The Importance of Artist Support

I live in an artist's community in Los Angeles, and we recently had houseguests. One lady wants to make a career of singing, and plans a move to Austin, TX to pursue that dream. I used to live in Austin, and I think she will do well there. She is interested in bluegrass music and Austin is a great place to develop traditional forms of music like country, bluegrass, folk, etc. I went to the University of Texas and the music scene was always thriving in Austin, and more so now with the SXSW festival every year attracting more attention to the town. (As an aside, I attended some of the very first SXSW - it was held in a hotel downtown, and consisted of only a few panels and no performances that I know of. How things have changed.) I bring this up because we started talking and she told me that she has written a handful of songs. I pulled out my songbook later and looked at it, and I remember the very first song I ever wrote, and how excited I was about it. It's a few years later and I have now filled a notebook with songs, some finished and some in progress. I showed her that songbook to encourage her, and to demonstrate how if you keep after something, you can cultivate it to fruition. More support needs to be given to young artists, and I want to help as much as I can to support all kinds of creativity. I did not get as much support as I needed when I was younger, and I have had to work very hard to make up for that. If I can help someone else blossom into their creativity, too, that makes me very happy. That's one reason I chose the name Fleur D'Amour for my musical activities. More love could help the whole world flower into its full potential.

Another World to Conquer

Welcome to Fleur D'Amour, a blog whose purpose will be to chronicle my activities as a singer and songwriter. Fleur D'Amour is my performing name, and is French for "Flower of Love." This weblog will be a place for me to talk about recording the songs I have written and about the process of developing ideas I have regarding my music and its presentation.

For anyone who is interested, I am also a writer of books and an arts journalist, and I have a separate blog for those areas at http://www.parsifalshorse.blogspot.com. I recently began that blog as an umbrella for all of my creative activities, but it quickly became apparent that it will work much better going forward to break the music and the writing into two separate blogs. There will be some overlap between the two, most especially between the journalism and music, but I work deeply in both fields, and it seems better to provide a forum for each in order to do it justice.

I hope to use this space to detail some of my progress, both creatively as I work on my music and more materially as I make efforts to release and distribute it. I am excited about the wide-open new world afforded by the internet, and I look forward to direct interaction with an audience.

-Susan Brooks