We were lucky to catch up with Adrian Bourgeois recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Adrian, we’re so appreciative of you taking the time to share your nuggets of wisdom with our community. One of the topics we think is most important for folks looking to level up their lives is building up their self-confidence and self-esteem. Can you share how you developed your confidence?
I must first give credit where credit is due for having the most encouraging and supportive parents one could ever ask for. The paradox of confidence and self-esteem is that not having them is the very thing that will prevent you from developing either. It’s not something you can wait to earn for yourself either by your own experience or the assessment of the others, but rather something you must simply decide to own for yourself which I believe stems from beliefs you decide to have about humans in general. A deeply held tenant I have always held to is that barring some serious physical ineptitude, anyone is capable of being great at anything provided they have the passion and patience to develop the craft and creativity required to be so. So the confidence and esteem I have in myself is rooted in the confidence and esteem I have in all people and knowing that I’m no exception. And I carry this with me to the music I make both in the studio and on the stage. Something I’ve always found odd and a bit of a turnoff is performers who seem to direct their art mostly at those who might not believe in their abilities, using their entire performance and craft to somehow prove otherwise some doubt, stated or not, held by someone towards them. Art that is only relevant with the presence of an adversary requires keeping that adversary around at all costs. Personally, I exclude from consideration entirely those who don’t believe for whatever reason that anyone is capable of making meaningful art, and instead make art starting from the place of having nothing to prove and can then place my entire focus on creating songs that feel like magic and home, not demonstrating what is possible, but reassuring of the eternal reality of the ideal. That’s the confidence and esteem that I believe is available to anyone provided they make the choice to reach out and have it for themselves. And in time, that confidence is something you can look back on as something proudly earned provided it doesn’t start as something you wait to look forward to.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I am a songwriter, a producer, a singer, and a multi-instrumentalist. I have two albums out and have been releasing a new single every month for the past almost two years presumably leading up to a new album. I perform regularly around Los Angeles and elsewhere and have appeared on recordings and stages with Grammy winners and Rock and Roll Hall of Famers. Some highlights of the past decade or so have included appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live, performing for thousands at a presidential campaign stop for Bernie Sanders, performing Paul McCartney’s “Ram” album at the Troubadour with original Wings drummer Denny Seiwell, recording music presented at Farm Aid, and serving as technical director for John C Reilly’s Mr. Romantic show.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
-Develop your taste. That’s ultimately what artistic creation is. I’m always suspicious and ultimately not very interested in artists who say they like everything. My assumption then is that you don’t love anything. Why else hang a painting if the blank wall were just as preferable? Why fill the silence with music at all or choose these notes together over those if either way would be just as well? Let what you create be your own personal crusade for your own definition of beauty and meaning. And that doesn’t mean your taste is a judgment against someone else’s opposing taste either. Two artists with diametrically opposing tastes have more in common than one with no preference in taste at all.
-Authenticity is a given; strive for quality. So many people say the most important thing an artist or person can be is authentic. I think this is a misnomer and misses the point of what authenticity even is. To me, authenticity is the truth of whatever you are at any given moment. You can be authentically fake, authentically untruthful, authentically cowardly, or authentically unoriginal, and of course you can be authentically all sorts of wonderful things too. When many people say they were being inauthentic or “that wasn’t me,” what they usually really mean is that they didn’t like who they were in that moment, but in reality, that was indeed authentically who they were in that space and time. So authenticity then becomes a blank canvas on which curation and creation is required. Rather than wanting to be authentic which is impossible to not be, strive instead to be good and interesting. As Bob Dylan once said, “life isn’t about finding yourself or finding anything, it’s about creating yourself.”
-Don’t prove you can do something, justify why you should. In a room full of people, why do you have the stage and the microphone? Out of the millions of songs to fill my ears with, why would I spend the next four minutes listening to you? As I said before, every person alive has the ability to make meaningful art, but also, the art each person makes is something that not another soul is capable of imagining and executing exactly. In the same way no two people are exactly alike, so it is with what they have the potential to create. So take the execution of the art you make that will not exist if you do not breathe life into it as a sacred responsibility. That does not mean that what you make needs to reinvent the wheel or resemble nothing else. In fact, the art that moves me the most is the stuff where it’s almost hard to believe no one has thought of this before and feels like something that has always existed. But it will only exist just so because it was made by you. Don’t waste one iota of artist energy pushing back on shallow, small minded prejudices that might doubt that it is likely or acceptable for a certain type of person can make a certain type of art. They are not worth the space it took to write that sentence. Instead, let your art be a gift worth of the open arms of the world.
Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?
My favorite book in the world is “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. It was a very famous book at one point, but I rarely come across people who have actually read it. The book mostly focuses on the definition and essence of “quality” and how it can’t be achieved by following any strict list of guidelines, nor can it be chalked up to the whims of what an individual subjectively likes, but instead is the “zen” if you will that exists at the meeting of subject and object. There’s a throwaway line in the book that has also very much shaped my thinking which is that in some languages, the word for “God” and the word for “good” are the same. Almost every spiritual tradition has the expression “God is good,” but in that sentence, “good” is usually understood to be an adjective. What if instead we read “good” to be a noun, as in God is goodness itself, and regarded goodness itself as what we devoted our lives to serving and worshiping? How different would the world be then?
Contact Info:
- Website: www.adrianbourgeois.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/adrianbourgeois
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/adrianbourgeois
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@adrianbourgeois?si=gV_WfS8NaL-AGuEy
- Other: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0Fipiq3Ehrqr8nFomu7QnI?si=8nQrDNAeT2eHH4R9vu03sA
Image Credits
Photo credits: Fede Petro, Atreyu Jones, Adrian Bourgeois
