Best and Worst Decisions I’ve Made as a Professional Musician
At the end of last month, I moved to Iowa City to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. That move marked the end of what I consider to be the first chapter of my music career, as I intend to spend the next few years focused on my writing. If I had to choose three words and a phrase to encapsulate my experience as a professional musician, they’d be blessed, transcendent, could you turn down? and frustrating. I have made good sounds and I have made bad ones. I’ve played hundreds of gigs, toured the East Coast, played to six thousand ears and played to six of them. I’ve written three albums and recorded two. I’ve played for two thousand dollars and I’ve played for twenty. I’ve learned how to properly wrap an instrument cable. How to run a basic mixer. How to make a room full of people quiet, and how to make one louder. I have learned that I should learn how to manipulate social media. I’ve seen an ugly person with a microphone become beautiful, and a beautiful person with a microphone become ugly. I’ve seen talent that kept me awake, and talent that helped me sleep. I’ve heard how much I haven’t heard. I’ve met people that made me believe in people. Creatively, and otherwise. I’ve met Robert Glasper. I’ve opened for Crumb.
Music has been my adulthood. My passion, my job, my craft, the bane of my existence — all of that. Here are three of the best and worst decisions I’ve made as a professional musician, and what I took from them:
Best: Learning Music Theory
I always think of music theory as like grammar. You don’t need to be able to explain how sentences work to make one, but if you want to talk about sentences with other writers, it helps to have access to the terms around which they’re structured. Music theory has made it easier for me to communicate with other musicians. Sometimes a bandleader turns and says, “this one is a I-IV-V in G major” and there isn’t time to ask “what does that mean?” Music theory is the reason I can show up to a jam session in any popular genre, ask “what’s the key?” and find my place. Music theory is a crucial step in the move towards instrument fluency, and instrument fluency is essential when it comes to working as a professional musician.
That isn’t the main reason I’m happy I learned the stuff. My understanding of music theory has shaped my understanding of tension and harmony. My first guitar instructor spent lessons deconstructing the theory behind my favorite songs. He showed me why certain moments felt as good as they felt — what the chord progressions did that was unconventional and separated classics from all the other hits. What made a song endure. The odd key change in “Under the Bridge” when the intro moves into the verse. The B section in John Mayer’s “Gravity,” where an Ebmajor9 appears in a song that is in the key of G major. By understanding the rules my favorite songs were breaking, I learned how to write towards tension and originality. I am incredibly proud of the songs I’ve written, and I have my first guitar instructor to thank for that.
Worst: Not Focusing Broadly Enough in my Musical Training
To be fair to myself, I started playing music quite late. I was seventeen when I learned how to play a “G” chord, and by eighteen I was performing onstage. From seventeen to nineteen, my focus was mainly on guitar — learning scales, chords, right hand rhythms, and all that good stuff. From nineteen to twenty-two, my focus shifted to vocals. When I started working as a professional at twenty-three, it occurred to me how many aspects of the craft I had neglected. A complete musician has a relationship with sound, along with their instrument. They know what compressor the engineer used for the vocals on their favorite song. They can hear how the frequencies interact in a room. They can find their way around Logic. Writers have their relationship with language, and musicians have their relationship to sound. I wish I had understood that, and developed a more varied approach to my “studies.” There are still a lot of gaps in my training, particularly for a professional musician, and the older I get, the harder it is to find time to fill them.
Best: Learning to Sing
Learning to sing gave me performance independence. I don’t have to hire someone, I can provide the melody to my own accompaniment. The market for guitar players playing over a loop pedal for three hours is not non-existent, but it’s too small for me to have gone that route and been satisfied. There’s a reason popular music is not instrumental music. People like lyrics. People like to hear a voice. Not everyone plays guitar, not everyone understands rhythm, but everyone has a voice, and it’s often the first thing people connect with. That’s why there are singing competitions, because someone in a suit has assumed (often incorrectly) that if audiences can connect with someone’s voice, that voice will be enough to sell the music.
The majority of my income in life has been made singing. I was not born with blessed vocal cords, or even decent ones, but with consistent work, I’ve managed my vocal ability towards ‘passable.’ The adage anyone can learn to sing is mostly true, although a truer statement might be, anyone can learn to sing as well as they can sing. I will never be like Luther Vandross, Whitney Houston, or Mariah Carey, but with hard work, I’ve managed to become a completely different version of myself. Also, singing is fun. I hate it, but it’s fun.
Worst: Learning to Sing Wrong
I’ve written about it before, so I’ll keep the beatdown of self to a minimum. But I had no clue what I was doing when I learned to sing, and so throughout my career, my voice has been unreliable. It’s the main reason I don’t enjoy my own recorded music. It’s the main reason for my discomfort as a performer, and also the main source of my musician impostor syndrome. I should’ve approached learning to sing by acquiring information, and rooting my confidence in that information I’d acquired. Rather than just trying to build my voice through repetition. The voice does need to be built through repetition, but correct repetition. 10,000 hours spent doing something wrong, will make you a master at doing the thing wrong. If I could go back and emphasize the truth of that to my younger self, I certainly would.
Best: Taking a “Yes” Year
People need to see you do something to believe you can do it, that’s just the way it is. Experience beats Degrees in “Experience, Degrees, Connections.” Sometimes, it can beat Connections too. In 2019, I said ‘yes’ to just about every gig I was offered. At one point, I was in seven bands. Someone would see me playing with someone and call me up to play with somebody else, and that’s how it snowballed. By the summer of that year, I was getting called all the time. And when I wasn’t getting calls, I was making calls. Or rather, sending emails. I went to open mics, played at breweries, restaurants, I played at Kroger. I played every Sunday at a Potbelly Sandwich Shop — two hours solo for forty dollars and a sub. For one year, no gig was beneath me. That year was my education in music, really. You don’t need a degree after you put yourself through something like that, the experience is your credential. It is exhausting, it isn’t always fun, but having a yes year is most certainly useful.
Worst: Not Taking Better Care of My Hearing
I’ve had ringing so long, I can’t remember what silence sounds like. I blared headphones from eleven to twenty-three, with intermittent periods of “I should turn down.” The music in my car was as high as I could tolerate. Never wore ear protection onstage. Now I wish I had been a lot more careful. A lot more careful. Some general life advice: start caring about your health the moment it occurs to you to care about it. If reading this sentence is the moment for you, then let this be the moment. The stuff young you is doing to you will affect old you. Be careful.
I love music. It will always be a part of my life. But what I’m realizing here at Iowa is that I am a writer. I simply am one. I am as much a writer as the sun is far away. But I don’t know what else on this Earth I love the way I love music. Hot wings? I dunno. Music will always be a huge part of who I am, even if it constitutes no part of my income. And I’m starting to think it might be better if it doesn’t. That maybe there’s something about keeping certain loves sacred. Music, for me, is a sacred thing. I intend to always keep it that way.
