[Editor’s Note: Since 2011, Colorado-born singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and musician Stelth Ulvang aka the “Barefoot Wanderer” has been touring with the popular folk group The Lumineers in addition to making his own music. Now based in California, his project Stelth Ulvang and the Tigernips released their self-titled album on September 18th. Today, we’re excited to share an exclusive essay from Ulvang about useful mechanisms he uses to cope both in everyday life and when times are tougher. Both of which may help others find calmer moments.]
First off—I’m a tapper. Call it anxiety, call it ADHD or OCD, call it sedatephobia (fear of silence), but I am constantly tapping a leg, clicking on the steering wheel, or drumming with a pencil. I tap rhythms while I run, making polyrhythms and hemiolas with the beat of my feet hitting the ground. I LOVE to play drums on dishware. I strive to find the singing of water in bowls while washing dishes—but with all the noises whistling, humming, and singing to myself. I like to sit and pick a banjo around a campfire, and if I’m not, I hope somebody else is. I sing melodies late at night quietly into my phone when I wake up from dreams with song ideas. I don’t love the ukulele, but it is small enough to ensure that I can bring an instrument with me wherever I go. On one tour, I chose to bring a guitar instead of a suitcase. Our tour manager gave us “one bag only” space limitations, so I chose a hotel guitar over spare clothes, wearing the same wool suit day in and day out for five weeks, washing underwear and shirts every night in the sink, and letting them dry as I slept, but loving falling asleep with the guitar in the bed next to me. A couple of times, I woke alarmed as it fell to the floor with a startling “strubonk.”
I have been told time and time again that I need to give it a rest, or, less kindly, “for the love of God, shut the hell up.” With a history of OCD in my family, nothing can ruin a day more than coming up with a song idea that can’t be played out. Like on an airplane, where you must remember every bit of it, a cappella humming quietly to yourself over the roar of jet engines. Or at a dinner party, attempting to be present and an engaged listener, instead of creating a drum set with the host’s porcelain and crystal, using chopsticks. Ahh, how crystal can sing. So, I have a few tips for you. You, who can’t stop humming and strumming and clicking and tapping, here is what I have learned to find peace with this noise, so perhaps others can as well. And that peace is key to making productive noise, so your return to music a few hours later will allow your creativity to snap back like a holy slingshot from the gods above.
- Please, start with a breath. Breathe. But perhaps just one big breath. If you start to breathe in and out, you have created rhythm, and we can’t have that now, can we?
- After this breath is a perfect moment for you to focus on your other senses. Look around, feel the warmth of the sun on you. Smell is interesting, as it’s the closest related to nostalgia, and you are at risk of smelling a passerby’s body odor and recalling a crowded festival, or the scent of woods reminding you of your first guitar, or the scent of perfume reminding you of the titular Britney Spears song. You know what—maybe let’s avoid smelling as well as breathing. Luckily, holding your breath long enough creates some drugless euphoria. We’re off to a good start!
- Consider now, your non-musical hobbies you love, and leave time to focus on those hobbies! Stamp collecting, cross-stitch, or model trains. Rod Stewart and Neil Young both are model train enthusiasts, and you’ll find they NEVER use a running, or train beat in any of their songs. How they separate their worlds I don’t know, but both swear the separation does them good, and they seem to have lived longer than most of their peers.
- Speaking of peers—hang out with non-musicians. This one is tough, because only musicians can tolerate you, but this is also a good chance to talk to people about themselves, and not just your own spirals of sound. Sometimes people will avoid conversation about themselves, and you will be in luck because they are DYING to know what your favorite city to tour is. But just say New York as a segue to reverse the conversation back to them and inquire about the stock exchange. Or taxes! If you are reading this, you will never know enough about taxes. There is almost nothing at all musical about taxes. But if I have anything to suggest in that realm, it would be this: your condition of making everything musical is a great opportunity to write off anything and everything.
- Lastly, and this is the trickiest part: Accept your value as a noisemaker. Remember that you are the gardener in a world of earworms. Each ditty you conceive and rhythm you create is the start of something big. Well, it could be. Most likely no, but each little seed of an idea can be nurtured and harvested into a world of potential. You may be able to get under someone’s skin tapping your pen at the DMV, but joke’s on them, because in one year’s time, the chorus in your radio hit “Making Love at the DMV” is going to be coursing through this person’s veins, and FM will roil with your noises. The non-tappers will find themselves moving uncontrollably, clicking their toe against the grocery store tile, and humming in the shower. The contagious and addictive nature of melody is taking over, and this may give you a chance to take a break and enjoy some peace and quiet.
Stelth Ulvang
Stelth Ulvang is an American musician, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, best known as a touring member of the folk-rock band The Lumineers. He is also the co-founder of the Front Range-based band The Dovekins and Stelth Ulvang and The Tigernips.
