I wrote this “artistic statement” for a competition I’m entering, and thought I’d share it here. Please feel free to comment.

When I set out somewhat naively to make a documentary about troubadours, I simply thought it was a story that needed to be told. Almost eight years later, that remains my primary artistic goal in Troubadour Blues. As Peter Case observes, your subject matter is built into your life and your job as an artist is to dig down inside yourself and find it. I believe that this is a story worth telling, one with broad audience appeal, and that I am the one to tell it.

Music has been a central part of my life since childhood. Although I grew up in a classically oriented household, the music that spoke to my heart as a child was more rough-hewn: Marty Robbins’s gunfighter ballads, Johnny Cash’s Indian laments, Hank Williams’s lonesome blues. Later, I was blown away by the sheer energy of the Beatles, learned about the blues from the Rolling Stones and Yardbirds, immersed myself in traditional and contemporary folk during my college years. I got to see a generation of singer-songwriters at the beginning of their careers: John Prine, Jackson Browne, Tom Waits, Bonnie Raitt, Jesse Colin Young, Peter Wolf.

I met Peter Case in 1998, bought all his records and started going to his shows whenever he came east. Although I had been a fan of the Plimsouls since the early 1980s, I realized as I got to know Peter that his music had a special resonance for me, in part because of our common experiences growing up in Rust Belt communities, in part because of our shared love of the folk blues. It seemed a logical next step to begin documenting his performances.

Through Peter I met Chris Smither. Through Chris I met Mark Erelli, whose song ‘Troubadour Blues’ gave me a title. Artists introduced me to other artists, and I followed the trail as my work schedule permitted. I worked without a crew, the way that most of the artists in the film conduct their tours. My background in ethnography teaches me to be unobtrusive, to interfere as little as possible in the setting that I’m studying. This dictated shooting by available light, capturing performances from an ordinary seat, conducting interviews in comfortable settings.

The nature of the subject dictated the narrative style of the film. These are gifted storytellers, and the best thing a filmmaker can do is to stay out of their way. Along with formal interviews, I tried to capture the myriad interactions between performers and fans, set against a background of song. I want the audience to engage with these artists as I did, seeing them on a stage and then gradually getting to know them. This dictated that there be no scripted voiceovers, no omniscient narrator telling the film audience what to think. Likewise, I used no archival footage; everything you see is original.

The digital revolution has liberated filmmaking by eliminating the need for big budgets, expensive equipment and large, intrusive crews. As Francis Ford Coppola observed, technology has taken the professionalism out of movie making, freeing filmmakers to tell smaller and more personal stories. Troubadour Blues is one of those stories.