Why Sph*eric
Names are tricky. The thing we call ourselves as artists transmits a firm impression about our place in the world. In songwriting there's a word I love: prosody. It's when the lyrical intent matches the tone of the music. Choosing a name to symbolize your art is similar. I've worn a few singer songwriter personas, but none quite fit right, more like an imaginary doppelgänger that made me secretly cringe, embarrassed for myself.
But I do like the idea of a dedicated artist title, a separate identity other than my birth name. For me it instills more freedom and permission to step beyond my known parameters. An entity upon itself.
My devils advocate could point out that a singer songwriter using their actual name has even more prosody, since the hallmark of writing personal songs is revealing your true self in story form. It’s vulnerable and sincere to just be yourself, John Mayer.
But when an artist nails their title in perfect prosody- The Black Keys, INXS, Rage Against the Machine, Weezer- there is an immediate flow. Clearly others break on through just fine with non prosody abstractions- My Morning Jacket, Radiohead, Foo Fighters, Duran Duran. Either way, it is the frame around the picture. I prefer prosody. Like Prince really was a prince, visually and sonically.
I am more interested in questions. They cultivate more humility than answers. They invite spaciousness, curiousity and inclusion all around. The symbol for me is a sphere. The bottom of the question mark!
I’m fascinated how the earth regenerates its force of life. We see it in the familiar and recurring patterns in the veins of a fallen leaf, your own skin or the view of the Nile River from space. Life explodes outward, yearning, striving, achieving. Everything we know happens here, on this sphere, unconcerned by the delusions and boundaries we invent. Life wraps itself around the twirling Earth, we are built upon it and merge back into it.
Whether the valence electron around its atom, a molecule or even a star, the sphere is the source and symbol of it all. I look for its patterns. Octave to octave there are eight musical notes. From Mercury to Neptune there are eight planets. Playfully I imagine the Earth as a musical note on a circular staff around the Sun making melody with Venus and Mars.
In my video, The Number You Won, I see the silver ball and the earth connected, hurling through a field of chance and luck. I find the sphere metaphor in everything!
I include the asterisk* to symbolize the blooming expansiveness on the sphere we live, our personal journey to growth and along with the Big Bang theory, the universe expanding too. I really should just get a tattoo*
In my work with eyewear, I decipher prescriptions and design lenses to restore sphericity. The idea is to reroute rays of light entering the eye to compensate for any non spherical aberrations. Another layer of meaning to embed my artist identity with.
And Sph*eric includes my actual name, I literally fit into the puzzle. But it's really more than just my artist name in code, it's the more expansive idea of an inclusive personal brand that shares music, musings and visuals that play with larger questions through human narratives. To me, this is prosody.