Singer Amelia Hogan on Music and Connection

In this conversation, author T. Thorn Coyle speaks with Amelia Hogan, a San Francisco-based singer and artist, about her creative journey, the philosophy behind her music, and the importance of community and connection in artistic expression. They explore the interplay between music and visual art, the significance of tradition and land, and the role of curiosity in the creative process. Amelia shares her insights on creating safe spaces for expression and the deeper 'why' behind her artistic endeavors, emphasizing the importance of emotional connection and authenticity in both performance and community building.

You can find out more about Amelia at https://ameliahogan.com
Support this podcast at https://www.patreon.com/c/ThornCoyle

Transcript

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Hello there, T-Thorn Coyle here. I hope you're doing well in these tumultuous times, as well as can be expected. This podcast is late because I have been in a bit of a business bottleneck. I've had a bunch of projects all come due at the same time, some of which was on me, some of which was on printers and other things out of my control. But as it is, I'm fulfilling one Kickstarter, planning another Kickstarter, finishing two non-fiction books, rebranding three series, and preparing for three in-person events this fall. So it's been a lot, a bit too much. I've also started writing a new Pride Street Corgi book, which is really fun. So I've been busy, and the podcast is the thing that fell by the wayside. My apologies. But thank you so much for my Patreon supporters who make this podcast possible. And if you want to join their ranks, go to patreon.com backslash thorn coyle So that's about it for my update. If you want to buy books directly from me, go to thorn coyle books.com. I have a lot of ebook bundles on sale right now, and some folks are taking advantage of that. And I wanted to let you know about it so you could take advantage of it too. All right, let's dive into the show in which I'm talking with musician Amelia Hogan. Hello everybody, welcome back to Magic, Creativity and Life. And today I'm talking with Amelia Hogan, who is a San Francisco based singer of traditional and contemporary Celtic folk music with three folk chart topping solo projects and numerous collaborative works based around songs from the Irish, Scottish, British and American song traditions. Her performances are both in the Irish music tradition of Seán Nos or Old Style, a highly lyrical acapella tradition and also with accompaniment. Amelia is the podcast host of Mixed Media Talks and recently joined the Folk Works writing staff. She is also a painter and mixed media artist. Amelia, thanks so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me on. It's very nice to be here with you, Thorn. Yeah. So I know you have, you're one of those people who's been a creative person for a long time, just like most creative people. Of course, I believe all humans are creative, but some of us are more active in what people consider the creative arts. And so I like to always ask people what your creative roots are as a child. Were you painting? Were you writing? Were you singing? Were you dancing? what was happening there in your early days? Well, so I would, I think I have to sort of describe a little bit of my first impulse toward being creative. And I'm, I was told when I was several decades younger, that the first memory that I had was when I was less than a year old, of looking up at my father's mother's refrigerator magnets, they were these brilliantly painted, colored, vibrant red and yellow ladybugs. And that was, and I just wanted to like eat the color. And I think my my first creative impulse was to just dive in to that sense. And I think I was singing before I could walk. So I don't I don't know that I could separate my sense of self from being a creative entity. That's interesting. You were singing before you could walk. Is that it? Do you have a memory of that or is that something people told you? Kind of both. um I would say that I have always been drawn to melody. I've always been drawn to a limbic system connection with my emotions and sounds. um I think those things are also interrelated and hard to separate. Yeah, yeah. So as a child, what forms did your singing evolve into? Like were you mostly singing songs you heard? Did you make up your own music? Were you doing theater? How did that work in your childhood? And you know, teenage years. Well, part of it as a very small child was that I was raised in and a part of the San Francisco Folk Music Club and my mother would take us to house parties, my brothers and I, and she would go and as a writer, she would be sharing her composed or written songs in one room and in the other room, the Babbies would be left with the old folk. And I was hearing traditional singers dive deep into their love of ballads and traditional songs. And so for me, it was about learning songs from people rather than mostly recordings, although I did love recordings. And I was kind of a freak in my teenage years because there's this weird archaic kind of music that like, that's not cool. But I, that's just what I knew and loved and was familiar with, because that's what I'd been exposed to. And it turns out a lot of the people I found out later are highly respected scholars in these various traditions, but these are more family than family in some cases. That's amazing. So your mother was a or is a musician and composer. Yeah, she lives in Nashville, Tennessee and moved out there in the 90s and makes her living writing songs and had worked at UC Santa Cruz as a physics professor in physics. She was in theoretical physics specifically on solar magnetism, but her her love was writing songs. And so she'd be in one place doing music industry things and we as children would be left to our own devices. And for me, that was traditional singers. Wow. So that's amazing. mean, so few people these days have that kind of an upbringing and have this family tradition and folk tradition that I think, you know, at least in my mythic imagination used to be more common in certain cultures than it is now. And, you know, we've, we've have distance, more distance from, you know, the kitchen table music, right? of people just sitting around in the kitchen and singing and playing together. But you ended up kind of being raised with that, which is amazing. You know, I think myself very fortunate actually to have been able to be exposed to this thing. No! Oh heavens, okay. Am I back yet? I don't know. You're back, you're back. So you were you were about to say, I think I just. I've been very fortunate to be exposed to a thing that is not very common in the entire continent, really. It's just not a part of American culture. But I was around music scholars and academics who were raised in the traditions and all over the world. And so I got I got to experience something that even the cultures that they draw from or drew from had have long since shied away from, except in odd pockets of song tradition. So it's just, it's very much a person to person chain. That's beautiful. It's so human. And as I said, it's such a, it's a thing that most of us have lost. So I love hearing that. I love hearing that you've had that experience. So I'm wondering with those experiences, how did that or does that affect your creative practice? I think it affects me in the fact that I think of the music as alive and me as a conduit for the music rather than the other way around. um My job as a singer is to be in service to the song and people's connection to the song. And it's not really about me. it actually performing, this is so funny. You know, I'm a performing artist and a recording artist, but in every choice I make, Musically, I am sort of philosophically approaching it from the perspective of being in service to the connecting people to the song and to loving it the way that I do or helping sort of introduce them to this living entity or thing. Right. What helps you open to that to become that channel? I think part of it is learning it and finding what's true about the song for me. I have a harder time leading people to that narrative approach if I don't feel it or believe it or find something that's true for me in it. I think there's an approach to it, which is partly that I have a sort of mental bent toward the narrative. And I've developed my performing chops over the decades, but the performance is, the purpose of it philosophically is to be in service to people connecting to the music deeply. So it doesn't necessarily have to be the technical side and all of that, but I don't want my technique or practice to get in the way of that song. Right. It strikes me, and I've seen this with other musicians, and also with painters and writers as well, that there are people who their technique is astonishing, but I don't feel the connection and I don't sense the connection, right? And there are other people that might have a technique that doesn't feel as sophisticated or advanced, but the connection is so clear. that I'm right there with them with whatever they're creating. And then of course, there are the rarer people I think that bridge all of that, right? Their chops are high, they've practiced for decades, their technique is amazing, and they've got that sense of connection. And it strikes me that in a way, artists have a choice, right? And it doesn't have to be an either or choice. It can be a both and choice, but I feel like we have to choose, am I going to perfect my craft to the best of my ability, or am I going to try to connect with and resonate and find the resonance in the art and the craft and with the people who are engaging with that art and craft? Or am I going to push further and attempt to blend both those things. What do you think about that? I think that part of my art school education was adding tools to my toolbox and understanding that my job as an artist is to learn and know my craft thoroughly enough that I can be the most effective with the emotional connection and resonance to keep coming back to that as the source or most important, most high priority thing that I can be doing with that technical skill. So you're starting with the emotional connection and adding technique and craft on top of that, not the other way around. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So do you have physical or spiritual practices that help you with this process? I do. kind of have to get into an open, playful headspace. um And because of, I think, you know, there's a trauma bit in there around my family, but my mother's technical skill is to such a high degree and lacks the emotional that it took me a very long time to be able to open up and get back into play space. Right. around my creative process. it's easier to work through panic attacks around some of my writing and some of my composing and some of my own work in that regard. But it's definitely an intellectual process of letting go of judgment about what it needs to be and being in the moment with. the process itself. so part of that is a meditative approach where I go inward to a place where I can just connect with my body and environment and gods and spirits. And what is and come back to kind of almost a thesis statement about what is it for? What am I doing? What's what's the root emotional quotient or spiritual quotient that is important? And so everything can then flow back into that framework. Mm-hmm. Do you have a steady daily practice or a weekly practice or is it something you do before you sing? How does that work for you or is it all of the above? I would say it's more a daily practice. And when I think about things in terms of a daily practice, if I put a label on it, it becomes harder for me to do. But if I let myself do the thing that feels good and that I love, when I give myself the space and set up uh the time in my daily calendar to have space, it comes very easily. Mm Yeah, that makes sense. It's breathing room. You know, we all need breathing room. And I think art and creativity and spirit needs breathing room. I mean, we need a certain amount of structure as well. Right. I mean, the song itself needs a skeleton to hang on. Right. So, again, I'm back to that sense of balancing and give and take between structure and just opening or structure and connecting. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I'm wondering, I know there are people who struggle with, here's the creative impulse and here is studying craft. And sometimes for some people it's pretty, it's easier that studying craft just helps expand their creative impulse. But for some people there's a freezing up or a seizing up. when they start to study craft really intensively, they become brittle and lose that connection they started with or lose the creative impulse. Anxiety enters, perfectionism enters. And then the art itself and the craft, feel, shrinks instead of expands. Do you have any processes or advice? Anything that's helped you or help or you've seen help other people that you've worked with around that. curiosity. I think it sounds really trite, but in all honesty, the process of coming back to yeah, but why? What does this do? And yeah, but why? um I of open up different aspects and elements of the puzzle, little by little and untangle it a little bit with, what's this? helps, I think, root me back into letting go of it needing to be or do anything. Like, if I am in service to this thing rather than I need to do it this way, then I let go of the expectation of how it's supposed to look as I do it, and I'm with the process of finding out. Right. It becomes a co-creation. Curiosity is something I invoke all the time. And I really invoke it whenever I do start to tense up, whether that's around creativity or business or anything else, really. It's like, oh, can I be curious with this? Can I invoke curiosity? And that lends a lightness and an ease to the process that I find really helpful. yeah and then it helps me let go of needing to feel like i need to do something correctly. Right. I think if we can come back to sort of pulling our tendrils back in toward that as a way to be in the world, it helps even tackle or address really dark and hard and complicated tasks as well. Sometimes the work is not pretty. Sometimes The work is ugly. Sometimes the technical side is to find the roughness or the uncomfortable. Explore what helps convey that or address or find its way into the feelings around that. So when we're again, when we come back to that curiosity point, go there, go there, honestly, go there, sincerely go there. not because you think you should, but it's a part of being alive and corporeal. Yeah, yeah, I agree. So you're also a painter and a mixed media artist. And I'm wondering a few things about that. Like, do they feel like primary forms of expression for you? Do they feel ancillary to the music? Do they support the music? Does the music support them? You know, what's that relationship like for you as someone who does, you you're a professional musician, right? I think of you as a professional musician. I don't necessarily think of you as a professional painter. So I'm wondering how and I could be wrong. I'm wondering how that plays out in your life and how that works for you. Well, I laugh because I think the advent of AI practices where people can get images cheaper, faster, and so forth has actually hurt some of my visual art business. Oh. So you have been a professional visual artist. Yeah. But I find that my most committed clients and people who have purchased original works have come back to the thing about my work overall in any media, which is that it feels like you're there, like there is an emotional honesty and vulnerability in it of having experienced something for real and find what's true for me about an idea of a place or find what's true for something in an image or a thing, like something I have a connection to or feel a love about. Even if it's darkly tinged or or gothically sort of touched or something. But I'm less interested in something that has a flat affect or only one vantage point or perspective to approach it from. So I want it to feel immersive. And I think I have a very painterly approach when it comes to composing songs and the music as I share the music as well. Because I am a visual thinker, so they kind of touch each other pretty intensely. I am very clear about having a very visual frame through which to see all of my auditory sounds. Like, it's not synesthesia, actually. I do have a couple friends that have that particular... wondering if you had synesthesia when you talked about tasting the colors on the ladybug magnets. Yeah, it's not actually. But I think uh a useful way of describing the intensity with which I experience my visual imagination or what comes to my mind's eye. It does feel very all sensorial. it's all of them. Like I can put myself there. I can force myself into that world very easily. Um, especially if I've seen tasted smell, heard it felt right. Um, you know, the, the feeling of the wind, you know, what, what your skin tingles like in this environment or that. and so when I sing sea songs, I put myself on a boat. what's the sky doing? What's the water doing? What's the, the wind doing? What's it smell like? Like, I think. the visual art as a painter lends depth maybe to some of my audio landscapes as well. makes sense to me. What sorts of things do you tend to paint? What are some of your favorite things? I love landscapes. love looking at places and feeling their lifiness. I like the way light moves. I like the way the atmosphere recedes when I'm looking across distances. I like the way the sky opens up or closes in. I like the way the light shifts in different times of day for different clouds and different stratospheres or different I guess, what are they, longitudes, right? As I go up to Alaska, the light looks drastically different from where I am on coastal California. Yeah. Well, that coastal California light is something else. I'll never forget moving from Los Angeles to San Francisco and the light in San Francisco was so different than it was in Southern California. And then as I moved further north to Oregon, I also moved a little bit inland. I mean, I'm two hours from the coast and the light is very different here. The sun is different, you know. And that all affects my creativity because it affects who I am and how I respond to the world. I am in my environment. I'm not separate from it. And I am drinking the water here and I'm eating the food here. And I'm engaging with the light here. And the length of day or the shortness of the day is quite different from the place where I was a child. And so all that shifts. my creative expression. And all of that also shifts my spiritual practice in very subtle ways, right? Because I'm responding to the world, my spirit's responding to the world around me and taking that in. So I love that you're talking about, you know, that both in your landscapes and in the music, your relationship with environment, with the world around you. with all the senses, right? And to me, creative people who can tap that communicate something quite differently to me than folks who feel more distant from their environment to me. Hmm. I think there's, there's a mistake in assuming that we are not that the land belongs to us rather than us be landing to the land. Like, I think one of the sort of philosophical underpinnings of the music traditions that I was so steeped in as a child was understanding my place in the world as rooted and having the by the landscape I was made from. when I listen to the old songs, the hundreds of years old songs of my forebears and all these people that have these long chains of the music tradition, there's a love of particular landscapes and trees and rocks and stream formations and the tides and the way that they move in different seasons and And I feel like a lot of Americans sort of are unmoored from that connection and that love of a place that they continue to have a relationship with, or they don't continue with a particular relationship. But I think if I, as an artist, can help people find their feet under them and a love of the land that they do occupy in a given moment, then we can begin to have relationships that we understand better and treat better. Well, yeah, I mean, it changes culture, it changes society, it changes manufacturing, you know, it changes what our priorities are, what we're spending time and money on and attention on, right? The more connected we are to the reality that we are part of nature, the more that shifts our consciousness in every realm. And I think that is one thing that some artists have to offer, right? And so someone like you who carries these older traditions forward, that feels like a gift. You're saying, hey, look, people used to know this stuff and you can know it too. People used to feel these things and you can feel this too. I think the biggest compliment I ever get is when after a show or something where I've shared these songs I love. Yeah, I mean, it's nice to hear like you have a pretty voice, but the thing that makes me feel like I've done my job with my craft better and like I've done it successfully is when people sort of tell me their stories of how they found themselves or something about themselves. in the music. They're like, you cracked me right open and I here's my here's my child and here's my grandchildren and here's my long departed spouse and I remember my childhood when and like, they feel and find themselves because they've touched the songs and allowed the songs to touch them and begin to have a relationship with the songs. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I think my job is to make that immediately accessible. Yeah. you're talking as, you know, an artist, a singer, a painter who connects with the land, who connects with tradition, who is a conduit to be of service, right, to the song, to the work, to the people. And to me, that all sounds like a very spiritual activity, right? It's, yes, it's rooted in the body. It's rooted in the voice in raw materials, all of that. But the way you talk about it reminds me of the way people talk about ritual. You know, the way people talk about spiritual practice, going to church, standing in the sacred grove with their friends, right? There's something that's very primally spiritual about the way you talk about it that I find interesting. Hmm. I mean, I think if I intellectualize it too hard, I can remove myself from the immediacy of my, it's almost a feral approach, right? And I think part of it is that because these song traditions are an expression of an Indigenous practice, and several indigenous practices. And in many cases, they're the threads of indigenous practice the world over. They're the way that people connect with their communities and environments. And it is a kind of church. When I do a performance in a hall, people have been in church with me. I've been connecting them to their spirits and to their souls. by showing them how they can connect with themselves in it, right? It's an invitation, I would say, to connect rather than any kind of didactic sermon. It's not telling them how they should feel about whatever their relationship is with the songs. I'm just sort of inviting them to see how I have done it. Yeah, yeah. That's great. Connection is my primary focus in all of my forms of artistic and self-expression too, right? It's always for me about how am I connecting? And as you said, I'm not necessarily even conscious of that in the moment. I'm just being a conduit and letting things move through me. But my overarching wish is to have that connection. Hmm. with other human beings through my work. Yeah. You know, the other thing I wonder, and this may be too personal a question or not the right question, but I'm curious about growing up among scholars of this music when you have what you just described as a feral relationship with it. Was there tension there? Was that something you had to just end up claiming for yourself? What was that like? There is a tense spot actually between folk music academics and the people who have just heard Mima and Pa-Pa and everybody from their ancestors all the way back many, many, many, many, many generations and what real music is. One of the biggest conflicts I ever heard in doing my undergrad in visual arts was occasionally I'd take singing courses and I do chamber chorus and all, you know, I have enough technical background to understand how to communicate with other musicians. And they were always so confused by what I was doing until they got to be really, really, really experienced with a broader spectrum of music. And so there is this tension between kind of mad sciency feral approach to a deep immersion into the study of folk song from a lived experience perspective and the mad sciency, ha ha ha ha, I've taken 15 PhDs in ethnomusicology and well, what does this do, right? There is a kind of tension, but in the end, it all kind of melds back together, depending on how much depth and study and exploration people bring to their study of these traditions. Well, I think there also has to be a how much they're willing to bring to it, right? Because sometimes the purely intellectual and purely academic can be a distancing technique, right? From the emotional, from the physical, you know, and I certainly had that myself, right? For years, I used, I mean, my intellect, I think of myself, I used to be intellect first, you know. And it was a defense mechanism over time. And I had to really get into my body in order to crack open my emotions and deepen my connection. I think I've been lucky in... I was a little spoiled. And I've worked with other guitarists and they end up being sort of, now I understand where your standards come from, because my standards are from people who have been through extensive lifelong immersion in both. Who? the very first person that I ever performed with was a guy named Ray Frank. And he was the A-line guitar accompanist for all these major name performers and artists in the 60s, 70s, 80s on forward. and studied under Andressi Govia from a technical, uh classical background. So he's got all these technical experience, but then lifelong summers, hiking and backpacking in the Hills of Maine, picking blueberries in the summer and learning things in New Brunswick and fishing. like, you kind of have to have both in equal measure or in as intense a measure as possible in order to get the depth of both. And that's the first person that walked me into the world of performing. So I'm kind of spoiled about being able to think more freely. It's like jumping into calculus before learning all the aspects of algebra. em And they're, they're very different things, but they're very, you know, useful for each other. uh But because I sort of leapfrogged some of the things as I grow older, I get to fill in some of the gaps, the technical gaps in the meanwhile as well. But because I have that philosophical underpinning, which is a little freer, I get to remain more open to what the emotions are doing at every point along the way. That makes sense to me. And you are fortunate. That's fantastic. I love that for you. And I love that for everyone now who gets touched by your music or your art, right? That you bring that to us. That's beautiful. Oh, it feels it feels fun to be able to help other musicians along the way free up their Yeah, but what can you do with those chord voicings? It's a different texture rather than remaining stuck in a mindset which says only one's one, three, five chords are legitimate or something like Right. Yeah, but if you add a flatted 7th, that does something really interesting over here. Oh, but if you if you just bring in a slightly different chord voicing or a different route to that chord, what's that going to do? And it doesn't make it bad or wrong. And I think if I had any advice for someone exploring how to compose or find new ways is to just come back to being curious about understanding what is it and why do I like that or not like it. Yeah, yeah. So this brings me to, there's a part of your longer bio that I didn't read on air. You talk about your love of community building and music education. And you said something interesting. You said you're committed to sharing how music can inspire spirituality and how spirituality moves people to make music. So I'm wondering if you can share anything with us about what you're doing with community building and music education and that. that mix of music and spirituality you were talking about. I think I'm introducing people to a broader paint palette of what's possible. recently, and coming up in a couple of weeks, I've got some teaching opportunities, sometimes with children, and they start getting stuck or being told that's bad, that has value judgment, that has legitimacy or not legitimacy. And I find that a lot of my private students later in life are older singers who've been shut down um over decades by someone telling them they're bad or they're wrong. And every professional musician I know has heard someone say, I wish it were better or you could improve. And of course we can all improve. Like, that's a no go. Like, of course. But community building is also about freeing people to give themselves permission to say yes in their exploration, in their creativity, in their finding their own light switch. That's a phrase I really like because I don't want to flip the switch on for you everywhere you go. I want you to be able to find it and you're out how to turn your own self on. that's so much more important and I think valuable. And then when a community feels safe to be able to express and explore and play, I think the collaborations just get richer and more exquisite. uh And so some of that is in letting ourselves be our full selves, like finding the voice that is yours and then playing with it like it's the instrument that you have attached to you at all moments of time, right? You have that as an expression of your love and devotion to gods and spirits and places and communities of your own. Like a flame or something like if you have, if someone else shows you how to light your own fire, You can bring that to wherever you are. And there's no higher power that's going to give you permission to be your own body, in your own body and use your own instrument that you have attached. Yeah. Do you find it's mostly just a matter of creating a space where people can give themselves permission? Like how does that work in your experience? I think a lot of it is just emotional safety and emotional safety looks really different to different audiences. But if I walk into a room and I show people that there are challenges for everybody and questions and flaws and ways of exploring and finding out, that opens the way for other people to let down their own fears and expectations of themselves and their immediate community as well. So first you have to bring yourself though, right? Because if people don't see you being truthful in front of them, right? Or authentic, which became an overused word for a while, so I tend to not use it, but I think it's accurate here, right? If you show up in the room and you're authentic and you're as whole as you can be in the moment, people feel that and respond to it. And then I think that helps open the door to permission. I think if we enter a room and we enter a room with some sort of false perfection, then people sense it's not safe, right? Our animal body knows there's something off here, right? You're not being truthful with me in the moment. So therefore I don't feel safe enough. So, you know, I think for that to happen, that takes work you have to do before entering the room. You, Amelia, or me, Thorn, we have to have been honest with ourselves to as much as we can be, right? We all have our protections, et cetera, from old trauma or whatever that we may not have worked through. I feel like The more we can do that work in advance, then when we go to connect with community, together we can build a safer space. Whereas if we haven't done that work in advance, it's harder. And I will say that as someone who does performance as well as instruction, those are two different spaces you're setting up safety for. For a performer, sometimes I have to bring Mommy Fortuna's fake horn on the real unicorn for people to be able to see that it's a real unicorn they're feeling and experiencing. And so yeah, there are the trappings of performance craft. like hand gestures in bigger motions than that kind of thing. And the clothes and the makeup and the lighting, right? Like there's all the trappings that help you see what's actually there and be present for it and have that, get that toe in the door of being able to connect to it. But there's also like the workshop space is a slightly different way of opening, of making it seem available or reachable. So what feels different about the workshop space then? I think a workshop space has a different kind of formality or less of a polish or a trying to make it look just so ahead of time for someone to be legitimately believed. think it's, yeah. And I think if I'm really honest, those are my favorite performances, right? It's so hard to put the trappings on in order for people to. see or feel or experience it as real. Yeah, I mean, it strikes me as the difference between when I'm in my home in the morning, I will, you know, pick up a crystal, I will light my candles, I will do my breathing, I will say my prayers, I will do all that kind of ritual stuff, right? It's the, you know, the cup means something to my subconscious, the candle means something to my subconscious, those trappings help me connect. But if I'm out, walking and communing with flowers and trees, it's a similar energy, but I don't need any trappings because I'm just present with the world. Right, and both are valuable. They just connect in different ways. Sometimes they help focus our ability to see what's important there. Like that's the point of tools. Yeah, I agree. I agree. do I actually need a tool for doing certain kinds of ritual acts? Probably not. That was not how I was trained. Do I like the tools for bigger groups? Yeah, because they can see and focus on that thing a little more clearly, right? um Otherwise, find that people's intellect sort of play tug of war at the subconscious about like why they're experiencing what they do when they end up sort of spinning inside over the fact that they can't see it, but they can feel something and what is even like the fussy about it. They get sort of caught up in their own stories rather than being present with where their attention can be directed. That is interesting. And I think another facet, like especially when we're talking about things like performance, is the trappings alert a part of me and it says, have permission to suspend disbelief and just be present and feel right now. You don't have to say that's not a real unicorn. But we've told you, Suspend disbelief here because we're gonna take you on a ride and we're gonna let you experience this magic here. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good way of thinking about describing it. I, you know, for my own rituals and smaller ritual, I think, and with a familiar group of people with whom you have an ongoing deep connection and relationship with making magic, it's much easier to be able to go, we know. what it feels like. And so your brain is already sort of twig to what it feels like when this thing is happening, even if I'm not seeing the tools and particular scents and particular candles and things. But the less familiar a person is with the space or with the environment or with the working, the more those focus points really help anchor people into a shared practice. It's also a shared language, right? Like the trappings tell me this is an opera. And I know an opera is going to be very different than showing up to, you know, a traditional Scottish band, right? The trappings are gonna be different. And they're both telling my subconscious what to expect and also giving me a pathway through which to connect. Mm-hmm. the performers are bringing. Yeah. And sometimes that's the fact that a venue has a great sound or lighting person. Sometimes it's the fact that they have an environment which has two, five, 400 seats in it arranged just so that everybody can see and hear everything about to happen. Sometimes it's about the fact that you have all of the equipment that people expect. Whether or not it's actually useful from a technical perspective is an entirely other thing, long as people can focus on the fact that you have them. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. That is cool. Thank So you've already talked about this a little bit in our conversation, but I wanted to ask you currently in your life and in your artistic and creative practices, what is your why? What's your current why? I mean, I think we've both sort of touched on this a little bit, but it's connection. Connection to ourselves, it's connection to our communities, it's connection to each other. It's a link and a way for people to find their wholeness. I think that's part of what music does for people. I have a friend that used to say that, you have the corporate attorneys and the politicians to do the hard sort of dehumanizing things. And then you have the artists to bring us back and to remind us of our humanity and our shared aliveness. I think that's true. I think that's my why is I'm here to feel and maybe that helps open the door for someone else to feel and heal and find their way through. Thank you. And what's one thing you currently find inspiring? Hmm I think people are like a pillowcase of raccoons as another friend says. We're not going to stay put. We're alive and alive is changing and growing and not doing what we're told just because someone wishes we were controllable. Like we're alive. And the opposite of alive is never changing, never growing, never doing anything different. But, but We're a pillowcase of raccoons. Like, we're not a handful of kittens to be drowned. We're like, we're gonna go out clawing and biting and fighting and making a ruckus and, you know, it's gonna be glorious and weird and shocking and amazing. I love that. Thank you. That's beautiful. So thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate this conversation. Thank you, Thorin. Thank you for inviting me to be a part of it. Yeah, so for all my listeners, once again, I was talking with Amelia Hogan and you can find her at AmeliaHogan.com and as always you can find me at ThorneCoil.com. Thanks for joining us. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Amelia Hogan. I really did. I found it quite interesting that she was basically raised in a family of traditional musicians. And here in the US, at least, I think that's rare these days. I think there are other parts of the world where that sort of traditional craft is still getting passed on through families. But I just enjoyed hearing how she relates to music and to magic. and walks through the world as a musician, as a singer, as a composer. So I hope you were inspired by that. And I hope you're inspired to do something creative yourself, which for me is the point of these conversations. The world needs more creativity, especially during times that feel really, really hard. So thanks again for joining me. And as always, you can support this podcast at patreon.com backslash thorn coyle have a magical creative day