So my plan for Worldly Savages when I came to London was to make it into an actually functioning business, A gypsy punk upstart. It was rough at first. All I had was a portuguese guy and a dream, sitting in the room I wasn't earning enough money to pay for trying to figure out how the hell we were going to find a violin and accordion. Somehow during November, we decided to start booking a European tour as a major order of business, before we even knew who was going to come on it.

So we started, firing in the dark, but sooner rather than later, it all came together. By the end of November a new lineup was born and by the middle of January we were out and gigging. A legendary European tour in April and lots of notable moments in the UK since then and I'm happy to say that everything I dreamed of when I left Toronto has now come true.

Now we're ready to take it to the next level. We're going to live in Serbia to record there and kick the booking and music making machine into high-gear. We've set a goal of 150 shows in 2013, which we will start booking next week. It's all so fucking crazy.

You have no idea how much hard work and hard lessons it's been up until this point, but it's all so funny now. We've just got to keep on going.

Life is indescribable. It’s the sum total of everything you could possibly feel on your journey. There’s absolutely no way to get away from that intensity. Some choose suicide. Some choose the security of mediocrity.

I’d like to think that I’m rather adventurous. Not only to I take a less trodden path in my journey, but I try to create an artistic that reflects the journey itself and makes something beautiful and lasting out of the moments along the way, which would otherwise just escape in time. It’s a tricky business! What’s even more tricky is to make my art in such a way that resonates with an audience. For years I only made music for myself and was incredibly hesitant to share it with other people cause it was so personal. Then I decided that I really did want to make music that touched other people’s lives.

I feel like as a person I’m quite tapped into the sorrow of life, but not in a way that cripples me. I don’t avoid it. I embrace it, like a Slavic tradition of enjoying being miserable that seemed to be enjoyed by both my grandfathers.

The default emotional state for me is depressive introspection. With my feet firmly planted in that ground I can explore all the other emotional territories which I enjoy, lose myself in ecstatic bliss, apply myself in hard work, indulge in curiosity and fascination of how things in life work.

But the default is depressive introspection. As in, what is this life and why is it such a miserable place to be, and what the hell can we make of all that?

How to prepare yourself for such things? How to prepare your children for it?

I was talking yesterday with this polish girl I live with about this… She was having trouble with her parents and their insistence to say those typical parent things to insist she work towards getting a good job and to ‘be successful’.

It then occurred to me that it’s wise to tell your children such things: Join the mainstream. Get that job. Take the secure mediocrity.

Chances are your child is one of the ones that would best benefit from that sort of talking to. Most people lack the courage and are far to complacent to actually figure out what their dreams are and to focus their whole lives attaining them.

So very easily, your art school daughter, in her lack of focused direction, could end up having no greater skill to bring the world than waitressing, or worse, that she would become a junkie.

So it’s better to tell your kids to go to business school, be ambitious in following a sure fire career path, etc.

If your child is one of the few people on this planet who are decisive enough to think differently from that and willing to make their artistic fantasies actually serviceable in reality, if they have something inside of them so strong that it cannot be silenced, then they will ignore the talks you give them and they will follow their dreams regardless.

Parents just want the best for their children, just want them to be happy. Very few people in this world know what truly makes them happy.

For all those kids in their 20’s trying to find themselves and their path in life, I would urge you that the way to make your parents happy is to find happiness yourself first of all, and success in the world as a closely related second accessory to this.

To find that voice inside of you which tells you what your calling is and to make it louder until it screams and you want to do absolutely everything you need to in order to make your dreams a reality.

Otherwise, life is a pretty bleak place and the best you can do is try to shield yourself from it.

-Erik

Life is a battle. I truly believe this. You need to fight every day to ensure that you get what you want from it. It’s also a business. You need to make deals. You need to focus on growth (on all levels). You need to innovate, be passionate about what you’re doing and instil a military like discipline in yourself and those around you. Ambition is glorious.

There are lots of paths in this life that will let you just sail along giving an absolute minimum of a shit and still do quite okay for yourself. Get a job, follow the rules, get the paycheck, blah blah blah. If there’s one thing you might discover I despise it’s this sort of complacency.

The arts is an area where I see very little room for that sort of stuff, at least if you want to be successful as an artist, you need to be motivated, extremely so.

Only a fraction of so-called ‘artists’ will ever be able to manage that. The brilliant and fortunate ones might find someone else to manage them and instil discipline from the outside.

I’ve gotten really lucky this time in this band, the new line-up is blessed with people who really understand how things work. That’s why I came to London, to find those people. A place where you have to struggle just to keep your head above water, the people I met here are a stark contrast to the people I was working with before in Toronto in terms of seriousness and the ability to understand my vision and what’s necessary to pull it off. I’m so grateful for that.

And so now we embark on our journey in a business of pretenders, flakes, all types of delusional dreamers all lost in a maze of smoke and mirrors.

To guide me through this I have the wisdom of my father, music industry veteran.

If you’d like to hear some of that wisdom, click here, it's an interview with him and his friend and long time co-promoter, Gary Cormier:
http://www.jazz.fm/index.php/education-mainmenu-111/music-seminar/5013-gary-muth-and-gary-cormier-from-the-music-seminar-2011

-Erik

So I've been thinking about the new biography for WS that I need to write...... It's kind of fucked up to have to write about it. Over the past few years I've witnessed how much information gets absorbed by people and well it's hard to decide how to represent my band at this point in light of how media and promoters tend to interpret information. Let's analyse some of the often generalized things:

-The band started in Serbia. That doesn't mean the band is from Serbia. It's not from Canada. It's not from UK. It's from all of these places. Sort of like me, mixed... But most people's attention span can't begin to comprehend that a Slavic-German-Celtic-Anglophone from Canada would go and start a band in Serbia and join with people from many different countries and travel around Europe playing music. It's not digestible enough as information and the answers create more questions than they answer. So it's easy for a venue just to put up posters saying we're from Serbia, or Canada, or who gives a fuck.

-The band makes party music, IT'S TRUE. but that doesn't mean there's no message. Yes part of the message is to drink and dance and throw yourself into cathartic abandon, please, if the music makes you do one thing, please let it do that. Party party party. Scream. Jump. Let our concerts inspire you to have magic mushroom driven orgies until sunrise while clutching a bottle of absinthe in one hand and your childhood teddy bear in the other thrusting into the absurdity of the universe. But please also think about what keeps you from feeling able to have those moments in your life and all those mundane emotional states and social obligations that keep you from feeling the authentic and strange feelings that you hide away in your soul. Think about all the things that stop you from being an honest and emotionally authentic human being, I beg you. The message is to party and the message is to think, to feel, to release the beast, but not mindlessly. If you think it’s just frivolous and superficial, you got the wrong idea. It’s the opposite.

-There is a message to the music, but that doesn’t I’m a serious person, or I’m against anything or think you should change your life. I'm not an activist as you might imagine them...I enjoy and accept all this thing this recklessly out of control civilization has given us: the social inhibitions, the class systems, the millions of shitty plastic products, the bad dirty food, the pollution, the decay, the turmoil, the existential confusion, the monotony, the schedules, the formality, the jealousy, the greed, the propaganda, the education, indoctrination… AND ALL THE MORE SINCERE STUFF. My message isn’t typical activist shit about being against this or against that. I am pro-everything! It’s more than anything a spiritual viewpoint. I eat meat, I take pride in the affluence in my language and world-view, I like to make money, buy stuff, I’m shamelessly hetero-sexual and masculine, I have bank accounts, credit cards, I think the system is on the whole pretty good…….. What am I singing about then? I am just on the whole bothered by society and the way it railroads people towards mediocrity, ignorance and complacency in a civilization where our leaders are, to put it lightly, not very good examples of human potential.

-The band makes ‘gypsy’ or ‘balkan’ influenced music, buit it’s not just that. Whatever you want to call it. I’m no gypsy and I’m not from the Balkans. I’ve exposed myself to both of these influences extensively and think I have done so on a very deep level where most who have tried have done it only superficially and I’m happy with the result. However, I think that growing up in Moore Park in Toronto, or being half from a Slovak German family, having a dad in the music business, etc. is just as influential and integral to my music than whatever I picked up from the Balkans or the gypsies……

-Yes, I’m fucking crazy, but I’m also other stuff. The band works on discipline, I drive this as a leader. I’m a very sensitive person, I feel this all the time. I consider myself a well-rounded person who is interested in a wide range of aspects of life. I can control my emotions. And yes, I have a frightening side of myself that even I don’t understand which has madness which wants nothing more than to be sprayed out onto the audience and that's part of the thing. I’m a complex and varied human being who has a strange mix of characteristics, I’m not just the crazyman singer on stage. I’m also a computer technician with a very refined customer service touch. I’m a good son/grandson who loves his grandmother and parents. I’m an entrepreneur, businessman. I’m a pervert. I’m a philosopher.... I’m whatever. I’m sure you’re very varied as well. Don't be so fucking surprised when you see me pounding shot after shot of hard liquor while reading tarot cards, watching videos of cute little kittens and talking about the necessity of discipline and "standards of excellence".... It's all me!

So at this point I’m going to admit that I’m a little lost at how to describe all this in bite sized stuff to be sent out to media and promoters and fans. If you read this whole post, you’re one of the very few who cares about any of these things in depth, and thank you for that, but as a slogan I’m just going to stick to the thing I wrote in New York City in March 2009.

“Contagious Folk-Punk Energy with Ethno Music Spiciness. Wild, engaging music to fight boring post-modernity.”

-ERIKO

Testing the WS BLOG.

-Erik