Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to DEan Bonzani. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi DEan, thanks for joining us today. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?
1. After many years of envying people with “normal” jobs, I’ve finally settled into myself and accepted that this is what and who I am. The challenge is in the valuation of what I output. That’s the hard part. It helps that my creative partner and I started and ran a successful retail store for twenty years. As a musical duo and video producers, we can draw on those two decades’ worth of professional experience, where we created a business from scratch that required us to do just about everything ourselves. We’d both veered off from any career path that we had when attending university, and came to realize that we were both cut from entrepreneurial cloth. Our college education helped a bit, but knowing how to teach ourselves new skills was the real strength, and we still do that constantly. The internet is a huge game changer there. At this phase in our lives, we’re deepening and consolidating our skill sets, and maybe not surprisingly, they’ve ended up being in line with our original college trajectories, though modified by time and experience. Back then, we both bailed on school when we felt that we’d gotten everything we could from the institution and stood a better chance of educating ourselves in the field while working on our own projects. The only difference between “normal” careers and ours is in how seriously we take and present what we do, and we’ve gotten ourselves to the point of believing in the credibility and worth of our production. So, yeah — I’ve stopped considering becoming a licensed electrician, or going back to school to get a medical degree. Music, art, video, and puppets are my calling and life. There are still plenty of challenges, but I’m happiest in the studio, exploring.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My love of recording and stage performance began when I was a kid. I was always in theater and choir, eventually going to university on a theater scholarship. My mom was really artistic, and encouraged me to pursue visual and musical arts. She bought me a guitar for my 13th birthday, and I immediately starting writing songs and recording them on a portable Panasonic cassette deck. I had a best friend who got a guitar right after that, so we formed a band called Brine. The S*x Pistols were happening, and as teenagers whose album collections were full of KISS, Aerosmith, and Black Sabbath records, we thought it was horrendous, which gave us the permission to do whatever we wanted to, at full volume. So we did. That’s been my attitude ever since, but it does get a bit trickier when getting paid is involved. I’ve noticed over the years that people respond the most strongly to whatever I’ve produced without any end in mind, for my own amusement. Perhaps it has a spontaneity and life to it that they appreciate. I keep that in mind during the crucial editing stages of whatever I’m working on, so that the honing process doesn’t end up choking out the vitality of the original glurp of expression. This applies to my live performances as well, where I’m working within the boundaries of songs, whether familiar or new to the audience, with an implicit permission to break out of those boundaries when the inspiration is running hot. Whether I’m working on music, video, drawings, writing… I have certain benchmarks set by my heroes that I strive for, having seen them in action, punching through to a higher plane, but I’m also just doing what I’ve always done, which is make stuff just because… why not?
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
My goal as a creative is to ease my own, and others’, existential agony, primarily through the art of humor. That’s the long and the short of what I do. We have to have a sense of humor to balance the sense of looming dread that modern life, and the current trajectory of humankind, invokes in the collective. If I can make someone laugh, or smile, or stop for a moment and say, “Hmmmmmm, I never thought of that in such a way,” then I’ve done my job. I’m my primary audience for everything that I do, by the way. I need to laugh everyday, to break the tension.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.
Non-creatives? Is there such a thing? Everyone creates, it’s just a matter of WHAT they create. But I guess if I had to divide the world into two types of people— those who video their own puppet show series on YouTube that may or may not ever become a source of income, and those who don’t spend their time writing, staging, videoing, editing, and recording music for a puppet show series— then I could see how people in that second category might wonder why someone like me would do such a thing. I’ve always been an outsider/outlier. This has allowed me to cultivate perspectives that I can now elaborate on via the mediums that I create in, with a certain freedom, but there is always the element of calculated risk. I can’t NOT do what I do, or the suffering with it would grow unbearable. Perhaps that’s the presumed line of division between “creative” and “non-creative” people: the degree to which their minds are infested with ideas, images, melodies, associations…
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.deanbonzani.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deanbonzanimusic/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MusicianDEanBonzani/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dean-bonzani-2a441678/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@pintsizedriotproductions
- Other: https://www.youtube.com/@DEanBonzani
Image Credits
Sandy Wilt, Elizabeth Bonzani