move through your life.

Ok so, I have a confession to make.

I have started recording conversations with friends and people that I admire. They are long-form, messy, wide-ranging, free-flowing convos about music - specifically, conversations about why we make music. Why do it? Why is music important?

Why make music?

This is very much adjacent to, and an extension of, what I wrote about here on this newsletter last year (#21 What can music do?). I want to spend more time - maybe a lot of my time - trying to understand music’s function and its potential, especially in the context of right now, a time when the planet is deeply wounded and our species faces very real existential challenges. In that gloomy context, music can sometimes feel a bit flippant. If I want to keep living a life built largely around music, then I feel like I really need to believe in its capacity to do good. In my bones.

Why make music? There it is. A question I can live in, at least for a little bit.

Let me be more specific about my confession. I’m possibly, maybe, predictably, inevitably, making a podcast. Oops. There I said it. Another bloody podcast.

I am not “launching” anything today. Just sharing a thing with you. Let’s call it a ‘pilot episode’ - a trial run, an experiment. This is an hour of me talking to a friend, about music and community and identity and life. It may only be relevant to me, and my friend. Or - maybe - you’ll get something out of it too.

The video is on YouTube. I’ve edited it up a bit, though I don’t totally know what I’m doing. It is not actually publicly available to watch on YouTube - it won’t be appearing in the algorithm or in search results, at least not to begin with. It is an “unlisted” video which means you can only find it if you have the link. I’m not quite ready for it to be fully “out there.” But if you want to share the link with your mates, go for it. I’ve also popped it in the same podcast feed where I’ve dropped a couple of other things over the past little while.

Feels perfect that this trial balloon I’m sending up is a conversation with Maggie Tra, who is not just a kick-ass DJ and producer, but also my friend. She has a giant heart and a mischevious sense of humour. We talk about community, identity, Vietnam and Australia.

Maggie says some very honest things about both the joys and the challenges of building community, both in Hanoi and in Sydney, she talks about some of the cultural and musical differences between Vietnam and Australia, and about her own personal journey exploring her identity through music making and community building.

We laugh and giggle constantly throughout, and for that I do not apologise. This chat is, at its core, just two friends having a hang. This is on purpose. I really believe in the power of warm, human, generous conversations. I think sometimes the best way to get into the deep stuff is to do so with lightness and without pretense.

I have a few of these chats up my sleeve. They have all been full of laughter and insight and warmth and reflection, jumping across personal experience, the vagaries and magic of the creative process, how music intersects with identity and activism, the goods and ills of music education, the power and challenges of community building, conversations around joy and sadness and connection and loneliness.

It turns out, talking to someone about their music practice is a trojan horse through which you can actually tease out a person’s worldview, get some hints into what they have learned through their human experience so far, and reflect on the entire human experience at large. No big deal.

If this thing becomes a thing, then it will be at heart a very personal project, driven by my personal desire to listen and learn, and live in this specific question. But ideally, I would also like these chats to be of use to you. Not “the world” or “an audience” or “a market” or “the internet” - but you.

So with that in mind, I would love to know what you make of it, if you watch or listen to it. Send me any thoughts at all - about how it sounds, how it looks, about what we talk about, what is interesting, what isn’t haha, anything. If this pushes ahead as an ongoing and public project, I’ll be tweaking it as I go - any feedback right at the start is super helpful.

I’m not sure exactly what this is or what it will be. Maybe I’ll just be having these conversations as part of my own process, of exploring the landscape of this question, of my questions, of becoming myself and finding my way.

Or maybe this is something we can do together. I have a bit of a vision for what it could grow into, but it also feels a little dangerous to think too far ahead.

Let me know what you make of it.

Thanks for reading, listening, watching, caring … hope things are good in your world.

More very soon
Tim