Uploaded September 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Should the audience, as Rick Rubin suggests, "come last"? Or is there a more nuanced and sustaining question to explore instead?
Steve Lawson's approach to making music and sustaining the development of his creative practice has always resonated with me. Over the past twenty-five years, he has carved out a living as a solo improvisational bass player, developing a thoughtful and sustainable model for art that resists the common assumptions that drive an obsession with numbers and scale.
I spoke to Steve about the topic of his recently completed PhD, A Study Towards a New Model for Subscriber Audience Involvement in Improvised Music. His thesis turns that lived experience into a lens for questioning many of the assumptions baked into how we think about creativity today.
Full notes (and audio version): the-haven.co/audience-comes-with
Steve's Music: stevelawson.bandcamp.com
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
07:50 How The Audience Became Part of Steve’s Creative Ecosystem
17:00 Scenius, Reception Theory, and The Space of The Talkaboutable
22:00 The Audience Shouldn’t Come Last (It’s Not a Competition)
30:20 What is a Community of Practice?
35:29 The Boring Drive To Constantly Wow (and Deceive) People
41:00 Transformative vs Incremental Change
46:26 How Can I Keep Doing This in a Way Works For Me?
48:00 Selling Integrity To Algorithms and Trends
1:00:00 The Only Decent Music Happened Forty Years Ago
1:01:58 Championing and Supporting Music in a Meaningful Way
1:07:55 The Impact of Unintegrated Nostalgia on Music Makers
1:14:45 Picking Up The Bass and Playing Through Dark Times
1:17:15 The Extraordinary Response of a Subscriber-Based Audience in a Culture of Enoughness
Should the audience, as Rick Rubin suggests, "come last"? Or is there a more nuanced and sustaining question to explore instead?
Steve Lawson's approach to making music and sustaining the development of his creative practice has always resonated with me. Over the past twenty-five years, he has carved out a living as a solo improvisational bass player, developing a thoughtful and sustainable model for art that resists the common assumptions that drive an obsession with numbers and scale.
I spoke to Steve about the topic of his recently completed PhD, A Study Towards a New Model for Subscriber Audience Involvement in Improvised Music. His thesis turns that lived experience into a lens for questioning many of the assumptions baked into how we think about creativity today.
Full notes (and audio version): the-haven.co/audience-comes-with
Steve's Music: stevelawson.bandcamp.com
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
07:50 How The Audience Became Part of Steve’s Creative Ecosystem
17:00 Scenius, Reception Theory, and The Space of The Talkaboutable
22:00 The Audience Shouldn’t Come Last (It’s Not a Competition)
30:20 What is a Community of Practice?
35:29 The Boring Drive To Constantly Wow (and Deceive) People
41:00 Transformative vs Incremental Change
46:26 How Can I Keep Doing This in a Way Works For Me?
48:00 Selling Integrity To Algorithms and Trends
1:00:00 The Only Decent Music Happened Forty Years Ago
1:01:58 Championing and Supporting Music in a Meaningful Way
1:07:55 The Impact of Unintegrated Nostalgia on Music Makers
1:14:45 Picking Up The Bass and Playing Through Dark Times
1:17:15 The Extraordinary Response of a Subscriber-Based Audience in a Culture of Enoughness
