StreetcredMusic: Songstresses, "Why I Left New York City" Pt 3

 So many of the creative and talented women friends I gained through this blog, doing shows, making videos and a film, are now gone. Like in, they left NYC. In most cases priced out, by the cost of housing.

I asked a few of them if they would like to write about it here.
Some do, and I will be posting their words. Some will post their name, others want to do it anonymously, here's the third in a series...

Morgan, is a woman I never had the pleasure of meeting in person. But I love her music. She's a vocalist in the Reggae genre.

I missed the boat Pete. Many ships come and go in NYC every day, I was never able to afford the fare. Since I arrived in 2012 I put all I had into, writing, creating, producing and of course recording all I could. I never went 'on the cheap'. I put in my money and just as important my TIME, because after all this was my shot.  

I was never going to be the woman who works 3 jobs and squeezes her music in. I worked one job 25 hrs a week, Monday through Thursday, days. I lived with my sister. I was never going to be a wedding singer, or a writer of songs and split a couple of thousand dollars with 5 or 6 others, on an occasional hit.

So I left in 2016. My half of the rent in LIC, went up to 1k from $650, in eighteen months. My day job was fine, but as a business, and music is a business, a big business, it was not working.
So many other girls I knew were making money but most not in NYC. They were going everywhere, in some cases the best money they made was abroad. And of course they were paying a COMPETENT agent.

I am in Colorado now, and have been part of a band, and BTW not to many Reggae Bands here, Ha!
We play for the ski crowd in winter and vacationers in summer. All my bills are paid from our gigs.
Every once in a while we go to Cali for the ski season and we have made some good contacts to travel when we want. Not personal #It'sonlybusiness.

I don't miss the subway, the rats therein, Starbucks, free gigs, or garbage bags stacked up every night.
I'm 29 now, and I feel like I'm on that boat. The Love Boat, I love where I'm at. xo Morgan.

Read parts 1 & 2 HERE!

Follow me:: Pete Carma

StreetcredMusic: Songstresses, "Why I Left New York City" Pt 2.

 So many of the creative and talented women friends I gained through this blog, doing shows, making videos and a film, are now gone. Like in, they left NYC. In most cases priced out, by the cost of housing.

I asked a few of them if they would like to write about it here.
Some do, and I will be posting their words. Some will post their name, others want to do it anonymously, here's the second in a series...

Sarah, a songwriter, pianists and mom...

Pete, It’s been 19 months since I lived in New York City. I lived there for eight years. It would have been a decade this month, which means that if I’d never left I would be, officially, a real New Yorker soon. Instead, I became the person people roll their eyes at. I moved to Vancouver, Washington, with my baby and my boyfriend. Now Brooklyn becomes this weird blip, the place I spent my 20s. Leaving felt like getting out of a bad marriage, like I was “choosing happiness.” Like many New Yorker's, I spent years fantasizing about other lives, and months on different Zip Codes in real-estate apps. We had the Vermont phase, the upstate New York phase, the looking into visas in Berlin phase. What would it be like, to be an adult in not–New York? 

My music career? I was writing songs hoping they would be 'placed' and playing weddings and gigs for the corporations I disliked for making every business a cut throat campaign. I made my rent and then a bit more doing that. That's not a music life, it's a struggling existence. One of the last live gigs I had was packed, my tip jar paid me $83, a net loss of $200 for me, $200 was one ninth of my rent.

As it turns out, living elsewhere is exceedingly comfortable. Years spent in New York made it seem like a bad thing to choose ease. A weakness, a personality flaw. After all, if an easy life were something I was after, why had I spent so much goddamned time in a railroad apartment near the BQE? Had I internalized the values of the people around me, assimilated so much I’d forgotten what I actually cared about? 

  Living in New York was never a dream of mine like it is for some people. New York made realizing so many of my dreams possible: writing, love, and a child. Maybe once I got everything I wanted out of the city I was ready to leave. Maybe I made my contacts, got my contracts, memorized the subway lines, and then I was done. 

For more than a year I didn’t miss it at all. When images of the city flashed in my mind, it was like a montage of car exhaust, putrefying garbage, and hauling my ass up subway steps at the end of a long day. The word that came to mind was misery. And then it shifted. It was almost like my brain missed using all my particular to New York knowledge. I fantasized about walking certain pathways across town. I got butterflies thinking about that section of Rivington that doesn’t quite connect when you cross Bowery, or sliding into a table at a crowded coffee shop, right as it empties.

So I went to New York by myself, for four days.

I landed in JFK, giddy to be in an airport that felt like a spaceship, I ran off to find the subway, my subway.

“I don’t know how you do it,” I said to my friends at dinner that night — my old, dear friends who make me laugh like no other. What I mean to say is Why. But there was a bite to my comment, a bitterness. When I saw other women with babies strapped to their chest in carriers I got a flash of anger, like, No, I have a baby, or What are you trying to prove? It took me a few days to realize that my friends and these women were doing what I couldn’t, or wouldn’t — do. They were hacking it in New York. 

 I woke up the next morning at 6 a.m. — windows open, no air-conditioning, on an air mattress in the office of my dear friend’s Bushwick apartment — to the sounds of construction. It was that comically loud New York sound where someone is basically dropping a ton of cement onto something really clangy. The kind that makes you jump and laugh and scream.

 I can’t do it anymore. I’ve gone soft. What that means is that I’ll be forever living in not–New York, in a second-rate place with an in-unit washer and dryer. And that’s the cost — knowing that there will always be a city that has everything but that I can no longer take. There will always be a city to contend with, to compare to. It’s incredibly annoying, but hey, that’s New York....Sarah.

see part 1 HERE!   ... Follow me: Pete Carma

 

StreetcredMusic; Songstresses, "Why I Left New York City"

So many of the creative and talented women friends I gained through this blog, doing shows, making videos and a film, are now gone. Like in, they left NYC. In most cases priced out, by the cost of housing... Enough from me.

I asked a few of them if they would like to write about it here.
Some do, and I will be posting their words. Some will post their name, others want to do it anonymously, as this first of many will be. I chose this one to be first because it reminds me of me, especially when she speaks of her behavior after she knew she was leaving, Enjoy!!
...."Anonymous" She is a songwriter, vocalist, and plays a mean flute.

Pete: Why did I leave?... because I forgot. I realized it when I started to question if I still wanted those same things I fantasized about having as a child. (Yes, that may even involve the cliché white-picket-fence scenario.) And that realization scared the shit out of me. Because I knew deep down, I did.

 I moved to New York because I wanted that feeling of independence forced upon me. Living in New York makes you fiercely self-sufficient, like you don’t really need anyone else. It’s very easy to forget that relying on others is not always the worst thing, and there's a lot more to life than just trying to build yourself up all on your own.

 I didn’t want to leave New York. Did it help that every time I told someone I was moving from New York to Ohio they'd just stare at me blankly?  I’d been making excuses ranging from “I’ll be bored” to “I hate Junior League” for not returning to my hometown since graduating high school. The truth is, after my mom died, I never thought I could ever be truly happy there again.

As far as my career in music, NYC only helped me to learn to struggle, and compete. I wasted so much time chasing things, my creativity suffered. But I did play lots, for not much money. Being on stage and thinking about your rent, sucks. There were some really fun times though.

Days leading up to my departure from New York, I noticed a huge shift in my behavior. I didn’t pedal as fast as I possibly could on my Citi Bike to make the light on West Broadway and Houston, since missing it means you have to wait at least five minutes.

When the subway arrived right as I descended the stairs, and I missed it because I had insufficient fare on my MetroCard, I didn’t become irate. I simply waited in almost an eerie calm for the next one to arrive. Because I knew it was coming. 

For once, I wasn’t in a rush. I wanted to relish every single second of being in New York, a city that had become one of my true loves; I needed time to stand still just for a minute.   

   ..Did it take me leaving the city to finally feel calm in it? Maybe. And maybe that says it all. 

 It’s an entirely different decision to leave something you really love and feel grateful towards it. I have no idea if Ohio is my finish line -- but I know it’s the closest I’ve felt to it.

              ********************************************************

(Just to add what I know, her rent was increased $300, and she still had a one hour commute to the city. She didn't have an adequate kitchen, which didn't sit well, since she eats healthy all the time)

 This is the first of a long series, I hope....

See other Op/Eds on this topic HERE


Follow me: Pete Carma

StreetcredMusic: Raffaella Daino, Pivirama, And A Closed Frontier.

I have been friends with Raffaella Daino for several years now. She lives in Palermo, Italy (birthplace of my Dad)  She is a marvelous musician and vocalist, and front woman for the band Pivirama

 Pivirama, a very creative and artistic group, you have seen their videos on my 'video of the week' several times in the past.

Raffaella is also a reporter. I have been following her work there as well as her music.
Reporting in Southern Italy and other parts of Europe puts her at ground zero for the decade long refugee crisis. She has posted footage and seen first hand the death and suffering. It has enlightened me, especially since the coverage here in the US of A is as non existent as our actions to help.

Raffaella in Syria

Pivirama released a music video that includes some of the footage.

Raffaella:
 "London, I’m calling. Is anybody there? I’m sending you a postcard, please answer me. Don’t look away. Listen to me. I’m begging you”.

These are some of messages written on the walls in Calais, France, near the border with Belgium, where thousands of migrants and refugees try to survive, whole families with very small babies, living inside tents in the middle of nowhere, in the snow and in the mud, hoping to get to Great Britain and join their friends and relatives, brothers and parents who managed to cross the Channel. But walls and boundaries are in their path. 

This is what I’ve seen in the displaced camps in the middle of Europe and it inspired me to write a new song and create a new video, I made it by myself for my new upcoming 4’ Pivirama album.

The video:: "Jungle, Frontiere Chiuse" (frontier closed)  
View Video HERE: 

                             **********************************************

"because they're all afraid of me" it's an adult question, it wasn't the thought of this Syrian girl who carried with her a suitcase bigger than her around the refugee camp, dragging it between mud, earth and snow, Telling everyone that "she went to England"... taking this 4-minute trip, you will discover that even in Hell you can dream, smile, and above all survive.
When I saw them, I didn't understand how they did it.

 Everlasting thanks to Raffaella for exposing the inhumanity that is everywhere, in this horrifying time. 
...The new album from Pivirama is available; HERE NOW

Follow me: Pete Carma