Are You a Real Musician?
I was sitting on the floor of my tiny apartment crying. I knew I had to make a phone call to accept a job I didn’t want.
It was a good job – a contracting position at Google, that paid really well. The agency was very confused as to why I was so reluctant to accept it.
But this great job offer, that to most people would represent success, to me represented failure.
Seven years before, when I left the corporate world and moved to Mexico to focus on music, I vowed that I would starve to death as a musician before I ever went back to working in a cubicle.
But the rough-and-tumble musician lifestyle had taken its toll, and here I was, broke, with nodules on my vocal cords, acid reflux, and a whole lot of credit-card debt and back-taxes. The part-time software jobs that had (sort-of) filled the gaps in my music income had dried up, and I was driving for Lyft to try to pay the rent. My life was falling apart, and my back was against the wall.
So I picked myself up off the floor, made the phone call, and accepted the job. It was only a one-year contract, so I resolved to make the best of it. I hired the best vocal coach in the world and started working on my voice, and tried to find a little bit of time to practice every morning.
I put a happy face on it and told everyone that it had worked out really well. But inside, I was defeated. I didn’t even think about it that much – it made me too sad. I wasn’t a musician anymore. I was a failure.
For several months, I kind of just checked out and went into survival mode. You know that feeling when you tell yourself “This is temporary” and put all your thoughts toward the future?
But eventually something shifted in me. I realized that I had no more excuses anymore to not be a songwriter.
For years, I had told myself that my financial troubles were making it too hard for me to be creative. Now that excuse was gone.
Then I told myself I was too lonely to write songs, that I needed love to be inspired. When I had two girlfriends but still couldn’t bring myself to write, I had to admit that that was just an excuse, too.
Eventually, I ran out of excuses and I had to just start showing up every day and doing the work.
And I realized that my quest to be a full-time musician was just another excuse, another way to distract myself from the hard, scary work of sitting down and staring at a blank page and actually writing new songs and sharing them with the world.
I had been telling myself that once I was a full-time musician, then I would be able to focus on my own music. In reality, a musical day job is still a day job. I know because I’ve been a full-time musician, playing covers in Mexico and being the lead singer of a classic-rock cover band. There were fun moments, but mostly it was a hustle that wore out my body and my vocal cords, and didn’t magically make me more creative.
So I started writing every day. Since October 1st of 2020, I’ve written every single day, without fail. On January of this year, I started a new commitment – to write a new song every day. Most of them are terrible, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m showing up and doing the work.
And I’ve realized that this is the real defining factor that makes you an artist or not: regularly creating art, and of course, sharing it with the world.
That’s it. That’s all that matters. Making financial success the defining factor is just letting society decide whether or not you’re not an artist.
Of course, I want to make music that people enjoy and I want them to express their gratitude financially, but I can’t afford to wait until enough of them are doing that before I start being a songwriter. As “Papa” John Philips of the Mamas and the Papas said: “You’ve gotta make your own kind of music, even if nobody else sings along”.
Austin Kleon says: “If you want to be the noun, do the verb”. If you want to be a songwriter, start writing songs. If you want to be a writer, start writing. If you want to be a painter, start painting.
Jesus said “By their fruits ye shall know them”, not by their paychecks.
American society is very fixated on how we earn a living, as evidenced by the way we ask “What do you do?” almost immediately upon meeting someone. But this is not the norm in other cultures, and you don’t have to let it define you.
The fact of the matter is, no one really cares how you earn a living. They only ask that question out of habit and to find out more about you. If the art that you make is a better representation of who you are, and it takes up more of your energy and devotion, you owe it to yourself and to others to put that side of you out front.
If someone asks the follow-up question of whether you’re making a living as an author/musician/artist, you can tell them you do other work to pay the bills. There’s no shame in that. Plenty of great authors and artist have had day jobs. T.S. Eliot worked at a bank. Salman Rushdie worked as a journalist while he wrote his first novel. The vast majority of artists, writers, musicians, and other creatives are not making a living from their work. A few lucky ones are, but I guarantee you they didn’t wait for a lucky break before they started working on their art.
Don’t let money be the definition of success. If your goal is to be an artist, then every day that you create art, you’re succeeding.
You don’t need anyone’s permission or approval to be an artist. You just need commitment.
If you show up and work at it every day*, you’re an artist in my book, regardless of how much money you make or whether or not you ever get recognized for your work.
Now get to work.
*For me, making it a daily habit is essential, but if you’re carving out several hours every weekend to get deep into the zone and producing a lot of good work, that counts, too.
Other reading:
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield – essential reading for anyone who wants to do anything creative but is being held back by the forces of Resistance.
How to Be An Artist – a talk by Jerry Saltz, the Internet’s favorite art critic.
Your Unfulfilling Day Job Might Be the Best Thing That Has Ever Happened to You
