Meet Tavia Rhodes

We were lucky to catch up with Tavia Rhodes recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Tavia, so excited to have you with us today, particularly to get your insight on a topic that comes up constantly in the community – overcoming creativity blocks. Any thoughts you can share with us?

Persistence. Waiting. Having faith that creativity will always come back around.

During the pandemic the impulse to create all but disappeared. At a certain point I even put a sheet over my keyboard so it would stop staring me in the face. I waited and waited. What finally unlocked things for me was going at it from another angle. Instead of sitting down at the piano to wait for a melody, or at my journal to wait for a chorus to appear on the page, I got moving. I started reaching out to the most talented musicians I knew and formed a band. Instead of forcing new material we worked on old material, and eventually, the creative block became unjammed and I was writing new songs.

Actually, the opening track on the album, ‘Belonging,’ is the first song I wrote after those pandemic years. I still remember sitting at my piano singing the first lines. It was as if I was reviving my voice, freeing it from my body…“what’s it like to fly, what’s it like to flow.”

Recently I’ve understood creative blocks as a sign that I need to slow down, pause, and listen. If I listen hard enough, a melody is always there. It might not become a song, but it’s something, and it’s a place to start.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I have been working on this record for 15+ years. It started as a wish, before I had even started writing songs. I’ve always been a singer but composing songs is a wholly different thing.

The last 15 years have been full of starts and stops, acquiring skills, forming collaborative relationships, and honing my craft. Although I was writing and recording songs it wasn’t until three years ago when I formed a band that things started to gain momentum. After gigging around town for a couple of years, one year ago I launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the album. The campaign was successful and here we are less than a year later and my debut album ‘HER SAY’ is here!

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Hmm…there have been so many. If I had to choose three, I would say getting my own recording setup at home, learning some basic guitar and piano, and getting over the idea that I need to feel 100% ready before doing something.

First was getting set up with Protools so I could record at home. A big part of my writing process is adding harmonies and Protools gave me the ability to stack as many harmonies as I wanted. Before I had my own setup, I would use my phone, or I would record at my friend’s home studios. Being able to record in my own space on my own schedule was a game changer. That said, it has taken me a long time to get my technology dialed. In fact, to this day I’m still running Protools on an old computer that can’t even access the internet anymore. So I’m always transferring files on flash drives. It’s a work in progress!

Second is learning some basic guitar and piano. I took about a year of lessons on each instrument. I’m still not at performance level, but both have brought a different dimension to my songwriting. I’m hoping to get back to playing after this release.

Getting over feeling ready is essential to pretty much any endeavor. There are so many areas in my life where I have waited until I’m ready. The fact of the matter is, sometimes, you just have to dive in. I think this is especially the case when it’s the first time you’re doing something. I can already imagine that my second album will feel so much more feasible and doable.

My advice would be to follow your desire. Divide your goal into steps and move in the direction that excites you and gives you energy.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

The number one most impactful book I’ve read related to my creative journey is “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield. Before I read that book I thought that if I kept coming up against road blocks in an area of my life, it was a sign that I should not pursue that thing. Pressfield’s take on this is that the stronger the resistance you feel to doing a thing, the stronger an indication that it is THE thing worth pursuing. In fact, he suggests that as you pursue your life’s work or life’s calling, and the closer you get, the more resistance you will feel. It is as if the amount of resistance might be a compass or way of confirming what your life’s work is. This helped me reconcile the fact that pursuing music in a real way has always been something I’ve wanted in my heart of hearts but it has also been the hardest thing for me to do. It is truly astounding how many different ways the voices in my head have tried to get me to give up. So yeah, it’s pretty incredible that I have finally finished producing my very first album!

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Brad Curran
Rachel Simpson
Ted Zee

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