Gregg Oliver shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Hi Gregg, thank you for taking the time to reflect back on your journey with us. I think our readers are in for a real treat. There is so much we can all learn from each other and so thank you again for opening up with us. Let’s get into it: What’s more important to you—intelligence, energy, or integrity?
This is kind of a softball question. Integrity is. In my mind when you feel you understand your purpose, and your principles and actions are integrated in your pursuit of achieving that purpose. I think that’s where the idea of personal integrity comes from.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m a fully do-it-yourself musical artist. There’s nothing special about that… It’s become pretty common, I suppose. I write all my material, selecting instruments and arranging, perform all the parts, do all the production – engineering, mixing, and mastering of the finished songs. And that’s just the music part. There’s also the business part, I’m the sole interface with publishers and distributors. If there’s social media posting to be done, videos or photographs that need to be created, I do it. If a t-shirt needs to be made, I’ll design it. And I do it that way because it all shapes the message and what’s important to me is the message. The message is packed into the music because I live the message and I make the music. The message has to get to the people that are ready to hear it. The songs come out of the blue, into me, I have to get them out of me and into people’s hands. That’s the whole job.
Amazing, so let’s take a moment to go back in time. What did you believe about yourself as a child that you no longer believe?
That there is something outside of myself that I have to live up to. I have a thing that I need to do, the thing that I have to tell people about. They don’t have to listen but I have to tell them. So I do what I do. And that’s all I have to do.
Is there something you miss that no one else knows about?
I once thought life was a certain way… and I thought that because I was told that, not because I ever saw any evidence of it really. The goodness in people, the fairness of society… it was the blue pill. I was taught to interpret other people’s behaviors in ways that supported that blue pill story. At one point in my young life, things changed literally overnight for us and life got much harder. There was a long period in which I no longer believed the blue pill story. And because I no longer believed it, I had no destination – and no compass. I was left searching for something true, but didn’t know how to navigate because I had no destination in mind. I was just trying not to drown. Then I decided on a destination, and started pursuing it. There were many times I was angry that the blue pill story wasn’t true, that I was taught to assess things using incorrect perspectives. I missed the comfort of the blue pill, but I could never say that out loud so no one knew. The blue pill is an effective narcotic. It’s a good story, reassuring and confidently told. But it is hollow as a gourd. It is a sedative.
So a lot of these questions go deep, but if you are open to it, we’ve got a few more questions that we’d love to get your take on. What do you believe is true but cannot prove?
I believe that the energy that fills us – fills all things. I believe there is a time in everything’s existence when the energy leaves it. I know what that time looks like for a person, or a dog, or a tree… I don’t know what it looks like for a rock, but I believe it is detectable event. That moment comes for all things. The energy leaves and goes into a pool and mixes with all the energy that is there. I picture it to be like an ocean. And I believe at the moment something comes into existence, it is because some of that energy goes into them and is temporarily theirs as their personal “life force”. So you may get a little energy that George Washington had, a little from Louis Armstrong, a little from a kangaroo, a little from a redwood, a little from a rock that expired on a distant planet… and when I pass, my energy will go into a pool and get divided up and redistributed … it’s all borrowed and it’s all temporary. Life is only as cheap or as precious as you think it is. That’s something I believe most surely and could never prove. We are all connected, we all know things we couldn’t know, we all feel at home places we’ve never been.
Okay, so let’s keep going with one more question that means a lot to us: Are you doing what you were born to do—or what you were told to do?
I am doing what I decided to do. I decided that making songs – about ideas that have helped a lot of people including myself, making them as close to “by myself” as I can get, distributing them in the most accessible way possible – is exactly what I am fit to do. I liken it to making “ships in a bottle”, tedious work, all handmade, something that either touches you immediately or holds no interest for you. I make them, put them where people can see them, and go to work on the next one. Sometimes I get email or social media in which someone tells me they got something out of one, or asks me what something means. They ask me if my message was this or that. I don’t answer that. The meaning of the message is determined in the decoding process, not the encoding process. I experience like and encode what I get out of it into my being and my songs. People hear my music, and they decode what it means to them. How would I know if they’re right?
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @gizmosophy
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61572111667022
- Other: Spotify = https://open.spotify.com/artist/4ALq1CdDNQEMfUQlwS3b60
Image Credits
Denise Rolen
Gail Benedict
Gregg Oliver
Dan Scott
