Do Artists Have Any Real Idea of Their Real Impact on Real, Ordinary People? No — but the Impact Is Real

He doesn’t know it – and he never will – but Bruce Springsteen made me cry this morning.

Over two fried eggs and a couple of pieces of peanut butter toast, all resting on a chipped plate on my knee, I wept as Bruce Springsteen sang.

Actually, it was Prince who brought me to tears. I’d call Bruce Springsteen his accomplice, but co-conspirator is a better term. They were equal partners in crime on this one.

And it all happened on the most normal Monday morning you can imagine.

My son Isaac had already finished his breakfast and had gone downstairs to get ready for school. I was alone, with my protein-heavy fixings and my iPhone, scrolling through the normally mindless meanderings of Facebook, when I came upon a video clip of Bruce Springsteen opening his Saturday-night show bathed in purple light and performing Prince’s signature song, “Purple Rain.” In the exact same key Prince had performed it when he was alive. And doing his New Jersey damnedest to make it sound just like Prince himself had come back from wherever, for six minutes and 10 seconds, to belt it out one last time.

As the song ended, with the big-finish-setup pause before the resolving guitar chords, the shivers that went up my spine were exactly the same as the ones that went up my spine in 1984, when I first heard the piece. But this time my eyes welled up too, as I thought of Prince not as some lost legend but as just a guy – no different than me or anyone else – who couldn’t possibly have had any idea what sort of impact his music had on any particular person on any particular day in any particular, everyday situation.

I’m at the coffee shop now. I settled on this place when I left the house a few minutes ago. I had actually considered going to a different coffee shop but I ended up here, largely because it’s right by the post office and I had to mail a couple of packages. It was that routine, that random, of a decision.

I semi-consciously picked a place to sit here. I say semi-consciously because a) I’m semi-conscious until the coffee kicks in, and b) I do like intentionally sitting by the lovely fireplace at this shop, especially when it’s 43 degrees outside and it’s late April and we deserve better for already having survived another Minnesota winter.

As I got settled in to begin writing this piece, the two guys at the table next to me started talking about … Prince. Here, verbatim (I’m a notorious eavesdropper at coffee shops, but I didn’t even have to try on this one), is a snippet of their conversation:

First guy: “His music cut across generations and genres. David Bowie, Glenn Frey, they were huge. But they weren’t Prince. <long pause> Not even Mick Jagger, when he dies, will be remembered like Prince.”

Second guy: “Do you think he was our generation’s Elvis?”

First guy, after several moments of thought: “Yes, I do. But [Prince] never got fat and gave it up. He just performed the other night, for crying out loud.”

It was the kind of thing you might find in a Rolling Stone writeup of Prince’s passing. And I’m sure that even Prince knew, from afar, that people talked about him this way in life, and that they would do so in his death as well. Surely he understood that he was an icon, larger than life, in the eyes of everyone but, well, himself. And perhaps his family members.

But he couldn’t possibly have known that a song he dreamed up — music and lyrics he created who knows where and who knows when out of his own brain and heart and soul — had the lasting power to make an almost 49-year-old man cry in Moorhead, Minnesota, more than a quarter century after the fact, on a spring weekday morning that is much colder and gloomier than it ought to be.

Artists are all about light. They write or paint or sculpt or sing or build or restore to share a part of themselves with the world, in hopes that it will somehow matter to others as much as it matters to them.

But they are overwhelmingly in the dark when it comes to understanding which individual hearts their art touches, and why, and how, and when, and where.

Does Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, who with a ukulele performs a stunning version of Judy Garland’s song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” have any idea that he, too, made me cry in the last 24 hours? It’s true. As I sat staring out on a beautiful nature scene at my aunt-in-law’s house in rural New York Mills, Minnesota, yesterday, I wept not once but twice as I heard the song not once but twice. Both times it reminded me of my dad, who died last July. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” — Kamakawiwo’ole’s rendition with its gentle beauty — was part of Dad’s funeral.

Does David Draiman of the band Disturbed have any clue in the world that, for the last several weekday afternoons straight, I’ve been trying to sing, with him, his intense, very much not disturbing version of the Simon and Garfunkel hit “The Sound of Silence” as I load up the dishwasher in the kitchen and wait for three of our four kids to arrive home on the school bus?

Does Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees have any idea that, as the dare I once saw in some YouTube comments suggested, you really can’t put on some headphones, blare “Stayin’ Alive” in your ears, and then proceed to walk normally across the room? It’s true: It simply cannot be done. Try to walk with “Stayin’ Alive” flooding your senses and your gait immediately turns into a sashaying sort of strut. Like any good researcher, I have repeated this experiment many times. Walk becomes sashaying strut. Consistently. Predictably. Ask the neighbors.

Does my son Kian’s second-grade teacher, Miss Lackmann, know how far my jaw dropped when I heard her riveting — voice and acoustic guitar — rendition of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe” back in December, after she posted it to YouTube as part of a contest she had entered?

Does my sister-in-law Alli understand how much her paintings speak to me, not in any sort of way that I can articulate as a sophisticated art type of person but, rather, simply for their colors and for the indescribable, sunny vibe I get from them?

Could my dad have had any awareness that a coffee table he made from scrap wood decades ago would end up in my wife Adrianne’s first-grade classroom, giving a bunch of six- and seven-year-olds one of the fanciest workstations in the elementary school universe — and reminding me of him every time I visit to bring my beloved her school supplies (aka coffee)?

Art does the extraordinary to ordinary people in their ordinary, everyday lives. And you don’t have to be a famous artist, or even call yourself an artist, to be a part of it.

You’ll just never know your own true reach.

Same as Bruce Springsteen. Or Prince.

Or anyone else.

Peter Vogt

I’m a writer. An essayist, to be more exact. I tell stories here—true stories, from my own life, in hopes they will make a positive difference in yours.

I share laughs and tears, insights and observations, frustrations and realizations, relying all the while on the storytelling wisdom of Julia Cameron, author of The Right to Write.

It is a great paradox that the more personal, focused, and specific your writing becomes, the more universally it communicates.