Artist to Artist: Blue Monkey Discusses Creative Freedom

I think artistry, like life, has unique, cyclical timing. We are constantly coming home to ourselves. So, to speak on rebranding as a manifestation of intention rather than instinct feels backwards to me. Dangerous, even. If something of intention can be done, it’s surrender. Surrender to what is. But when we’re told from a young age to do something “meaningful” with our lives, and in a very specific timeframe, going with the flow gets lost in the ideation of sunk cost. Alan Watts calls this a “great panic to […] achieve something,” and in that great panic, there is little space for unparalleled expression. 

Life is about gathering information. When we stick with a career or a relationship not because they’re fulfilling but because the idea of starting over sets us back from this imaginary finish line, we miss out on the opportunity to inform our lives with the information our lives give us. It is certainly true that, if you let it, life almost always finds a way. And so, I let life, and Blue Monkey, find a way. 

Allow for a Slower Pace 

The period of convalescence between releasing my final pop album as Charlee Remitz and my first single as Blue Monkey was the most uncomfortable part of the process for me. I feel I totally misunderstood its purpose, and because of that, I was resistant to it. Knowing what I know now, that that limbo would come to an end, I fear I missed out on the chance to be intentional with rest. To allow for things. For the pace to be slow. For the days to stack up where nothing of consequence was created or destroyed. But I was too panicked. Too pressured to do something swift and seismic. I’d been raised to contribute to society’s machine, and I was relentless in my push towards progress. 

You’re Never Late to a Place You Were Meant to Go 

The music was fully recorded, mixed, and mastered in 2021, and I spent two years with it in my SoundCloud library in complete denial of the fact that I wasn’t ready to share it. There was a lot of ego in the urgency I felt to disseminate the work. I feared I would lose steam, that I would never put music out again. It wasn’t owed to a primordial need to create, rather, it felt important in my pursuit of prominence. How would I become someone if I resolved to never releasing another song? To me, that seemed like an obvious place to start. First, I set out to understand why I made the art in the first place, then I severed myself from the art’s function. It was only then that I could accept the timing of it all. We talk about late bloomers as though they somehow lost their way, but where I eventually landed is: nobody ever arrives too late to a place they’re meant to go. 

So, in 2023, I surrendered. I chose to find purpose in the downtime. Instead of posing a question about where and when, I wondered if perhaps the answer would only find me in the stillness. In the silence. In my peace. There was no Titanic or nuclear event when it finally did, I woke up one day in March of 2024 aware that I had arrived. Looking back on the three years of objective nothingness between 2021 and 2024, I see it for what it was: a gathering of confidence. There was simply no way I could have embodied the moniker Blue Monkey in 2021. I was not ready for the level of self-sacrifice Blue Monkey would demand of me. 

Community Over Individualism 

There’s an extremely polarizing discussion in The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin around creation, and whether a creator would be willing to give up authorship if it was the only way their work, which the world greatly needed, could be published. It’s a troubling thought, but I find more and more that being known is of little significance when the world is drowning. 

Blue Monkey believes in community and Charlee Remitz (the musician) believed in individualism. To become Blue Monkey, I had to become extremely angry at the state of things. I had to reject any presence of the self in the work. If it was only to my benefit, there would be no reason for it. This is all to say, Blue Monkey wouldn’t be if I hadn’t given in to the extreme discomfort of idling. If I hadn’t rejected this idea of scarcity, that there isn’t enough for everyone to go around, that time is running out and resources are running thin. I started to believe in a utopia where everyone starves and eats together. It changed my entire mindset around releasing music. I didn’t need this music to do anything for me, rather, I needed to release the music hoping it could do something for all of us. Whatever that means. 

So, if there is any advice to reap somewhere in this long, drawn-out explanation of how I got from point A to point B, it is to embrace the times when nothing is obvious, and to allow for things to be confusing. Being in flow means that not everything makes sense all the time. Because we grew up with tangible goals like finals and graduation, we’re always looking for some kind of indicator that we’re on the right path. But there is no right path, there is only movement and stillness. 

Visit instagram.com/bluemonkeypresents. 

An Additional Sentiment: Charlee Remitz on Ageless

After I wrote this album and I was trying to design the track list, I broke it up into three categories: friends/growth, self-love, and time. I’ve always been very literal and chronological, and while I admire the artists who lean into the abstract, I prefer to tell my stories exactly as they happened. And what happened is my grandfather died and I grew up. It’s an interesting phenomenon, but the first place we tend to experience growing pains in our lives is in our interpersonal relationships. I lost a handful of friends. I sometimes miss them, but mostly I feel grateful for their absence. They left space, and I moved into it. Without that vacancy, there would be no Blue Monkey. See, we need meaning in our lives, but we often look for it in the wrong places. My life didn’t need more people, things, etc. It needed stillness. Idle hours. Boredom. I don’t think there will ever be a moment when I can plainly say, “I found myself.” I think the self is a concept that evolves over time, and that what we’re really meant to find is fluidity. I’ve struggled my entire life to accept that someday I will die, and in every project I release, I imagine that tug-of-war between wanting control and surrendering to what is, will be the most enduring theme. I wish I could say I wrote Ageless from a mountaintop, but I didn’t. I wrote Ageless as a lament. I don’t want to grow old, but I’m going to. It seems to me that the world’s most major issues could be resolved if only we found a way to live in this truth. We will never be ageless. But, we can be conscious. 

A Musician’s Thoughts on Surrender

These days, it would almost always be that sharing your art was a form of self-flagellation. I talk emphatically about creating for the sake of creating, but I’m human, and it was always right there in front of my face — a kind of truth. The calculated success of art didn’t used to be so accessible and immediate. Now I had special apps to track my streams and followers and engagements, apps that updated in real-time so I could watch as a song I published started its slow crawl to whatever abstract milestone was mentionable enough for a post on social media. The whole affair was underwhelming at best, painful and defeating at worst. When considering the smallness of it stacked against news of plane crashes and executive orders that felt strangely and irritatingly personal, it was killing. And I was meant to keep contributing to this machine? To find myself some stable ground where I could emerge from another boring release day unscathed? Hopeful even. Prepared for whatever would be asked of me when, inevitably, the world rose up and said, “enough.” One resounding moment amidst the chaos signaling the start of something new or the end of it all.

When I thought about it — putting my music out — it really didn’t seem that consequential. Couldn’t I just put it out and allow for it to mean nothing or everything? When I got right down to it, it felt quite immature to make such intense “I” statements about something I couldn’t really control. Things like: “I’m never going to make it.” “I’m just one more singer in a long line of many.” “I don’t know why I think I’m so special.” Of course, I knew the importance of creating to create, rather than creating for praise. But it was hard to stay latched onto the original intent when the song in question wasn’t picked up by a curated Spotify playlist in a matter of hours after its release. To many an artist, that placement made a world of difference, even as we released a collective sigh about the powerlessness of the artist’s relationship with streaming giants that were eager to raise prices incrementally with no meaningful impact on the artist’s salary.

Without that initial pickup, I all but threw my song a funeral. I went into overdrive doing chaos management, like a publicist trying to control the narrative for some A-lister hell-bent on spinning out. I would check and re-check my social media, making sure the lack of traction wasn’t the doing of some 10,000-year flood, whereas the systems were overwhelmed with notifications, the song making a miraculous splash and clogging all roads leading to me. I was in the dark waiting to be saved. And then, when I really thought about that — about my salvation being inexplicably tied to whether or not my work was being heard — I felt alienated by the absurdity. How funny to welcome the dark if it was a side effect of being so loved, so celebrated things had to be recalibrated to handle the magnitude of attention I was getting, but to fear it if it meant nobody was hearing me at all. To then run to Instagram to see it really was true: I had one notification. One. Notification. The song was dead on arrival. At which point I’d devolve into hours of mindless scrolling, eventually finding myself on somebody’s page — anybody’s page slightly more popular than mine — wondering whether they had great marketing, or the algorithm favored their aesthetic, or they were, simply put, chosen.

“Golden Rule” single cover shot by Hollon Beasley at Skyline Lanes in Clarksville, TN.

My newest song is called “Golden Rule,” and it is, at its very core, a song about presence. I wrote about times of inadvertent pause, when I found myself in a strip mall parking lot, watching the sunset, the clouds, which meant rain all day, now adding texture and substance to the sky, so the sun wasn’t just setting in a diaphanous blue, but backlighting a stage of hills and mountains and tributaries. It was a song about great American traditions and community, about singing “Sweet Caroline” at the ballgame and learning to populate our lives with the same intentions we used to decorate our homes. William Morris said, “If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” And I lived in service of this truth.

But then, I shared something of myself with the world, and even though I found nothing useful or beautiful in notifications or stats or streams — or jumping to conclusions, for that matter — I still let them lord over me like I was Elton John’s tiny dancer watching headlights approaching on the highway. It all felt so bleak. Doomed, even. I believed in rest, in the reset that happened when you took time away and allowed for space to bring you the next great idea that might turn you into a giant among men. It was only too bad I had to be pushed to rest, frustrated to a point of Shakespearian downfall, whereupon I left my phone in some undisclosed location and forced myself to be present with all that was in the material world.

And so, when I decided the release wasn’t going my way, I poured myself a glass of wine, and I brought it out to my front stoop where I sat, hot from a bath, trying to cool down, and watched as my neighbor’s motion detecting garage light flickered on. In time, a small gray cat named Fitz trotted up, dragging his face along my jeans and pushing himself into me with so much force, I thought it ridiculous I was mourning a song that had barely been out for twenty-four hours. We created this reality with its likes and filters and award shows, and now we had to find a way to live in it. Sometimes these moments of surrender, while more reactive than intentional, were the only ways we could fight back. And perhaps, that was the great why of it all. We create because we have to, and we disseminate our work because we have to, and we learn to find purpose and merit in it because we have to. There was no other way.

Later, as I sat at my computer and typed in the same password I’d had since I got my very first laptop, a pink MacBook in 2009, I thought of the girl who authored the password, so feverish and ready to be the exact age I am now. Through the ages, we shared this one innocuous keyword and a devout wish for things to be different, which is to say, there was a certain level of denial there. I was always her and she would always become me, and there was something pacifying in that. In timing and predeterminism. Possibly, it was all greater than I would ever be, and trying to exercise some level of control was futile. I refilled my glass, and I considered this essay, and I recalled a moment when my friend and I sat around a bonfire two nights prior. She talked about the January wind, how she opened all the doors of her new home — a home she’d prayed for — so it could rush in. “Now, this is living,” she said, finding ostensible meaning in an otherwise throwaway transaction with the world; a tiny rebellion in its own right.

This is all to say, it is never that easy to surrender to what is. I’ve tried, and I only find that I disappoint myself in that way too. Perhaps, the great mystery is letting life be disappointing when it’s disappointing and letting it be exciting when it’s exciting. In either state, there is flow and stillness, especially when you consider the fact that none of it means anything about the bigger picture, which is, of course, your Life. Who you are. The messages you carry and propagate with what you create. It’s by no means new, but I’ve found that artists need to be reminded of this time and again. That art isn’t dead on arrival. Art is, by its own right, alive, and giving into the doom of scarcity rather than reveling in the sweetness of maintaining a certain belief that art can change the world simply by creating and publishing what we create is one of the ways we contribute to the collective’s despair.

But it doesn’t hurt to laugh at yourself. This is a tough business, and, by nature, we’re dramatic, artistic, and defeatist. As I sulked around my bedroom the night of the release, ready to prematurely mourn “Golden Rule,” my partner said, “Give it a chance.” It still had plenty of time to do something great — forever, if you really think about it.

There’s this feeling that only the new can make a splash, so we drive up our output to stay relevant. But what if we fought back merely by reminding ourselves that old art is constantly being discovered, and that all good things do, in fact, take time? As I sat there in the throes of my newest tragedy, my partner laughed at me, and in time I laughed too. I guess it is kind of funny when I remember there was a time before cavemen discovered fire, when the dark was just an established and abided part of life.