In something of a dream-come-true, Touring & Mental Health: The Music Industry Manual has been featured by the last word in cool – Rolling Stone Magazine.
EXTRACT:
LIFE ON THE road may sound glamorous to some, but burnout and mental health challenges have affected musicians of all stripes since they first stepped on stage and struck a guitar chord on tour. The pandemic has worsened the load with many artists nixing tours and dates in favor of self-care.
The new book Touring and Mental Health – Music Industry Manual (out now via Omnibus) seeks to help musicians navigate the lows. It’s edited by Tamsin Embleton, who used to have a career managing artists and tours. Now, she’s a therapist and the founder of the Music Industry Therapist Collective (MITC), which comprises mental health practitioners with music industry backgrounds. Embleton, along with MITC members, cowrote the manual, which provides guidance for those on tour, addressing a range of issues from addiction to navigating interpersonal band relationships and the self-care essential for maintaining wellbeing. Divided into six parts, it’s not meant to be read straight-though, rather for readers to skip around to the sections that address any issues they are currently facing. “[It] is designed to dip in and out of as you see fit,” Embleton writes of the manual. Radiohead’s Phil Selway, Nile Rodgers, and Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden are among the musicians interviewed.
Tours impact everything from navigating a personal life when far away from loved ones to heightened anxiety that comes from performing.
“You get caught up in just trying to gauge how everybody else is doing onstage, the actual technicalities of what you’re doing in your playing, trying to dampen down the voices in your head going – ‘Oh shit, you’re shit!’” Selway explains of music performance anxiety in the book.
You can read the rest of the article by clicking on this link. Enjoy!
