Fiddle Studio
The glasses clink and the talk and laughter grow louder. In the corner of the pub, musicians sit and play traditional dance tunes that make your feet want to stomp and slide. Join fiddler Meg Wobus Beller as she brings you along into the world of fiddling and traditional music, from bow-grips and double stops to Old-Time tunes and Irish jigs.
Fiddle Studio
Too Much Nothing (Amazing Grace)
Wow, it's good to be back!
This episode is an update on what I've been doing and what I've been thinking about. Hope to be back with more fiddle topics, interviews, and tunes for you all soon.
For my anti-tech writing, check out my Substack A Life Outside or my short (FREE) book Turn It Off: A step by step guide to going offline.
Sheet music for Amazing Grace is here: https://fiddlestudio.blogspot.com/2025/11/too-much-nothing-amazing-grace.html
Thanks for listening!
My Fiddle Studio Book 1: Fiddling for the Complete Beginner is FREE on Amazon! It has over 30 easy beginner fiddle tunes with sheet music, tab, and a link to a video for each tune!
You can reach me at meganbeller@fiddlestudio.com.
My website for learning to fiddle is Fiddle Studio which has courses and a mailing list and my Top 10 Fiddle Tunes!
Welcome back to the Fiddle Studio Podcast, featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus, and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Amazing Grace. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Wow, it's good to be back. It has been a while. This episode is going to be more of an update and a step to help me get back, set my microphone up again and get out my audio software and jumpstart me back into doing some podcasts. There will be fiddle topics coming up, hopefully some interviews if I can get some folks scheduled to do that. But for today, it's gonna be a little more of an update. You can hear what I've been doing, what I've been thinking about. I've been off from the podcast, I think since the spring. I have to double check. My last episode was an interview with Megan, Lynch Chowning. You should check it out. I had some great interviews last winter and last spring, and I recommend all of them. Since then, I have been playing a lot of music. Don't worry, I didn't stop playing the fiddle, but playing music mostly for fun. And for my job, I have been writing. So I write children's books and young adult fiction, other kinds of books. That's mostly what I've been spending my time doing. Right now, my current book that I'm trying to finish up is with the editor. So I have a little bit of downtime while I wait for her to get through the book and send it back to me. And here I am sending out a podcast to you all. I have, I guess, over the spring and the summer, I've definitely become more of a Luddite, even than I was. Even more than I was before uh a Luddite or a person who's very skeptical of technology. That's definitely how I identify these days. And in addition to the various fiction book projects that I work on, I also write specifically about what you might call digital minimalism or tech skepticism. These days it's sort of bleeding into AI doom. And I have a Substack where I publish little essays that I write, mostly when I get an idea in my head and I I cannot get it out, kind of writes itself out and scrolls around in my head over and over again until I write it down. So just right off the bat, I will if you're interested in these kinds of topics and occasionally how they interact with music and want to read more of my anti-technology rantings, you can find my Substack. It is called A Life Outside. And yeah, I'll put a link to it in the show notes. This seems like a good time to say I don't use any AI to plan or write these podcasts. There's no AI in any of my books. I don't use it for my music, transcription, my software. I don't use it for sound editing. Yes, everything that I write and create is brain made. No AI. I've been thinking about this song that I grew up listening to called Too Much Nothing. It's a Bob Dylan song. When I was a kid, I would hear it on car drives when my parents would put in a collection of Peter Paul and Mary songs. And the version that they did is very different from Bob Dylan's version of this song, Too Much Nothing. But I like them both. There are a lot of different interpretations of this song about what the nothing is that Dylan's referring to, if it's idleness, um, having nothing to do, if it's poverty, lack of money, or even like death and war and destruction. It's a catchy song, the way that Peter Paul and Mary covered it. And I asked my parents, what is up with this song, just as a kid, trying to understand it. And the way that they explained it to me was as a criticism of of idleness, of having nothing to do. So that was always how I saw it. I think it's been on my mind because as a mom, I've definitely worried about a world where my children, I have three teenagers right now, have, for lack of a better word, too much nothing, nothing to do. Uh sort of living and surviving gets easier and easier for them, and they can order things to be delivered, and even the prospect of having like robots that do our chores at home. Um I see how they fill in the time that is quote unquote saved from this wonderful labor that is now provided to us in so many parts of our lives. And not to throw my children under the bus, but a lot of the a lot of what they do with that nothing, with that freedom, is just being on the internet, scrolling, checking things, watching things, messaging. Yeah, I worry about it. I I do think folks have worried about this for a long time, you know, worry about their food being replaced with corporate food, worrying about, you know, public transportation and walkable neighborhoods being replaced with cars that you have to buy and upkeep. And now there's so many things that can be replaced. I mean, big Spotify deals to make playlists of AI music. I'm a writer too, so I'm aware of how much writing out there is uh being replaced with AI or or slop, as we sometimes call it. I know artists are feeling that, and even just other parts of our lives, like being able to navigate, being replaced with using the GPS, shopping, going out to eat, being replaced with delivery, our social lives now, our our planning and writing and thinking abilities all being replaced by technologies. If you if you look at the lyrics to the song, Too Much Nothing, to see what what Dylan has to say about what might be the consequences of uh of having nothing to do, each verse ends in a pronouncement about this. The first one, too much nothing, no one has control. The second verse, too much nothing, nobody should look, and the last one, too much nothing, just makes a fellow mean. I mean, I'm on board with Dylan here. When I think about labor saving and computers and technology and our economy taking care of things for us so that we have less to do. I think about Star Trek and Wally. So the Star Trek is the, of course, tech optimist interpretation of this where the computers and the technology take over all the hard stuff, and we can explore the universe and have fun hobbies and have adventures on the holodeck. And if you have seen the children's movie WALL-E, it's the maybe tech skeptical interpretation where computers and technology have taken over all of the hard work, and humans are in these floating chairs, each one clutching a smoothie that's the food that they ingest, and they have like a screen, and they're just scrolling and messaging and scrolling and messaging, and that's what they do all day while the computers do everything else. I think this hit me really hard when I was watching. It was a turbo tax commercial, and they said you could save an hour on your taxes. And then they they showed this woman jogging by a river, and so every now and then I refer to when I'm ranting about this stuff to my family, jogging by the river, that a company says, We're gonna save you time, and the message is like, so you can go jog by the river. But of course, very few of us are using our extra quote unquote saved time to jog by the river. If you check your screen time numbers and stuff, as we have extra time, we we are generally using it for scrolling and being online more. And of course, all of that extra time online does make them more money because of internet privacy and ad rules that allow them to, yeah, collect our information and advertise to us and sell our data. I am gonna talk briefly about the fiddle, just bringing it all back to music. I do think that playing music is kind of a, you know, take that to the man and to this corporate plan and design that is taking all of our labor away and kind of giving us too much nothing. Music is like so many things online, it's a dopamine hit. It makes you feel good, but it costs nothing. I mean, it doesn't have to cost a lot. Once you have an instrument and you can also open up your mouth and sing, and you can just make your own entertainment, either by yourself or with other people. And I love music for that, and I love the way music feels to play, I love the way music feels to listen to, I love being in a big jam of live music. The music is filling all the space around me and feeling the vibration of it, and the energy in the room of people all in tune, in sync with each other. I think all of the things that we can do, whether it's music or anything else really that's offline, building out those parts of our lives that are away from, you know, surveillance, capitalism, and the internet and AI. I think all of those other things we do are just so important to to keep and to develop and to put our our effort into. And that's maybe one of the reasons that I'm not super online at the moment. I definitely have some fiddle tunes I'd love to share with you and some musical topics I've been saving up in my my brain that, you know, thinks of things and and um reminds me to to write them down and share them. But I am just as a as an individual working a lot on building out that part of my life that's offline. And I write about that journey and just ideas for that again in my my Substack. If you're interested in this stuff, you can go check it out. Our tune today is called, oh, it's not really a tune. I guess I call it a tune if it doesn't have words. So this is a song or a a hymn, Amazing Grace. I really love hymns. I grew up my mom was one of seven siblings and they sang a lot together, especially the five girls, and they sang a lot of hymns. So even though I'm I'm Jewish now and I I love Jewish music and Jewish religious music, I still love hymns and and Christian music. Kind of, I don't know. I'm I'm on board for music now, no matter wherever it's coming from. And I've always loved Amazing Grace. I'm gonna play it here at the end and kind of do my take on it just with solo fiddle. But the story of this song is so incredible, probably a lot of you know it, but the man who who wrote the words, John Newton, he wrote them about a huge change that happened in his life. And it it wasn't necessarily about a change that was enacted upon him. It was more like he he went through this difficult experience. It was out to sea and there was a really bad storm. And after that, because of that and because of what he had gone through emotionally, he changed his own life like completely. He had been on this boat, he had had people who were kidnapped from their homes and were going to be sold into slavery. He was a person just perpetuating evil and doing things that you can tell from his later work that he he knew were wrong in order to make money engaging in the slave trade. After the storm, he turned the shit back and he quit the business. He became an abolitionist and a writer and a poet. He wrote poems and hymns and worked against slavery. This really speaks to me just as a testament of free will. He realized even though he was making money, what he was doing was wrong and it was evil, and he changed his life to be something entirely different. So this does kind of fit back into my technology criticism. As a person now who's working on building her offline life, I'm often the maybe the only person at a jam without a phone, the only person at a gym without headphones on, the only person, you know, walking around the block not staring at a screen. And do I kind of wish that more people would have like a John Newton moment about this stuff and just reject AI, reject social media, turn away from that online world? I definitely do, but I'm also a realist and committed to making the best of things. So for me, the best of things offline, it's usually music. I'm gonna just keep playing music, and I encourage all of you to go play some music, play it by yourself, play it on your porch, play it with friends, go find some live music in your community, and you know, maybe try it without your phone. I'm gonna share this hymn with you about having a realization that that changes your life, and you can find sheet music for it on my blog. Yeah, I have this substack, I have this blog. The blog is fiddlestudio.blogspot.com. There's a lot of sheet music posted there and some transcripts of old podcasts. You can also, if you just go to Fiddle Studio, there should be a heading that says blog. If you're interested in more of these thoughts, you can check out the Substack, A Life Outside, and I promise there is more fiddle content coming. Next time we'll be on a fiddle and music topic. But I really hope everyone is doing well. Take care of yourselves, take care of your of your music and your fiddles, and I will talk to you all soon.
