Shannon Hayden, a cellist and guitarist raised on an organic vegetable farm, traces how her childhood environment, classical music training, and deliberate exploration across instruments shaped her philosophy of artistic authenticity. Rather than remain confined to the classical cello tradition, she questioned rigid training, embraced the creative possibilities of the guitar, and ultimately committed to audience connection over competitive achievement. Her story illustrates the tension between honoring established artistic traditions and the responsibility to find one's own voice within one's own time.
What Does It Mean to Have Your Own Voice as an Artist?
Shannon began formal music study young—asking her parents for cello lessons at age 3 (0:57). She immersed herself in classical composers and their works, learning to respect the depth and power of their artistic voices. Yet from the beginning, she felt a conflict: the great composers' voices were so authoritative that she feared "I felt sure to lose something of myself if I was limited to their ideas" (1:40). This tension between reverence for tradition and the need for personal expression became the central question of her artistic development.
She resolved this conflict through a specific realization: just as the classical composers she studied had lived in their own time and used the tools available to them, she too had a responsibility to "live in my own time and use the tools available for doing so" (1:53). This wasn't a rejection of classical music but a maturation into it. The great composers didn't inherit a fixed set of rules—they pushed boundaries and expanded what was possible. Following their example meant not copying their notes, but embodying their spirit of creative inquiry.
How Does Your Environment Shape What You Create?
Shannon's childhood on an organic farm was not incidental to her artistic philosophy—it was foundational. Growing up in a space that "encourages thinking outside the box" (0:51) meant she developed a different relationship to authority and convention. She played alone, in isolation, and let "what was around me influence my playing rather than notes on a page" (1:22). In other words, her environment trained her ear and intuition before formal theory constrained them.
This early autonomy created habits of mind. She didn't passively receive instruction; she internalized patterns of self-directed learning and questioning. The farm itself modeled a different approach to living—making electricity, growing food, cooking on a wood stove. All of this communicated that you don't have to accept default solutions; you can build your own.
Why Does Learning Multiple Instruments Change How You Think?
A crucial turning point came when Shannon became interested in guitar. She noticed something important: "there are some instruments that thrive on change and are constantly reinvented" while others—like the cello—seemed to suffer "from the constraints" of tradition (4:04). The guitar, by contrast, appeared as a tool actively shaped by diverse practitioners doing "a whole lot of different things with it" (4:18).
Crucially, learning guitar didn't mean abandoning cello. Instead, it changed how she thought about the cello itself. "Playing the guitar really just started to influence the way I thought about the cello and also the direction I wanted to head in with the cello and just began to make me question my traditional training" (4:45). This is the mechanism of cross-pollination: exposure to different approaches doesn't fragment identity—it expands possibility.
What she discovered was that the cello's "constraints" were not fixed properties of the instrument but inherited assumptions about how to use it. Once she saw guitarists working with the instrument's plasticity, she could ask: what if I treated the cello the same way? The result: "what I could do with the cello began to expand" (5:54).
What Is the Real Cost of Musical Competitions?
Shannon had competed both nationally and internationally. She won. But she rejected competitions as her path forward, citing what "competitions do to people emotionally and artistically" (7:58). She was explicit and stark about this: "I just don't really like" them, and even shared a cautionary anecdote—"one of the first competitions I won was I was actually set on fire by a competitor" (8:02).
This wasn't sour grapes from a loser. She's describing a structural problem: competitions create scarcity (one winner) and stakes that warp artistic thinking. When the goal becomes winning rather than making, the internal relationship to the work changes. And as her story suggests, competition can activate hostility and burn-out rather than inspire collaboration.
For Shannon, the alternative was clear: "I am really happy to be experimenting with my own ideas and I'm really just trying to connect with audiences that's what music's all about" (8:30). Notice the shift: from competition (ranking against peers) to connection (relationship with listeners). This is not a lower standard—it's a different criterion altogether.
What Does It Mean to Carry Your Art Into the World?
Shannon also addressed a practical reality: "traveling with an instrument is never easy and adding a lot of other gear makes it much more difficult." Yet she notes it remains "worthwhile though when you're having a good time on stage" (7:15). This is not romantic. It's pragmatic: the friction of travel and transport is real, but it's worth it when the end result—live connection with an audience—justifies the effort.
This suggests that artistic authenticity isn't a private affair. It requires taking your work into the world, bearing the inconvenience of movement and exposure, accepting that your art will meet resistance and demands it wasn't designed for. The farm gave her space to develop an inner voice; bringing that voice to stages required a different kind of courage.
Where to go from here
Shannon's story offers several points of departure for anyone interested in artistic development or authenticity more broadly. First: examine the inherited constraints in your field. Are they features of the medium itself, or assumptions passed down? The cello hadn't changed, but Shannon's perception of what was possible with it did, simply because she saw others pushing differently.
Second: take seriously the relationship between your environment and your thinking. The farm wasn't a setting—it was a teacher. What assumptions do you inherit from the spaces you inhabit? What would change if you worked in a different environment?
Third: consider whether you're optimizing for the wrong metric. Competitions, rankings, and comparative measures often capture attention but misdirect energy. What would it feel like to replace "winning" with "connecting"?
Finally: honor tradition not by copying it but by doing what the great practitioners did—understanding your own time deeply and using its tools creatively. Authenticity is not rebellion against the past; it's a mature engagement with it.
