lowquality.net

Played an open mic gig last night with Luke Tay­lor as part of his house band. Didn’t get in until about 2AM. As nice as it would have been to sleep in and totally avoid work today, the post-gig endor­phin rush may be the best med­i­cine for get­ting through the drudgery of my 9 to 5. Plus it’s Friday.

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I have a ten­dency to always fall behind a bit when it comes to mak­ing major life deci­sions. I’m an incur­able late bloomer. I got mar­ried a lit­tle later than I maybe should have and we’ll prob­a­bly have kids much later than we prob­a­bly should. Our finan­cial sit­u­a­tion could have been dealt with years prior to when we actu­ally have man­aged to do it. My anx­i­ety issues, my weight-loss, all of these things.. once they were finally  “under con­struc­tion” there was always this feel­ing of “hey this is easy, how come I didn’t do this before?” Rel­a­tively speak­ing, all of these projects have been dealt with quite eas­ily when com­pared to how impos­si­ble they may have at one time seemed.

And so it hap­pens again. Despite hav­ing done so much in the last 5 years to draw a steady income out­side of music, I am feel­ing myself pulled more and more back to it and I keep ask­ing myself “why now?” The answer may sim­ply coin­cide with my con­cur­rent treat­ment for anx­i­ety / depres­sion. As a result of my ther­apy ses­sions and med­ica­tion, I’ve found myself to be so much more com­fort­able on stage, so much more at peace play­ing with other musi­cians and much more capa­ble of per­form­ing in the moment, that I think I sim­ply enjoy mak­ing music again. Hon­estly it’s been way longer than 5 years since I’ve said that, prob­a­bly since before I attended Berklee that I could say that I enjoyed mak­ing music in such a pure way. My only worry now is how to keep the momen­tum going. How do I keep the gigs com­ing and how could I, ulti­mately, lever­age this back into a full-time career that ful­fills my finan­cial needs as well my psy­chic needs?

There are thou­sands blogs and hun­dreds of books, writ­ten by far bet­ter musi­cians and music indus­try pun­dits than I, devoted to answer­ing that ques­tion and I ask it half­heart­edly. I know the give and take between being a pro­fes­sional musi­cian and a 9 to 5 schmo. Hav­ing done both, I know there’s a lot to be sac­ri­ficed in being a self-employed per­son, let alone a self-employed musi­cian or artist. I’m not exactly pre­pared for it right now, but, for a change, I know that I want to be. I seem to know a lot of peo­ple who do what they love for a liv­ing.. or love what they do for a liv­ing.. (you get the idea). I know it’s a bless­ing to be counted among those peo­ple, but it’s never seemed like too much for ask, even though it’s always seemed impossible.

It can only be hoped that when the solu­tion presents itself I will be as dumb­founded at how sim­ple and easy it seems that I will won­der why I had not done it sooner.