You have a day job and you hate it. You even hate yourself for having a day job. You hate yourself for not being a proper musician.
All this talk of easy money as a musician + freelancer has you thinking you can quit and be a full-time, professional musician. After all, that’s what all the guys & gals on the CDs in your collection did, and look at them, they’re Pro Musos. You have the proof (said whilst waving CDs).
If you have a day job, then do all you can to keep it. Getting out of the 9-5 mode might seem very attractive, but there are a lot of costs you don’t really realize until they are a problem for you.
Over The Hills & Far Away
Some days (weeks, months, years, decades) it will feel like your job is crushing your delicate artistic spirit. If you could be free to sniff the daisies, you’d be able to be your real, authentic self, and your “Dark Side Of The Moon” would just arrive, and the world would be nothing but money, cocaine, hookers with DDs, and great gigs at Central Park, followed by…
“Bin there,” says Fender Tremolo in “Cyborg”. We all have this. It is what we do with it that counts.
The reality is that when you look at truly successful people, they tend to do several things at once. Time isn’t an excuse for them. Successful people naturally prioritize what they have passion for and let go of what they don’t care for as much. It isn’t a hard trade for them.
Successful people also know that there is little to no gain in being miserable. Frustration is a sign to change something. Not unwelcome as a sign. Not welcome to stay. Before they burn down the house, they work out WHY they have frustration and then change that.
Sometimes easier said than done, but make that your strategy: Why?
My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys
All proper musicians are 100% musicians and nothing else. They live life free on the range. Sometimes this is true. But only sometimes. Mostly, it is a fantasy these days.
Back in the 60’s, this was a lot easier for a few reasons: a) life was cheaper, b) people had lower expectations of lifestyle, c) jobs were relatively easy to get, sometimes as simple as showing up and you were given a go.
Remember how at the end of Chapter 1, I warned you, “We all need to take care that we don’t extrapolate ourselves out of the game, esp. with false data.” This is one of those moments.
The thing to remember is that you only hear romantic stories from those who have made it big enough for people to tell the stories. Many of those stories are embellished, if not flat-out made up. Most people who live like Cowboys (or junkies in squats) don’t amount to anything. Until perhaps they get a 9-5 job (or die quietly) that is.
The reality is that many of the musicians on CDs that you own still have day jobs. “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” is about right for most musicians who aren’t Top 40 on a regular basis. So are the bits about the guy going home to build a back deck on the house in the making of DVD that came strapped to the back of a Lamb Of God CD I loaned from the library – “Sacrament” I think.
Most musicians lead surprisingly normal lives these days; some sort of regular job is commonly part of that, at least until they have enough money invested to live off the interest.
Money Changes Everything
Money talks. It really does. Everything in today’s world is tight. Right or wrong we all seem to want it this way.
If you want a phone, car, internet for Facebook, wife, kids, a computer to record your music on, more internet to upload your songs to your website…
All these things take money.
A day job may feel like time wasted, but it doesn’t have to be seen that way. A day job can be the very thing that buys you the ability to do your music thing.
See it this way: if you lived hand to mouth, when would you have time to make music, your music the way you do right now?
Before you get too far down the path of an idealized pseudo-tribal agrarian lifestyle, people worked hard all day, had little free time (hence the value placed on festivals), could be called into battle at a moment’s notice, died young of what we would now call trivial causes, and didn’t have mobile phones with 6” screens to call up “Star Wars Episode #97 – The Force Enforcers of Forcetooine”.
Keeping money coming in is what you do to buy the ability to have your DAW, plugins, and more importantly, the time to sit around pontificating the best ways to get your song heard on the internet.
Watch Me Bleed
Let me tell you what it is like to be un-working:
It sucks
Yes, really it does. You have a ton of time, but rather than the bonus time going into more & better music people fall over themselves to buy from you, you find the stress mounting. As the stress mounts, your actual creativity diminishes. Your music suffers. Your health & happiness suffer. You don’t sleep properly. You stop being able to go out for dinner, movies, to see a band, or surf… IT ALL STOPS!
If you don’t have money safely rolling in, you worry. Worry undoes your ability to be creative as you swap from having mental bandwidth to consider artistic matters to expending all your bandwidth on where the money to keep yourself from living on potato peelings scrounged off the floor might come from.
Some of my most creative times have been whilst I was working and bringing in a pretty decent income. I may not have been as happy as I wanted to be, but I knew I had X number of days to compose and enough money coming in to buy a new computer, new CDs, and save for the future.
Safety can be a trap in some situations, but in others, it is what we need to be creative. It may not be exactly the work you think you want, but it may be just what you need to actually live the lifestyle you want.
Question: if your life’s dream was to have a luxury limousine, and one day you won a top-of-the-line Hyundai with all the trimmings. Would you kill yourself because it wasn’t a Rolls-Royce? If you were smart, probably not, you’d be delighted that your dream came true.
If you have the ability to stay working, do so, even if it is part-time work. Working can let you have your dream if you loosen the ideas about the details of that dream and focus instead on the feelings.
Machines (Or Back To Humans)
Not working a normal job makes you an unattractive hire for most bosses. Might be unfair. But it is reality.
Bosses are wary of hiring people who have spent any time outside of perfect 9-5 jobs with descriptions they can understand. They think you have issues, you could be: a) unreliable, b) have attitude problems, c) be unwilling to take direction, d) a prisoner, e) a drug fiend… All (hopefully) wrong, but they won’t change this impression, especially if you tell the truth: “My job was boring so I quit to try to be a Rock Star and failed badly so here I am”.
Even Bruce Springsteen could find it hard to get a day job spurting soft serve once the hiring person realizes that he isn’t a guy with the same name as that guy.
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
None of this means you absolutely shouldn’t pull the pin. But really have a very clear sense that you are able to manage yourself in the wild blue yonder, and able to get back on the horse (not the white one) if needed.
Before you bail on reality, take stock and check that you can pay your bills, save for a new car, braces for your kids, and still do your music thing in comfort.
If you still hate your job, and I can’t necessarily blame you, then can you put yourself in a position to get a different job, one more suited to your temperament?
Could your unhappiness be from something in your mindset more than the world around you? If you keep finding yourself in the same situation time & again, I think this is a very good Q to A.
In the meantime, be sure to work from real data before you quit your income.
Benedict Roff-Marsh 