Victor Wooten, THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC: The Lesson Continues

[1:49]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zoe Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time To Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. If And all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast. I could not be more proud to announce today's sponsor and why they're sponsoring the podcast, Citizens of Humanity, which you may know as this amazing denim company, decided to do Stay Safe t shirts. They're available on Monday, May 3, and you can shop them exclusively on the Citizens of Humanity website, citizensofhumanity.com. A 100% of the retail selling price of every t shirt sold supports the Susan Felice Owens program for COVID nineteen vaccine research at Mount Sinai Health System, which I founded. I am over the moon grateful and excited that Citizens of Humanity is donating their proceeds of their Get Vaxxed shirts which are long sleeved unisex t shirts available in white or black and the retail price is $34 Go to Citizens of Humanity. Please go get one of these t shirts. And again every t shirt sold supports vaccine research at Mount Sinai and the program that I founded to honor my late mother-in-law. Thank you Citizens of Humanity for choosing my charity to donate the proceeds to. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And I am just so excited. So go check out Citizens of Humanity, the shirt, buy some jeans, go crazy, and, just thank you. I was so honored to talk to Victor Wooten who wrote The Spirit of Music, The Lesson Continues. Victor Wooten is a five time Grammy Award winner. He's a founding member of the supergroup Bella Fleck and the Flecktones. Victor has become widely known for his Grammy nominated solo recordings and tours. Among other accomplishments, he is a skilled naturalist, teacher, author, and magician and has won every major award given to a bass guitarist, including being voted bass player of the year in Bass Player Magazine's Readers Poll three times, the only person to win it more than once. In 2011, Rolling Stone voted Victor one of the top 10 bassists of all time. In 2015, the Huffington Post listed Victor as one of 50 iconic black trailblazers who represent every state in America. Wooten represented his birth state of Idaho. He lives outside Nashville, Tennessee. And I just love talking to Victor, and I would encourage you to watch our YouTube interview. All of my podcasts have YouTube components. But he has set up his camera in such a cool way, so it looks like you're actually watching a movie of him. So go check that out as well. Welcome, Victor. Thank you so much for coming on moms don't have time to read books. I love that name. Thank you. As well as your name, Zibby. Oh, thank you. It's short for Elizabeth, and I just have had it my whole life. Can't get rid of it. So Much better. Elizabeth is nice, but Zibby is you. I like that. Thank you. Okay. Your second book, The Spirit of Music. Beautiful, amazing memoir, really like a a love letter to music and its role in your life in addition to other background. Tell me about writing this book, what it was like writing this book, why now? Go.

[5:28]Victor Wooten: I like that. Love letter to music. I'm gonna use that if that's okay. Take it. I like that. Well, when I wrote I wrote the the first book, the the music lesson, maybe around 2005 or '6, probably '6. And I and I I published it myself first just for fun. I had no idea of what I was doing. I just put it on my website and and sold it. And then a bigger company picked it up, and the book has done very, very well. But I also knew, even when I was writing that book, The Music Lesson, that that I had more to say. So Penguin put it out, I think, in 2008. And so in 2011, I started writing The Spirit of Music, but it didn't flow. It wasn't flowing the same way the music lesson just poured out. So I didn't force it. I stopped. I was touring a lot. I didn't I was under no obligation to even write another book. So I put it off until 2017, and I started writing again thinking that I was gonna have to start all over. And I read what I had written back in 2011, realized I liked it. So I reworked it and basically finished it. And I was gonna put it out myself, actually, again, except a friend of mine who had retired from Penguin said, look, just call this one guy before you do it yourself. Call this guy. And I I called this guy and fell in love with him. He's a great person and ended up putting it out with with the company again. And but, yeah, basically, I just felt that there was more to say. And there's still more to say. I just have to see whether I'll take the time to write about it.

[7:06]Zibby Owens: So what are some of the things I was really interested in one section where you were feeling a bit bedraggled and not fulfilled by the touring and the crazy schedule and you went back home after like with this ten hour drive and you talked to your dad and said, you know, I'm just not making time for music. And he was like, well, then you're not making time for you or something really like amazing that he said. Tell me a little bit about that and how even if you're touring, you can't necessarily get your your own sort of musical needs met in a way. Tell me about that. Sure. Well, and this is what is could possibly

[7:44]Victor Wooten: turn into a third book. Oh, okay. Well, the first book drops the idea that music is sick, and I couldn't leave it there. So this book goes into, you know, the possibilities of why she is sick, what we can do about it. But for me, what's just as important and this is what my parents were concerned with from my birth, And I'm the youngest of five boys that play music. I don't really talk about that in in this story, but I'm the youngest of five, and I really learned from them. But my parents my mom especially had a saying that I quote a lot that says, what does the world need with just another good musician? She says, we have plenty. And she said, what the world needs are good people. And more than ever, I've noticed during this pandemic that a lot of musicians, not just musicians, but people in general, we've kind of gotten lost. We've lost ourselves because we define ourselves. We've learned to define ourselves by what we do. And now that I've had to put the bass guitar down, something's left. And and who is that? What is that? So who is that person behind what we do? And the the pandemic is forcing us to take a look at that. And many of us have realized, wow. I haven't looked at that enough. And maybe I love who that person is or maybe I don't. But that person needs to be nourished so that I can bring a better me to what I do. Right? Because music is not about music. Music is about life. And if we lose sight of what life is about, then our music suffers. And then I would say music herself suffers. Wow. It's almost like

[9:31]Zibby Owens: music is a like a parable of sorts for the whole world. Like, you could say the same thing for the environment or mother nature or you know what mean? It's like a a greater good. I totally agree with that. My outlook is that music exists. You can hear it in your head.

[9:47]Victor Wooten: I can hear it in my head. But for music to take a physical form, it needs a being and an instrument. Now it could be a bird and their voice, but it's still a being and an instrument. For me, it's me and a bass guitar. I'm much more musical without the bass guitar. Right? But the bass guitar allows me to to express to you how musical I am, but it also allows music to become a vibration. And in another sense, it allows music to be born on Earth. Music already exists, but for it to vibrate, it needs us. Right? So music is indebted to us in the same way we are indebted to music. We need each other, at least on this plane we call Earth and life. So if I can it it's like I hope this comes out right. It's like having a child. The more healthy we are, the more together we are, the the better that child will enter the world and hopefully exist in the world. Music is the same. When we have ourselves together,

[10:47]Zibby Owens: music comes in under a more pure fill form. I feel like though that the reputation of many musicians as these, like, you know, rock and roll crazy people is not necessarily the picture of perfect emotional health.

[11:03]Victor Wooten: Yeah. I mean yeah. And and I don't wanna be the one that says I know what, you know, perfect emotional health is. I don't, you know, I don't wanna claim that. But in my view, a lot of my musical heroes were maybe failures in life, but maybe they weren't. Maybe that's what they needed to to to do what they did. And, you know, what what you call a good person can't exist without a bad person. So both both are are necessary. So I can't say that one was wrong or one was bad because it gave me things. It gave me both to both sides or all sides to look at, and I'm thankful for that. I've learned so much from all these musicians. And who are who are some of your musical heroes? I mean, you could name them. I mean, they're really really all of them. I grew up in the Motown era. So, you know, there were people like The Temptations and The Jackson five, of course. Stevie Wonder came along, and then James Brown wasn't Motown, but he was still there. So I grew up in that era. But at the same time as Motown was happening, The Beatles were happening, and Led Zeppelin and the Who and bands like that. Chicago came along. So there were horn bands like Chicago, but then there was also Earth, Wind, and Fire on the r and b side. But then there was also Tower of Power who was somewhere in the middle, you know. And the pop radio stations back in the seventies and sixties, pop radio only meant popular. It was just short for popular. So the pop stations played whatever was popular, every style. So I had heroes that I didn't even know were my heroes just because I grew up on, you know. But the people that that I was really conscious of were some of the people like, you know, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin. My mom would always play this gospel music every Sunday, Mahalia Jackson, things like that. And then we got into jazz. My dad used to love singing country, so I knew about Burl Lives and different people like that. Willie Nelson, of course. So you had, like, a three sixty immersion essentially in in music and music culture from day one, it sounds like. Yes. Fortunately, I did because of my parents and my brothers. Now I grew up playing mostly r and b because of the dances and things that we got hired to play, where mostly, you know, people black people who wanted to dance to some soul music. So it was a lot of James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, Curtis Mayfield, Jackson five, of course, and things like that. But at home, we were into everything. So as we grew, we got the chance to play everything, you know, from Van Halen to the Beatles to Miles Davis,

[13:48]Zibby Owens: John Coltrane, all of the above. So how did you go from being a music loving, listening, playing, playing at dances to being like a five time Grammy winning bass guitarist.

[14:04]Victor Wooten: I mean, one thing leads to the other. The more you do anything, the longer you do it, the more you learn about it. And the more people learn about you, especially if you're good at it. And the five of us brothers were good. I had no choice but to be good in the same way you're good at English. In English, you don't think about that, but you're really good at it. But it's because your family was good at it and you started jamming with them in English as a toddler. I had the same thing presented to me as music. I was jamming as a toddler. By the time I was five, we were out gigging, touring, and things like that. So after a while, people start hearing about you. And the better you get, you start meeting and getting a chance to to interact with people who are better. One thing leads to another. I'm working with this banjo player that that was never in my my playbook that you're gonna play with a banjo player. But one thing led to another, and we put this band together and, you know, a bunch of Grammys later and touring later and albums later. We're still doing it and but, you know, again, awards come from other people. So once people find out about you, you know, it's very possible that you win awards, but you're not in charge of that, other people. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[18:08]Zibby Owens: And when did you discover that you love to write? Like a book? Yeah. Like how I mean, I'm assuming you I shouldn't even assume that. Well, I didn't know about writing music. And so I wasn't Oh, I meant like writing, like, your books, your two books. You know what? That's a good question.

[18:22]Victor Wooten: I I don't really know because I I stayed away from it. I've been running music camps this year. I just actually released this year's schedule today. Oh. So this will be our twenty second year of running music, music and nature camps. And because I learned this to play music in a different way, I teach it in a different way. And students for years have said, you have to put this in a book. You need to write a book. This is so cool. This is different. And I was like, I don't wanna write a book. I don't want a Wooten method. I don't wanna put this in a form that I have to defend. You know, you come to my camp, you get it. We're cool, but, you know, the world may not understand what what I'm talking about, and I don't wanna have to defend it. So I stayed away years from writing a book until I was in a car with a friend of mine, picked me up from the airport, and in his passenger seat was a brand new copy of Richard Bach's Illusions. And what went through my head as I moved the book out of the seat is what went through my head is I remember reading this book at maybe 14, 15 because my brothers had read it. And I told myself in my head, I said, I bet I could write this book now. I know this information so well. And the light bulb went off. That's the way to write the information these people are asking for, these students. Don't write an instruction manual, the Wooten Method. Write a story. Let's call it fiction, but put the truth in there. Let people find it if they want. If they don't want it, the story is still cool. Like Star Wars, any of those movies, the stories are great. There's lessons there, but you don't have to get them. Right? So I ended up I started right away and poured it out over a couple of tour, Flecktones, with Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. We'd do a gig. I'd stay up all night till sunup just writing. And basically, the book is patterned after the class that I was teaching, where we break music into 10 equal parts. And I show them how to how we're not focusing enough on the other nine. We're only focusing a lot on notes. And people like that, so I wrote a book about it. And I was already teaching when I talked about notes, I talked about tracking animals. When I talked about space, I talked about this. So I had the parables, the ideas, but how to put it into a cohesive story that goes from beginning to end. That was a little bit of a challenge. But I had help. People who knew how to write to step in and say, this is good, this sucks.

[20:46]Zibby Owens: You know, that kind of thing. So I was fortunate to have that. That's good. Don't worry. I feel most people when they work on books have those people too. It's okay. When you were writing about how you hear all the sounds in the world and how everything from, like and I'm gonna get the note wrong, but, like, B, the B note of your alarm clock, or, you know, how you hear things. Do you feel like you have it like a heightened sense of sound, like in the sound of metal or something? Did you see that movie yet? I don't know if you saw it. Yeah. I don't know. Do you have like, like this heightened awareness? Like, it's it's almost like piercing what you hear or was that just what do you think? Yes and no. In other words, I don't think my hearing is better than anyone's. And I would go as far as to say it's worse,

[21:32]Victor Wooten: but I do pay attention. And there are others that pay attention more to me, more than me. But in my years and then from 1991 to 2001, I studied with some nature teachers, how to live off the land, the way our natives, the people that are the reason that we are here, they had to know these skills when there weren't hospitals, when there weren't grocery stores, things like that. That's how my parents grew up. So in learning that, I realized the importance of listening. And I realized the animals that live outdoors, if they don't listen, they're dead immediately. And so through these classes, I learned basically to pay attention. One of the things, I think I even wrote it in the new book, came from one of my nature teachers who said a few times a day, just stop what you're doing and just ask yourself, what am I missing? Look around, listen around, feel around. Oh, the sun's on this side, not on this side. It's just really changed my life and it's totally changed my music and the way I teach it, which is why now I use nature in all of my teachings. Wow.

[22:44]Zibby Owens: I mean, that's really it. That's the whole sort of in the moment wellness, you know, movement that's going on right now. It's just another way to look at it. Right? It's a it's being natural.

[22:58]Victor Wooten: Right? A deer doesn't have to take yoga. You know what I mean? They just do their natural movements. They're totally natural. A bird doesn't have to practice singing. They're not singing to win awards. They just sing because the sun comes up and they feel it or to their mate or whatever. So when you find anybody in the human world that's really good at something, especially sometimes when it doesn't seem like they should be, like you do something for the first time and you do it well, what do we say? Wow, you're a natural. Baby, you're a natural. What that means is you're like nature. Nature is the most natural thing on the planet. And the word natural means to be like nature. But in the dictionary, it also says natural means without sharps or with flats. It's also a musical term. So even the dictionary makes the connection with music and nature. But when you're at the height of what you do, we call you unnatural. So I believe our quest is to become more like nature. But in music, we're told to sit in a room and practice, which is the most unnatural way to learn anything.

[24:13]Zibby Owens: Yeah. No one wants to do that. Wow. Well, you're obviously a natural at teaching. Right? You I could sit and listen to you forever. You're like, the way you speak and the tone of your voice and the depth and introspection and your point of view of the world. So what do you get out of that? What do you get out of sharing what you've learned?

[24:35]Victor Wooten: Why do it? Why share it? Well, I think it was at least attributed to Einstein that says, if you can't teach it simply, you don't know it well enough. I love that. There's book saying, I don't know where it came from, but it's so true, is that you teach what you most need to learn. Right? Just imagine someone who I can think of so many stories of people who just get into a certain religion or someone who just learn about essential oils or someone who just becomes a vegetarian or someone who just starts taking yoga. They wanna convince the world, everybody they meet, all their friends, that's all they talk about. And they talk about it as if they're an expert. Right? But we talk about it because we want to learn more about it, and we need to learn more about it. So that's a long answer to say I grow every time I share. But I also love seeing the student, and I hate to even call them student. I like to see the person that I'm sharing the information with, their eyes gloss over to where me, the teacher, disappears. And they're in their own head, their own body, their own world figuring it out. I love that. And I get to see it many, many times a year doing these camps and and teaching at colleges. That's the best, is to see the the receiver of the information turn it into their information.

[25:56]Zibby Owens: Is this a sleepaway camp? Tell me about this camp.

[25:59]Victor Wooten: Yeah. It's a camp that that we we we've done we started it in 2000. Now we have our own location, a 150 acre place on a river just West of Nashville called Wooten Woods. And it's a the camp is a non for profit. We don't my wife and I don't who own it, don't take any money from it. But, yeah, we have cabins there for everyone to sleep. There's a, you know, bathhouse, men and women's side. There's classrooms. There's a full stage. There's a kitchen with a a chef who cooks for everyone, the best food. And, I mean, he'll he'll cook. He likes to surprise the students on the first night usually and cook lobster. Yeah. So there's lobster and salmon and all kinds of veggie and and gluten free, whatever you you you know, want. But when we do the camps, we're all there together. And most of the time, we don't leave the property. And we don't need to. So it's like and there's no Internet, so you can't really desensitize from it. It's not like you go to our camp during the day that you go to your hotel and turn on the news at night. No. We're there the whole time. And we, you know, we there's things that I've learned through my brother's teaching or through some of my nature teachers, some little hacks, I guess, that will get people to receive your information as well as receive each other. Because we have students from around the world, and people come with a wall or a barrier up, and we get them to to let down that barrier really quickly. And so to the point that where even I disappear. You know, my biggest compliment that I've heard most of multiple times is people telling me once the camp is over, they say, you know, Victor? Or a child might say, you know, Mr. Wooten? It always makes me laugh. When I first got here, they say, I was like, wow, there goes Victor Wooten. But then they say, but now I see everybody that way. And I'm like, yes, that's what we want. That's what my mom wanted. That's what my dad wanted. Who can't play music? Anyone. But when you're seen as a good person, and then when you're a good person allows everyone to see everybody as a good person, that's to me a success.

[28:15]Zibby Owens: That's beautiful. So what advice would you have for somebody who is trying to write a book?

[28:22]Victor Wooten: Write the book you would like to read. That's what I did. I wrote it in the style of books that I like to read, and it it was based off of illusions, Richard Bach, a teacher and a student. But it was also based off of one of my nature teachers, Tom Brown junior, who wrote stories about his teacher teaching him as a kid. So that was my model. And then get help. Because there's certain things that I would have never noticed except the guy said, you know what, you have your own style of writing, you really do. He said, but over in this section, you left that style. Did you mean to do that? I was like, I didn't even know I had a style. So no, I didn't mean to leave it if I asked him. So it's always good, whatever you're doing to get an outside view. Even if the outside view is you, you wanna be able to see yourself from the outside, but not only your view because we will overlook certain things about ourselves. So I have a good friend who's done a lot of writing. He was teaching at Stanford at the time, and I would write a chapter. I'd send it to him. I'd type it in word or whatever and email it to him. He would print it out, read it, mark it in a red pen, and mail it back. And I would go, oh, wow. I know nothing about punctuation. I I find out, you know. So that will be the one thing is to write the book you would would like to read and get help. Many people should probably seek professional

[29:54]Zibby Owens: help before writing a book because you're gonna need it to get through the process. No. I'm just kidding. But yes. Excellent advice. Excellent advice. Well, Victor, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for this very soulful conversation. You're obviously a very special man, and it's really nice to have met you. Appreciate it, Zibby. Thank you again to citizens of humanity for sponsoring this episode and for donating all the proceeds of your long sleeve unisex t shirts that are available for getting vaxxed, the retail price is $34 to the Susan Felice Owens program for COVID nineteen vaccine research at Mount Sinai Health System. Go to citizensofhumanity.com, chat and check them out. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram ZibbyOwens and momsdon'thavetimetoreadbooks. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.