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Freedom to Flow with Todd Marston

by Aine Fujioka | Oct 21, 2025 | Music

This interview series, “Art of Life: Artists Who Create Their Own Lifestyles,” was inspired by a conversation I had with my musician friend Paul Hansen about how artists make their careers work. Often, we artists have to create our own lifestyles because we frequently work as freelancers, taking on various jobs. Some choose non-music-related roles, while others strictly decide to focus on music-related work. Others, like me, end up having multiple careers as we follow the flow. No one shows us the way, so we have to figure out our own paths and adjust to our own needs. 

And for the longest time, I didn’t even realize that’s the life I was living. Only after 20 years had passed did I realize it. No one ever actually told me how to live as a musician. There are many ways, and you have so much freedom to create your own way. And that’s not easy because the choices are endless. So, I started this series of interviews to ask my friends how they live as artists. I’m hoping that this gives me some inspiration and support to create my own new way of living, as I am in the middle of a life-changing process. And I am convinced that this is also exciting and important to share with other people. If AI starts to handle the required work, many of us humans will be left with more unstructured time to fill.  We’ll have to create our new lives.

This first interview was with Todd Marston, my long-time friend and a keyboard player, composer, and educator. We met at a house concert of Bajuco, a band he formed with his roommates in Boston, which he mentioned in the interview. We later played together in Boston’s beloved indie band the Grownup Noise, and toured all over the US. Because we shared interests in yoga, meditation, and wellness, we spent quite a lot of time together on and off tour, discussing thoughts around music and practicing yoga. 

In 2011, he moved out to Portland, Oregon, and I moved to Berlin in 2015. It is not so easy for us to get together and talk anymore, but his random call from the West Coast is something I really enjoy. His perspective, interest, and willingness to share his thoughts are inspiring, and our conversation instantly brings me back to our time in Boston. He attended Portland State University to study body mapping and inclusive awareness. When he reminded me of that, I noticed that something awoke within me. It was a motivation to study something new, something unknown. 

When we were young and touring, we spent more than four hours a day driving, then loading our gear into the next venue, sound check, a long break before the show, playing the show, breaking down the equipment and loading up the van again. We thought that was what we would do every time and forever, but now in our 40s, we plan things better so that we don’t have to carry our bags for so long on the way, or we book venues that have their own equipment, so we don’t have to bring everything in and out, break it down, and set up again for every gig. We try to downsize our gear, too. Eventually, we start thinking about how long we can keep this up. Maybe if you are lucky and healthy and the situation allows, you will do this until the day you die. But in many cases, musicians injure themselves carrying their gear, or by overworking, or simply, by playing their instruments in the wrong posture. 

TODD: “And then there are aspects of it that are completely life-giving and are not actually taxing on our bodies. When you think of Elvin Jones playing until his last week of life, that’s the life I want to live. As I’m thinking of him, I’m thinking of all the circles in his playing. And how those circles are self-generating energetically. He’s not hurting himself at all. It’s playing. I think there’s an alchemy there. Can we take the hurt, the pain, the struggle, anything that is detrimental to us, that is not good for us, can we give that away, and then we can retain the thing that is life-giving? So I think that’ll be a process for the rest of our lives.”

Elvin Jones was a jazz drummer, a member of John Coltrane’s quartet known for playing in such a way that his rhythms spill over bar lines, creating a sense of motion that loops and breathes instead of stopping and starting. The pulse stays steady underneath, but his phrases swirl around it, generating a rolling, wave-like energy — the rhythmic equivalent of a circle compared with the more predictable, linear, “square” rhythms of 4/4 that featured emphasis on the 2 and 4 or 1 and 3 beats in the measure that were prevalent in Western music before then.

Did Jones’s approach to rhythm and to playing his instrument somehow make it easier on his body? Todd’s ideas often made me question what I’m doing.

So much more naive and sensitive than others, and not knowing it, I struggled a lot in life, and I know Todd and I share similar feelings about life in some way. And our conversations were often about how other musicians do things differently and how different we were. A method doesn’t always apply to everyone. You have to find someone or some method that works for you, or maybe, you create your own method that works for you. In the school system, people get tricked into thinking that there’s only one “right answer” and if you can’t follow it, you are wrong. But the system of this world isn’t that simple, or maybe, it’s as simple as “everyone is different.” For me, just talking to someone smart and logical helps me to organise my ideas, or even to feel at ease with life. So again, you need to keep searching for your own way, and as a yoga practitioner and musician, I think following your body sense is the key to finding what’s right for you. And you need to trust the feeling. At the end of the day, being honest with yourself is the most important thing, and when your work is created in that way, that becomes soul-touching, powerful art.

TODD: “What you’re highlighting to me is potential power because if you can learn from both logical and non-logical, you can learn from people with ADHD, you can learn from people with autism. There are all these different brain chemistries. And we all have serious gifts, right? And there is not one way to live. That’s where we are, alive in a moment where our society is becoming aware of this.“

As Todd told me about how he loved writing music and being creative in music from early on, but that he didn’t like the one-size-fits-all traditional method of piano training that involved endlessly practicing Hanon (piano technical exercises by Charles-Louis Hanon) and Etudes (musical compositions composed specifically for piano practice that also focus on a specific technical challenge), I became more clear about my own approach to learning music. For me, playing music was something I did for fun, and I never took a formal piano lesson until later on, when I went to high school. So, to this day, playing piano for me is really a pure joy. I play a range of music, from classical piano pieces to popular songs, but in my own way. So, for someone who has been formally trained, I guess my playing is very messy. And in that sense, I too feel I am a faker. 

TODD: “I don’t love. ‘Here’s my thing, play this.’ It just doesn’t work for me. I’m not engaged in it. And I used to think that there was something wrong with me because of that. And so there was a lot of tension in my playing because I felt like a faker the whole time I was at school. And I had to prove myself.”

This tension sounds so familiar to me. Once I began to pursue music professionally, I found myself surrounded by the world’s best drummers, as well as by many will-bes and wannabes, and I felt intimidated. And even worse, there were not that many female drummers around to look up to or to share experiences with. So, I was trying hard to prove myself all the time, without even being aware of it. Music ceased to be about joy anymore and became an arena in which to prove myself. 

Todd’s tendinosis led him to yoga. I didn’t know what tendinosis was, but I learned that it is a degeneration of a tendon’s collagen due to chronic overuse and misuse. It is different from tendinitis, in part, because the tendon doesn’t necessarily show signs of inflammation or tearing. It does cause discomfort and pain, but it needs to be treated differently from tendinitis. My own health condition led me to start practicing yoga as well. So we sometimes practiced yoga together, and the way he practiced made a big impression on me. I remember him being so open in class. He would listen to his body deeply and move accordingly. He felt comfortable doing something different than what the teacher instructed us to do, different than what the other students were doing. So one time when I led a yoga practice with the band members, he encouraged me to do whatever I felt, and he enjoyed whatever we did. 

TODD: “I like to engage with my body and engage with energy and not follow a script.”

Todd talked about the lessons he gave Andy Cahill, a busy coach/podcaster, who doesn’t have time to practice every day the way we are taught. Todd and Andy had these unusual three-hour lessons every week for almost three years. The lesson started with meditation, then listening and observing music. They would get into his songs, and through the process of writing them, Todd would observe Andy as he wrote. They look at what’s flowing, what’s not flowing, and why. And Andy went from having three unfinished songs to thirty-plus songs.

TODD: “Because we were really working on building his own form of learning and really nurturing the joy of it, he found that he would have motivation, even in those small five-minute windows of time, to go right to the piece that he was working on. And it would write itself, basically.”

This story reminded me of the lesson that I was listening to the other day. I have been following a meditation group, and the leader was sharing how she was practicing the piano. She never learned the piano; she has no idea what an octave is or how the instrument, the piano, works. And the only thing she wanted to do was play this one song on the piano for her upcoming concert. So, as the teacher was telling her to get Etude books and learn fingering, she told her that she wasn’t interested in mastering playing the piano, only this song. So, instead of the regular lesson, she wants to have a longer lesson, with her teacher at her side, so she can learn a little phrase of the song at a time, and once her body learns it, she wants to move onto the next phrase. And this is how she keeps her motivation and joy to play the piano. She was saying that instead of setting a big, unrealistic goal, make it small enough to be readily achievable so you can experience frequent success and stay motivated to continue. 

Hearing the same idea from different people, I was excited and inspired. What I have been learning from this meditation group is how to be. How to be all the time. If your body has tension, no matter what happens, you don’t feel happy or relaxed. On the contrary, if your body is completely relaxed, you feel the most grateful for the smallest surprises, such as nice weather, tasty coffee, or doing nothing with yourself. No matter what happens, you feel like you can overcome the problem. And our goal is to be in this state all the time. 

As you keep doing something, or work in the same job for a long time, sometimes you develop a bad habit or a bad mindset over time. I have been trying to shed mine, but when it comes to music, I know there are many things that I can still work on. But Todd has studied Body Mapping and Inclusive Awareness, and says that he can now play piano all the time because he is so relaxed when doing so. This really inspired me and renewed my interest in studying body awareness.

I have been learning how our physical state affects our mental state, and how both affect the sounds we create as musicians, and, really, everything else. Todd reminded me that body mapping is a practice that can be really helpful, particularly to musicians. Body mapping is a somatic process of examining our understanding of our anatomy and how it functions and the relationship between our understanding and the (sometimes very different) reality. Advocates of body mapping claim that the more accurate our understanding of how our body works and how we should use it, the more we will use it in a healthy, pain-free, and stress-free way. Body mapping is not only about observing how our bodies work and understanding how that affects our minds. It can also change how we play and how we perceive the world around us, thereby affecting what we play. It can potentially make us not just healthier musicians but better musicians. 

TODD: Lisa Marsh [who is Director of the Coordinate Movement Program at Portland State University, where she specializes in wellness for musicians] said, the sound that you make isn’t just going in front of you to your audience. It’s going to any place where the sound is audible. So that means all around you, filling the entire room. The sound is going behind you. And so if you’re playing with that feeling, I’m emanating sound from my playing, then it’s going to have something to do with your back, right? It’s going to have something to do with your front. It’s going to have something to do with what’s above and around you. If we can play and exist like that,  that’s right away much more dynamic and life-giving. 

This hit deep in me, because I have been looking for a way to be someone who can resonate more deeply with the audience. I realized that my whole being has to be working in harmony with this goal to achieve this.

For me, music is a way to understand life and this world. And writing music is a great way to discover and understand myself. Without it, what I do is more craftsmanship. Creating my own art helps me to look at myself from a distance and accept my existence. 

Before I began to express myself through writing music, I was restricted to trying to express myself through playing someone else’s music. They are trying to create what they have in mind. It’s their own precious world. Of course, some input from the other musicians may be welcome and may help, but you have to respect that it’s theirs. But I felt like this was the only place or occasion for me to express myself. From the outside, maybe nobody saw it because I am not a drummer with flashy chops, but in my mind, my ego was speaking so loudly, saying that I am here! I can do this! Look at me! This tension was for sure damaging my body and mind. So we worked on it, and now I am more relaxed, and I can enjoy playing more. 

Accepting ourselves includes accepting our cheesiness and the ways we are not cool. That’s also a part of us. Of course, we can choose to work on our cheesiness and try to be cool, but I now think we should embrace our cheesiness and our uniqueness, and appreciate every part of ourselves. The result makes our art more unique, and the art moves people even more. 

Todd and I also talked about how teaching could be different. The reason I don’t feel like teaching is that I feel like I am not there yet. I don’t have much knowledge of music history, don’t know enough songs, and don’t have the skill… but after pursuing my music career for more than 20 years, I realize that learning is a never-ending process. And nobody is teaching because they are perfectly capable of teaching everything. Todd’s and also my preferred idea of teaching is more like facilitating. In the era where we can find any knowledge or lessons online, one thing we can’t find available online is that someone who can accompany us. Coaches, teachers, and instructors are now expected to look closer at their students or clients and facilitate accordingly. It’s not about transfer of knowledge anymore. 

TODD: “In facilitating, it’s the same thing as getting out of my own way when writing a piece of music, so I think a big part of what’s so therapeutic and useful with writing is that it’s a surrender to the universe teaching us, and that has a lot to do with aesthetics. The principles of design are like a piece of teaching that I’m interested in because it speaks more directly to that. It’s so simple, too. It’s just contrast and repetition. So these two things are endlessly entertaining, endlessly fertile for creating composition or whatever. It doesn’t matter what art form. All you need is an A section and a B section or a strong beat and a weak beat to create syncopation. And those things I find like, okay, what’s the least amount I can give and then get out of the way and just let that go. And so, with teaching, it’s like maybe more about supporting people in having accountability, or maybe it’s more about just giving a prompt, a random prompt—I’ll create a bunch of things and put them in a hat—, the names of spirit animals, just something random to get people started and say, go get started with this.”

Music is energy. And that transmits your thoughts, intention, soul, and heart… your being. So be careful not to limit it, let it be as it is, and make the fullest of it. 

This conversation with Todd Marston reminded me of my forgotten and dormant desire to learn and grow and unlimit myself. I want to connect more deeply with my friends and my family. I want to dive deeper into music, to connect more profoundly with my audience. I want to stop preventing myself from challenging new things just because of my fear and take a step toward becoming a new me. So yes, from these conversations, I have developed a new idea in life. Going back to school. How about you?