Interviewed live during TAXI’s Road Rally, 2021
By Michael Laskow
There’s not a songwriter, artist, composer or TAXI member who hasn’t had to deal with the anger, frustration, and even depression that comes with their music being “rejected.” Many musicians don’t feel like their music is the only thing being rejected. They often feel like they’ve been personally rejected because their music is so much a part of them. We get it, and we want to help you find a productive way to use those feelings in a positive way, rather than letting it eat you up. Arnold Bloch is not only a licensed therapist, he’s also an accomplished musician, songwriter and a has been a TAXI member, so he knows all about rejection, firsthand! We’re excited to have him share some healthy, productive ways to use “rejection” rather than suffering from it!
Welcome, Arnold!
Arnold has been a family friend for 15 or 20 years, he’s been a therapist for longer than that, he’s also an accomplished musician, and he’s been a TAXI member, so he knows EXACTLY what we’re talking about when it comes to musicians dealing with rejection.
Frankly, I’m not well-informed enough to spend the next 55 minutes asking super-intelligent questions on this subject. So, I’d like to do a little setup now, and then have Arnold share his insights on how to not only take the sting out of rejection, but to use it in some healthy, productive ways instead.
So… here’s the scenario: A TAXI member sees a Listing for a $40,000 placement in a TV commercial. It’s asking for Indie Pop, and the member thinks, “I’m indie. I can make Pop songs. I’m going to submit for this!”
It’s a short deadline, just five days from now. The member calls in sick and stays home from work one day to work on it. It takes a while to get in the zone, but he eventually gets there. For the next four days, it’s “Don’t bother daddy, kids! I’m going to nail this TV commercial, and when I get that $40,000 check, we’re going to Disney World for a week, and we’re getting a suite at the Disney Hotel!!”
Dad works his butt off, barely taking time for meals. He only sleeps four hours a night while he’s working on his grand opus. He hires a female vocalist for $100, because this needs to be PERFECT! The night of the deadline, he starts mixing at 9:30 p.m. The deadline is midnight. At 11:55 p.m, he uploads it and clicks the ‘Submit’ button. Whew, he made it just under the wire! He can’t sleep that night because he’s so excited. The exhaustion is worth it, because he’s so proud of what he created. He finally falls asleep and dreams of his family at Disney World.
Seven days later, Dad sees an email from TAXI and with his heart beating out of his chest, he opens it. “RETURNED???? Are you effing kidding me?!”
The screener’s comment was, “Great song! Really catchy, and very well produced, but it doesn’t fit the Indie Pop genre. It’s not close enough to the references, and unfortunately, I couldn’t send it to the ad agency.”
The member’s wife is there when he reads it. Her heart breaks for him, and she can’t think of how they’ll tell the kids about the Disney trip being canceled. His loyal wife says, “Those idiots at TAXI wouldn’t know a great song if it jumped up and bit them on the ass. You spent so much time on that! You spent $100 on that singer! The mix was perfect, and you even mastered it! TAXI should have forwarded it anyway! Just because the screener doesn’t think it’s perfect doesn’t mean the music supervisor at the ad agency won’t love it. They should have forwarded it and let the ad agency decide!”
The TAXI member is heartbroken. He feels cheated, let down, embarrassed, sad, angry, and most of all REJECTED. It’s personal; it isn’t the music that was rejected, HE created it, so HE is the one who is REJECTED!
Virtually every one of you reading this has had an experience like this, to one degree or another. And I want you to know that each of us on staff at TAXI, and especially the screeners are keenly aware of how much it hurts when your music is rejected. And that’s why I invited Arnold to give us some tools to cope, and maybe even find ways to use those feelings of rejection in a positive and productive way. Arnold, the floor is yours!
Thank you, Michael. Thanks for this opportunity to share in this great TAXI community experience. I’ve always enjoyed the TAXI Rallies I’ve attended, and it’s great to be on this end of things.
As a therapist now for—I can’t believe it—37 years, you deal a lot, of course, with people who face rejection of different kinds and certainly adversity of many kinds. One of the things about life is that all I have to say is the world doesn’t always cooperate with us. And what we do with that is really the difference between living one kind of life, which would be a life of resentment and anger, versus a different kind of life, which might be, hopefully, a life where you are seeing yourself not as a victim of the bad things that happen in life, but as a continual learner, a habitual learner.
This is something I want to come back to. But who better to start with, then, is Leonard Cohen, himself. Those of you who are songwriters, you must be familiar with Leonard Cohen, and if you’re not, he has familiarized us all. He is one of the great lyricists of our time, for sure. So he said this line, which probably for many of you is already a cliché, but it’s very useful. He said, “There’s a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” Let me say that again. “There’s a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” Now, what I love about that is if you take that lyric seriously, you understand that many things in life… I mean, Leonard actually sees everything in life as within those disappointments, those cracks, those failures, maybe feelings of rejection, but then he wonderfully says that’s how the light gets in. What is that light? What’s he talking about? And I think with a little thought we can surmise that he’s talking about the lIght of maybe new growth, the light of perhaps deeper acceptance of life, the light of taming one’s ego, because we all have egos, and that’s one of the reasons we get hurt, because we have egos. So that’s one thing to keep in mind.
And I’ll say in this session I’m hoping to leave you with a few gems that you can hold onto. Having done quite a bit of public speaking, I’ve learned that we don’t remember that much of what we are actually told, probably 10% at best. So, I’m going to leave you, if possible, with a few little bits that you can really hold onto. And here’s one from Leonard Cohen himself, right? “There’s a crack in everything…” So when you get that letter that says, “We’ve passed,” maybe something in his voice will come into your head saying, “There’s a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” And maybe you’ll say, “Okay, where is the light?” In other words, what can I learn from this, rather than spending my time like in that scenario Michael described, being angry, and hating the TAXI screeners?
But you know it wasn’t only Leonard that addressed this issue; it was also Bob Dylan. And Bob Dylan in the fantastic song “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” he says, as Bob would do, he cuts right through and said, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” Now that’s one heck of a line. Let me say it again. “He not busy being born is busy dying.” Wow—so what is Bob telling us? One of the ultimate lyricists of all of our time is saying that if you are not willing to take what comes and reinvent yourself over and over again, which is being born, he says, well, then you’re dying.
“Whenever you receive what feels like a rejection, you have a choice. You can take it as a gift, or you can take it as that you’re being pointed to a possibility of new birth, new ideas.”
So, I have put it to you that you have a choice. Whenever you receive what feels like a rejection—and we’ll talk about what that is later—you have a choice. And always remember that. You can take it as a gift, or you can take it as that you’re being pointed to a possibility of new birth, new ideas. In fact, it came to me as I was preparing for this that when TAXI says, “We are passing on you”—I don’t know if you use that language—but…
We call it a forward at TAXI, when you get sent to the person who requested it. We call it a return when you don’t, and it comes back to you. But, yeah, it’s commonly referred to as somebody “passing” on you.
So, I’d like to suggest that you are not being passed, you are being pointed. You are being pointed somewhere else, and are you willing to do that? Are you willing to go in that new direction? What is there to be learned from this experience? Something about what you submitted, despite everything you have put into it, just didn’t pop, or it wasn’t quite right for that particular placement.
And then, of course, Paul Simon, one of the great lyricists of our time. I love this line so much. Whenever I try to write a lyric, I always remind myself of this line. We all know it, “Hello darkness, my old friend,” from “The Sound of Silence.” What a great line, “Hello darkness my old friend.” Now, because Paul Simon is a great lyricist, he writes lyrics which you can interpret in different ways. They have different meanings for different people, which is something for us all to recon with, right? Lyrics that are too obvious are really not that interesting. So, what does it mean to me, “Hello darkness my old friend”? It’s a reminder to me that even when things seem dark and depressing, that can be a friend to you. It’s kind of a paradox.
How can darkness be your friend? Again, I would say there’s something to be learned from that. If you’re depressed—you feel bummed because something was returned—how can you befriend that? How can you make that into something good for yourself?
I had a therapist years ago… Oh, yes, of course I’ve seen a therapist. I live in California, and who hasn’t? And I was lucky to have a good therapist, and like most people, I used to say things like, “He made me feel so bad,” or “It made me feel so bad,” or in the case of my wife, “She hurt my feelings.” And this guy, Larry, whom I grew to love and respect, he always said and pounded into my head, “No, it didn’t make you feel—you make yourself feel.” Quite frankly, when I heard that, I didn’t like that at all. What do you mean I make myself feel? That person did it to me. That TAXI did it to me; TAXI hurt me.
This a very high challenge, I’ll admit, fellow TAXI members. But if you can adopt this idea that nothing actually makes you feel a particular way, if you make yourself feel that way by the meaning that you attribute to whatever happens... We know this, because if you’re driving down the road and some clearly drunk or psychotic person yells, “You asshole,” that is going to have one particular meaning to you, because you want to say, “Poor guy. I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” but you’re probably not going to take it personally. But if somebody who knows you well—maybe your partner or maybe even one of your kids—says, “You’re a real asshole,” you’re gonna give it a different meaning, and it might hurt.
So what can we learn from that? We can learn that a lot of how we end up feeling in life in general has to do with the meaning that we attribute to everything that happens. This is a very empowering way to live.
“How does one stay inspired even when your precious work from your heart and soul has been told that it wasn’t quite what we want?”
So how that applies, of course, to TAXI is when you get their response after all that hard work, I’m going to ask you to remember that you can attribute the meaning to that experience that you choose to attribute. And I’m going to take that to a little bit of a deeper place a little further on.
Look, it’s not easy. How does one stay inspired even when your precious work from your heart and soul has been told that it wasn’t quite what we want? I’m very interested in how we frame things as people. Again, for me it’s all about meaning.
One of the most inspiring things that I got from The Artist’s Way, that great book by Julia Cameron. She has a wonderful way of helping people through all that. And one of the things that she said that really stuck with me, is that whatever you are creating, whatever song idea it is, remember that you are actually the only person in the whole world that can come up with that particular idea, because there is no one in the world that has had your exact life experience, your exact musical exposure, your study of the craft, or maybe lack thereof, which we can also talk about, right? How much craft does one need?
But think about how inspiring that is. That whether TAXI is able to place what you did or not, what you’re bringing into the world at that moment, that song, that particular message that grew, that melody, whatever it is, you are actually the only person in the world who can bring that particular thing into the world, and therefore it has some value. It has some value; maybe it makes one person happy—maybe your mother digs it, you know?
I’m just saying that of course your goal is to ultimately get great stuff to the TAXI screeners to where you want it to go and keep that up for sure. But you will find that you are not quite as devastated. If you understand that what you are doing is not just about TAXI, it’s about being a creative person, it’s about making something beautiful. And that you can do and continue to do, no matter what.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his great book, The Tipping Point… says it takes about 10,000 hours to really, really master something. So, if you look at that perspective—perspective is a very important thing in life—then if you are passed over you have got all those hours to keep working at it, to keep working with the craft, figuring out what works, and what doesn’t. And also, what do you do best? Some people do certain things wrong, other people do other things wrong. The name of the game I think for all of you is to continue to dig in as deeply as you can, learn what you need to learn and go for those 10,000 hours.
So, you know, we learn a lot from life if we’re paying attention. And a few years ago, even though I’m not obese and I’m not a heavy smoker or a heavy drinker, I had a stroke, which was a really shocking experience for me. I woke up one morning, couldn’t play guitar—my left hand was just frozen. Luckily, my brain was still thinking well—thank goodness, because I’m a therapist and I need to be able to comprehend and communicate—and I couldn’t walk properly. So, in this very room where I am talking to you from now, I had the blessing of having one of the guys I play with. He’s a guitar player, and we just went week by week, me playing like an absolute beginner. I just couldn’t play chords; I couldn’t do anything. It was a very devastating experience—talk about adversity—but slowly I began to be able to grip the guitar again. You know when you start learning guitar, you play the strings and they buzz because you don’t have the strength to press it down? But this friend of mine—and talk about a good friend—he kept saying, “Don’t worry. Let’s just keep working these ideas.” And I had been told by the stroke rehab specialist that the fact that I played guitar was gonna help me in my rehab. So I was determined.
But the reason I’m telling you this is not because I want you to feel sorry for me or anything, but because I learned something really amazing. I learned that when we have a stroke, we actually lose… a part of the brain gets starved of oxygen, and that part of the brain we actually never get back. In my case, there was some kind of a blockage, and I had a stroke. But what starts happening is the brain begins to develop new pathways around that injury, and it came to me that that’s a fantastic metaphor for what we are talking about when it comes to facing adversity, or what we sometimes feel is rejection. Our job is to not focus on the part that was injured, because you could spend your whole life being pissed off, like in the scenario Michael laid out.
Or… and I know I’m saying things in many different ways, but it’s the basic message I want to really get through today, and that is you have the opportunity to build new pathways around that injury, that loss. And if you do that, there will be a return to functioning—which is what I found with my stroke. It taught me a really important lesson: that we always have a way around the loss. And incidentally, I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t feel the loss. For those of you who get a rejection, and you feel down about it, I’m not saying you should pretend that you like it. It doesn’t feel good, and that’s why Michael and the TAXI staff decided to do this workshop, because we know it’s not easy. It’s hard.
I would say to you as somebody who has experienced rejection, both in the music world as well as a person, feel it, feel the loss! But there’s a difference between being sad and disappointed versus becoming stuck in it. Instead, ask yourself the critical question, “What do I need to learn?” What do I need to learn to be able to learn to build new pathways and keep moving forward?
Visit Arnold’s website, here!
https://www.arnoldbloch.com/
Don’t miss Part 2 in next month’s issue!