Meet Rees Shad | Practicing Creative, Entrepreneur, Educator, & Life -Long Learner

We had the good fortune of connecting with Rees Shad and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Rees, putting aside the decision to work for yourself, what other decisions were critical to your success?
Diversification.

I chose a liberal arts education with an emphasis on communication rather than a business or music centric education in order to expose myself to a wider range of information and experiences that then contributed to a world knowledge which has been hugely beneficial to my professional career. Having the ability to communicate with other people about their interests and expertise with an informed foundation of understanding – an empathetic base line if you will – has been important to establishing relationships of every kind.

Knowing a little about a lot of things also taught me the humbling fact that I don’t know enough. I seek to know more from people who have greater knowledge, and that means I listen. I believe everybody comes to the table with some sort of expertise and its important to listen for that expertise. Furthermore, people need to be heard, and they like to have the opportunity to speak with people that actually listen to them. So they tend to spend more time with me because I listen.

All of this has lead to relationship building, and working under the old adage that its just as much who you know as what you know, I believe these relationships – genuine and authentic rather than simply transactional – are a huge ingredient in what successes (and happiness) I have found in life.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
My creative work, like my work in higher education, music marketing, and even media production is firmly founded on engagement through story telling. What one of my early writing teachers used to preach was that writing should show more than tell… It is a bit of a cliché now, but this isn’t simply rooted in descriptive work. It is foundational to rhetorical positioning, audience engagement, and simple usability…a pretty straightforward rule of design as well. Every successful design tells a story of its purpose. It shows you what it is there for.
A song shouldn’t necessarily tell you its purpose, but a well-crafted song should tell a story that brings the listener to an epiphany or at least an emotional reaction that was intended by the songwriter. I see myself as a designer of musical interactions, certainly while composing, but especially in the recording process. I work to inspire empathy for a character and their situation. I endeavor to make connection between the listener and the persona I am taking on as the song’s performer. I don’t use simple language unless portraying a simple situation, and I let the story dictate the genre. So I’m not easy to peg down as a folky, or a jazz cat, or a blues player. I sing about the American experience in urban as well as deeply rural contexts. I reject the notion of genre pigeonholes – especially in an age where music marketing hardly ever makes money. Genres were created by marketing people trying to define markets and demographics in order sell a product. Now that nobody really pays for music, I think we can let those borderlines get obscured, and I hold a big old eraser a the ready with every album I release.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
When I play tour guide to visitors from afar, the first thing I do is bundle them into a car and let them see the landscapes. The natural beauty and character of a place holds the secret of its meaning. It is the initial reason people settled here, and if we can’t initially see it through the subsequent settlement and development of human beings here, we need to look a bit harder… or I’m living in the wrong place. We have a lot of small agriculture where I live, and it provides fresh locally grown food to many local restaurants and certainly to my family’s kitchen. So the first night would be a dinner in my kitchen… and conversation.
With a feel for the guest’s preferences, a walk into town to see what the town has to offer in terms of galleries, shops, too many coffee shops, and too little affordable housing before we’ll get back to my home for house concert performed by a touring colleague and attended by members of our community. Here the guest will get to understand the heartbeat of our town – it’s people. Following days might involve touring the studio of Chester French, or Church’s Olana… the gardens of Edith Wharton, or birthplace of W.E.B Debois. And dinners out at the many amazing restaurants before an evening concert at Tanglewood or dance recital at Jacob’s Pillow.
But every morning would have us sitting on the front porch listening to bird song and thankful for the company.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Having a partner in life who has been both wildly supportive while also being a trusted source of honest critique has been incredibly grounding for me. My wife and I have been together since High School, and have vastly different characteristics, interests and expertise. We have consistently worked to adapt to each other as we have grown and matured into ourselves, seeking out bonds of commonality without hindering one another’s growth no matter how disparate that might feel.

My work in the entertainment field as well as in academia has exposed me to communities of professionals who often over compensate for their imposter syndrome with over blown egos. Swimming in those waters without the life line of my grounded home life would have been terribly self destructive. I am blessed to have this partnership.

Website: http://www.reesshadmusic.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rsandtheconversations/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ReesShadMusic

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWLaoslXKQxEiDDUv0t0Zhw

Other: https://www.bandsintown.com/a/2292803?came_from=247&trigger=track

Image Credits
all photographs by Tim Gaudreau