Meet Arielle Silver

We recently connected with Arielle Silver and have shared our conversation below.

Arielle, so glad you were able to set aside some time for us today. We’ve always admired not just your journey and success, but also the seemingly high levels of self-discipline that you seem to have mastered and so maybe we can start by chatting about how you developed it or where it comes from?
I think my self-discipline comes from three places and times. The first is that I was a classically trained woodwind player from an early age, and I had teachers that brought to my attention the fact that learning an instrument requires daily practice.. My teachers have always taught me that growth comes from small incremental steps.

The second is that I was raised in what my brother calls “Conserva-dox Jewish. I went to Hebrew school, I went to synagogue, I observed all the Jewish holidays, we were kosher in the home. Throughout our daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly lives there were repeated rituals. I think that rhythm of life, that awareness, that separation from secular life was always humming in the background, and it taught me to access layers of Self. Being a songwriter is similar – while I move through my daily life, there’s always this ongoing hum in my mind as I’m working on songs or honoring my work in music.

The third thing is that I’m a longtime yoga practitioner, which is related to the first two things, but something that I chose as an adult as opposed to those other two are things that were more about my youth. I’ve been practicing yoga for the last 20 something years and have had a daily yoga practice for about 15 years. Sometimes it’s a physical yoga practice on the mat, but other times my practice looks more like meditation or daily journaling, which might have its origin in other first two childhood disciplines.

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?
Most relevant to me right now is Watershed, this record that I’ve been working on for the last two and a half years, that is being released on October 6th. That day is the big Los Angeles album release show, and then I leave for an East Coast tour.

I believe every song has its own mission in the world. Each song is here to do something – to heal, to inspire, to move, to console. I didn’t understand that when I first started writing songs and first went out into the world as a singer-songwriter. Back then I did it because I needed it, I wanted it, and I didn’t necessarily know why. But along the way, I stepped away from music for 10 years and went on a spirit journey that was more focused on yoga and creative writing, and when I came back to music I had a new understanding about the role of music and how they are vessels to communicate messages of healing, inspiration, and empowerment.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Perfection is unachievable – it’s a concept that is part of the definition of “God” or computer-made work. If you think about perfection, flawlessness, it is something with no blips in the fabric, no tears, no scars. That’s not human, and it’s unachievable for a human. Yet, for a long time I felt like a failure if I wasn’t achieving perfection. In a way, since perfect eliminates flaws, it’s the opposite of wholeness. Wholeness embraces the entirety of what we humans are – flaws and all. So when I let go of “perfection” and embraced “wholeness,” I realized that that is where all the interesting stuff is. Then, I could ask myself, “Okay, what’s the story in that? Where does that come from?” For folks early in their journey I would say this: embrace wholeness, embrace the human journey, the process, the story along the way.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?
I’m a voracious reader. I love literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, memoir. I love all kinds of things. But in terms of fiction – that’s a true storytelling tool that is as old as humankind. Storytelling is a way that we humans have passed wisdom down from one person to another through generations through eons. So – in college I discovered contemporary British writer Jeanette Winterson. Her writing is very playful. She plays with language in a lyrical and poetic way. Reading her novels opened me up to a new kind of playfulness and curiosity about the sound of words, and the use of phrasing, fragments, sentences. For her language and lyricism, Jeanette Winterson definitely played an important role in my development. For her ideas, Barbara Kingsolver is doing in books what I’m sort of trying to do in songs and stagecraft. All of her books have a mission. She has a reason for writing them. She creates characters and situations in service of that mission, and on a much smaller (3 to 4 minute level), I’m trying to do something similar in songs.

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Image Credits
all photos by Anabel DFlux

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