Last year, Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler appeared on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast to promote a new documentary about his career outside the iconic rock band. During the conversation, Tyler began to describe the early days of Aerosmith, and how guitarist Joe Perry would sit around at night playing whatever came to his mind on guitar. Tyler recognized the potential for the material and soon purchased a cassette recorder to capture the ideas as they made themselves known.
“That’s where we got some of our biggest songs,” he told Rogan. “But just think about the material we never got on tape. The ideas we never got to explore.”
Think about that for a second. For nearly half a century now, Aerosmith has been considered one of the most significant and most influential groups of all-time, yet the members cannot help thinking about what could have been. There is a fire in their gut that yearns to discover the next song, the next chord progression, the next melody, the next whatever it is that leads them to something new. For Aerosmith, success is secondary to feeling fulfilled creatively, and even decades worth of work cannot quench their creative thirst.
If all of Aerosmith’s accomplishments have been unable to replace their desire to create it is probably safe to assume the same would apply to you. The journey of creativity is not one where the goal is the destination because there is no end. To create is to embark on one adventure after another with little to no idea where things will end up. It’s about taking chances and accepting the outcome, whether good or bad, as something that will not stop you from continuing your work.
With this in mind, take a moment to think about your development process. Are you using a metaphorical tape recorder to capture all your ideas as soon as they come into your head, or are you allowing potentially great thoughts to be lost in the ether of life just as quickly as they recognized? Do you pursue your ideas until they are fully realized, or do you play with them until the next best thing comes along? If so, why?
We live in a time where people feel pressured to create. Even those who love working on new ideas often say they feel rushed to churn out new projects. Taking our time is associated with falling behind, but why? If time and focused effort can lead to better work, shouldn’t we all be taking our time?
Ask any creative and they will tell you that they hate when being creative feels like work. Ask any creative who has made a career out of their creativity, and they will tell you it’s always been work. You have to put in the work to get the most out of your ideas, and that begins by not letting them slip through your fingers in a fit of spontaneous creation. You don’t have to save everything because not all things you think up will be great, but you should see them through long enough to know whether or not you’re onto something potentially massive. Refining those senses takes time, but it’s worth the effort.
Don’t let great ideas go to waste. Take notes. Record your thoughts. Do whatever you need to do to ensure those moments of brilliance that strike like lightning coursing through your veins are not gone just as soon as they arrive. Wring every ounce of possibility out of each idea and, in time, you will find yourself creating things that change the world.
At some point in the last decade, the focus of promotional materials pivoted from an exploration of the art itself to something more focused on the personalities of those behind said art. The problem is, there is a lot more that goes into most of it than just someone’s character. You may have heard a saying about how the funniest people often feel the most pain, and the same thing goes for music. Those able to make others feel better usually do so by first trying to heal themselves, but just because you make others’ pain go away does not mean yours will too.
The same thing can also be said for writing and any other part of the music business. We’ve all succumb to this temptation of believing people’s personality is wholly representative of who they are. Maybe they’re the quirky Twitter commentator who has held a longtime publicity job, or perhaps they’re the angry critic whose takedowns of music notables has paid their bills for last five years. Maybe they’re a musician who sings about exorcizing demons, so we believe finding peace is possible, or perhaps they’re a really positive promoter who always thinks about the artists on the come up. We learn to see people as caricatures because it’s comfortable both in the short team and over the long haul. When we get close things tend to get messy.
Now if we all do this and we all know we do this then why is it so hard to break the cycle? When did it become taboo to let your flaws be known? In an era where the idea body positivity is finally getting the kind of widespread acceptance it has always deserved, we seem to have become comfortable allowing the confidence we have in our outside appearance to speak to our confidence in about other areas of life. We see a smile or hear a laugh and think, at least in some small way, that person’s life must be pretty good. After all, only people who have figured out something about this crazy thing called life could have that kind of expression.
I too have fallen prey to this kind of thinking in both of the ways described above. I have taken people’s personality as a sign of their mental and physical health. I have also used my personality to mask my struggles, such as hiding pain with jokes and writing about nonsense when really there is something very specific I wish I could discuss. The simplicity of only understanding a person or thing enough to categorize them as something in your head (good, bad, beautiful, ugly, smart, funny, etc.) is a plague, and it’s making us lose connection in an age where we claim to be more connected than ever.
To combat this in my own small way, I started sharing my story, warts and all. It was not easy at first, but in time it got easier. I challenged myself to write about myself every day, and every time I told a story I tried to add at least one detail unique to that story that told people something about me. Maybe it was a way I thought about some bigger concept, or perhaps it was just a turn of phrase. Sometimes I detailed the things I ate and why, but other times I would just mention a song and its inadvertent relevance to whatever events were unfolding.
You know what I found? The more I exposed my true self to the world the more people seemed to give a damn. All the pushback and negativity I expected to encounter never amounted to much if anything. Instead, I was inundated with messages from people of all ages, some of whom were complete strangers beforehand, telling me how much they connected with some part of my story.
They say in marketing you only have a few seconds to grab someone’s attention or you may never get such an opportunity ever again. That may be true when it comes to physical products, but in the game of life and art, the real success is found in strong, lasting relationships. It’s not just about grabbing someone’s attention, but connecting to them on a level so deep they hunger for they grow to have a kind of dependence on that connection. A longing, if you will. And you, the creator, will feel it too. Because at the end of the day all we have for sure is one another, and there is peace to be found in the communities we build together.
Whether you’re an artist trying to bring attention to your work or a person trying to connect with the world around you, the clearest path to success – not to mention the only real chance at happiness any of us have – is through the true expression of self. Let people into your world, show them ‘the process’ of being who you are and working towards who you want to become. Allow people to understand better that they share this journey called life with you, and through doing so hopefully, inspire them to create as well. Even if all you do is entertain them, you’ll know they’re taking in something real and true and representative of the struggles you overcome to do whatever it is you do.
Making ideas the best they can be is easier than you think
Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler recently appeared on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast to promote a new documentary. During the conversation, Tyler began to describe the early days of Aerosmith, and how guitarist Joe Perry would sit around at night playing whatever came to his mind on guitar. Tyler recognized the potential for the material and soon purchased a cassette recorder to capture the ideas as they made themselves known.
“That’s where we got some of our biggest songs,” he told Rogan. “But just think about the material we never got on tape. The ideas we never got to explore.”
Think about that for a second. For nearly half a century now, Aerosmith has been considered one of the biggest and most influential groups of all-time, yet the members cannot help thinking about what could have been. There is a fire in their gut that years to discover the next song, the next chord progression, the next melody, the next whatever it is that leads them to something new. For Aerosmith, success is secondary to feeling fulfilled creatively, and even decades worth of work cannot quench their thirst for whatever comes next.
If all of Aerosmith’s accomplishments have been unable to replace their desire to create it is probably safe to assume the same would apply to you. The journey of creativity is not one where the goal is the destination because there is no end. To create is to embark on one adventure after another with little to no idea where things will end up. It’s about taking chances and accepting the outcome, whether good or bad, as something that will not stop you from continuing your work.
With this in mind, take a moment to think about your development process. Are you pulling out the metaphorical tape recorder to capture all your ideas as soon as they come into your head, or are you allowing potentially great thoughts to be lost in the ether of life just as quickly as they were discovered? Do you pursue your ideas until they are fully realized, or do you play with them until the next best thing comes along? If so, why?
Ask any creative and they will tell you that they hate when being creative feels like work. Ask any creative who has made a career out of their creativity, and they will tell you it’s always been work. You have to put in the work to get the most out of your ideas, and that begins by not letting them slip through your fingers in a fit of spontaneous creation. You don’t have to save everything because not all things you think up will be great, but you should see them through long enough to know whether or not you’re onto something potentially massive. Refining those senses takes time, but it’s worth the effort.
Don’t let great ideas go to waste. Take notes. Record your thoughts. Do whatever you need to do to ensure those moments of brilliance that strike like lightning coursing through your veins are not gone just as soon as they arrive. Wring every ounce of possibility out of each idea and, in time, you will find yourself creating things that change the world.
How to pursue your passions without quitting your job
If there is one complaint we hear more often than any other from those on the come up in music it is this: I wish I had more time to pursue my passions.
It is easy to understand why this complaint is so popular, especially in today’s fast-paced world of entertainment. Once someone choose the path or career they wish to pursue they are taught to pour everything they have into that one goal, to sacrifice as needed in pursuit of something bigger than what they have now. This logic was pushed onto our team members when they were starting out more than a decade ago and it is still being taught to aspiring industry newcomers today.
Here’s the thing: While it is important to focus your energy on chasing the things you are most passionate about it is foolish to assume anyone is passionate about just one thing. Most people are passionate about many things, and more often than not those things are all related. Musicians, for example, are often interested in production and publicity. Likewise, many folks working on the business side of music have an artistic side they wish to further explore.
The problem is, the current industry culture does not promote pursuit of passions that lie outside what pays your bills. Some could argue it actively promotes against them, urging professionals at any level to be constantly connected to what’s happening minute to minute all over the industry. This forces people into believing they have to put in forty hours a week, if not sixty or even eighty, if they want to succeed. That kind of daunting commitment makes considering other, non-paying projects very difficult.
If all of this rings a bit too familiar to you we have a solution. It is not exactly a groundbreaking notion, nor is it guaranteed to help you make your side hustle a full time gig, but it will promote further creativity outside the confines of your job.
Here’s the trick: Make time.
It’s the simple! Make time every day to do the things you want and do not allow yourself or anyone else to tell you such things are frivolous because they are not. Whether you only have five minutes each day in between jobs or an hour before bed, find time to do something for yourself and own it. Stake a claim to your own finite amount of time and do not let anyone take it from you. The industry will still be there when you are done, always. It is not going to leave you behind just because you thought to do something for yourself instead of refreshing your feeds for the thirty-first time.
If you want to express yourself beyond the scope of your current career then it is on you to make that happen. No one is going to make time for you, nor is anyone going to ask if you would like to do less so that personal projects can get more attention. In fact, most are going to actively try and consume your free time so that they can hopefully make time in their lives for the things that interest them beyond the confines of their office. You’re not the only one who wishes they had more time, but you can be the one who makes a decision to find the time and keep it for themselves. You have that power.
Will it be everything you need? Probably not. At least, not at first. Your goal right now should simply be starting, and once you do that then you can refine your focus further. Don’t look to write a novel next month if you cannot find time to write a poem today. Setting unattainable goals will only make it harder for you to follow through on chasing dreams because they will always seem too out of reach to be worthy of attempts in the first place. Follow your passions one steps a time and slowly, but surely you will make progress. I guarantee it.
I’ve been emailing with a few up and coming artists about their summer and fall plans. In every exchange I make it a point to ask artists what they’d like to be doing in the 3 month, 6 months, and one year from the point of our conversation. I don’t expect a detailed answer, but whenever someone tells me their goals without mentioning their audience I get worried.
There are a limitless number of paths to success in life and music, but if you are thinking about the future without first considering the demands of your audience you are a blind captain steering a lost ship. We live in the age of on-demand entertainment for every taste, meaning there is always something to meet the needs of consumers. In order to build the kind of following you need to make a career out of music you need to be taking the demands of your audience into account.
Is there enough demand to support a tour through the midwest? What should our setlist be? Should we continue pursuing this new sound? What kind of merchandise should we be printing? If we were to sign with a label, what label rosters would be a good fit for us?
All of these questions are important decisions, and they should not be made without considering what you audiences wants/expects from you.
Social media has made this easier than ever before. On Twitter, for example, you can run custom polls asking your audience to weigh in on virtually anything.
You don’t have to do what your audience demands. At the end of the day your music is an expression of yourself and only you can determine what that means for your craft. If you need to make a bold change, do so with confidence. Your audience will believe in you as long as you believe in yourself.
That said, where business is concerned, the smart plays is always in listening to those always invested in your product. The people who love your music have heard it and talked about it as much – if not more – than you have, and they know a thing or two about it. Listen to them.
James Shotwell is the Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. He is also the host of the Inside Music podcast. You should probably follow him on Twitter.`
It takes a lot of work. I don’t have to tell you what I’m referring to because if it’s truly what you want to be doing with your life then you already know what I’m talking about. Maybe you haven’t admitted this to yourself yet, but it’s true.
I recently got into cooking, so for the purpose of this I’m going to use cooking as my prime example because there are few too many unique paths in music to choose just one. We all cook or know of cooking so it’s a fairly common ground to build from. If you cook, you may or may not think you’re any good at it. If you don’t cook then you already know where you stand.
All cooking is as much an act of artistic expression as it is an experiment. Learning the basics, from ensuring your chicken is thoroughly cooked to baking cookies, is relatively simple, but to become proficient at any single recipe or dish requires endlessly repeating trials made with the smallest of changes between each batch. A little extra salt here, a dash of cinnamon there. You make tiny, incremental changes over and over again until you find a mix that tastes better than the rest then you set to besting that.
There is no ceiling for success in cooking, just like there is no ceiling in music, writing, painting, designing, marketing, or a million other fields. The possibilities are limitless, and you have the unique ability to express yourself through your work in a way that others cannot. Others may stumble upon similar ideas or expressions, but none of them can be exactly likes yours. It may sound corny, but it’s true, and you won’t know just how powerful your ideas can be until you apply them to whatever it is you wish to do.
Let me be frank: Chasing any passion is a process that never ends. Even the best of the best — the people you look to as ‘trendsetters’ or ‘icons’ — in any field have nights when the greatness we all strive toward is out of reach. It happens more often than you think, in fact, and every time they fall short it still hurts just as much as it does for you or me.
And really, the greatness we seek will always be out of reach. There is no one way to do anything just like there is no way to please everyone. If you put your efforts into finding perfection in any way you will always come up short. Your goal should not be perfection, but rather constant progress in a direction that makes you feel happy and fulfilled. If you feel you’re grinding away and getting nowhere there may be good reason for that. You have to listen to yourself, and you have to heed the advice that little voice inside your soul is yearning to get across.
To work towards something is to accept the inevitability of failure. You can control your progress to an extent, but that control will only get you so far. Success is the cousin of risk. It lives and breathes on the back of chances taken, but to take a chance is to risk failure. It’s okay though, because everyone fails far more often than they succeed. What will separate you from others is your ability to get back up whenever you fall down and try again. That’s all you need to do: Keep getting back up. Keep trying new things. Keep believing.
You might think you want to reach some pinnacle of success, but that’s not really the truth. What you want is to be recognizes as the best of the best, or at least one of the best. If you really reached the peak — if such a thing existed — you would become so bored with existence that you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself. Embrace the process and learn to love it. That is the only way to stay sane in this crazy, crazy thing we call life.
James Shotwell is the Digital Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. He is also the Film Editor for Substream Magazine and host of the Inside Music podcast. You should follow him on Twitter.
A music festival sponsored by Jif and Smuckers called ‘Peanut Butter and JAM’
An interactive google map outlining the quintessential route for seeing every major landmark referenced in a third wave ska song.
Taking a road trip to see every major landmark referenced in a third wave ska song
A blog dedicated to late-90s alternative christian rock
‘TheySoundLike’ a website that autogenerates a playlist of recommended artists based on the name of any band input by users
A collection of .gifs from the 1994 film ‘The Paper’ with headlines and dialogue from the 2016 election photoshopped into the frame
A listicle of playlists developed by characters on The Simpsons
A petition to convince Netflix it needs to resurrect the mid-2000s sitcom My Name Is Earl in order to properly conclude its Season 4 cliffhanger.
Crowdfunding a Slick Shoes tribute album
Editorial – ‘In Defense of Neon Pop: Embrace Your Inner Scene Kid’
Book: My life as a millennial emo and why I no longer hate everything
Even when a list is good the contents of that list can be bad. I try to set aside time every day to brainstorm a few new ideas. These can be ideas related to my career, my hobbies, or life in general, but every day I challenge myself to develop a few things that could change my world. The ideas outlined above were all written down by me at some point in the last week, and I’m not ashamed to admit I definitely made in depths notes plotting out how 2-3 of these might come to fruition. I’ve since moved on, but that’s kind of the point of the exercise: Be creative without fear of failure. Anything is possible, you just have to use your imagination.
I make a lot of lists in my life. I make lists for grocery store, for chores around the house, for work, and in order to keep track of all the things I’ve yet to do. Sometimes these lists help me work more efficiently, while other times they remind me to complete a task or two I may have otherwise overlooked. Whatever the case, lists help me get a lot more accomplished in a timely manner than I would be able to do without them.
Idea lists, like the one posted above, help me by keeping my mind active even when I’m otherwise not engaged in an activity. By getting all the wild thoughts and ideas I have down on paper I’m able to better decide what I should or should not do next in my day, week, month, life. I’ve also found that creativity exercises like an idea list can help generate better ideas faster than you typically world. The brain is a muscle after all, and in order to make it function to the best of its abilities you have work it out. Consider idea lists like going to the gym, and the more you do it the more creative you will feel yourself becoming.
People are not machines. This may seem obvious on paper, but it’s a bit harder to discern when applied to real life. Many people feel they are put on this Earth to do one very specific thing, and every morning they set to doing that one thing over and over, again and again, until they whither and die. If they’re an accountant, they account. If they’re a teacher, they teach. Like machines, these people feel the only have one task and that is the only task they set to do. While this method of living may work in some careers, it is a recipe for disaster, or at the very least lethargy, when it comes to the creative arts. Whether you’re a writer, artist, poet, musician, filmmaker, or working under some experimental title I don’t even know exists just yet, variety is key to your success, and not just in the work you do. Let me explain:
A toaster’s sole purpose is to toast, and in order to do this it needs electricity. You can toast anything you can fit into your toaster, but virtually every toaster on this planet only functions if it has power provided through an electrical. There is no variety in the diet of your toaster. It needs one thing and one thing only to work. If you try and run your toaster of something else, like water or wind, you’re not going to toast anything anytime soon.
People are not toasters, or any other machine for that matter because we cannot rely on a single source of any kind to survive. We need a variety of foods in order to gain energy, just like we need a variety of influences in order to feel consistently inspired. We all have our go-to foods and sources of inspiration, but if we only rely on those things our palettes will tell us they have grown stale in a very short matter of time.
The same idea also applies to writing: If all you do day in and day out is write about the same thing the same way your creative drive will stall long before it should. If you’re a pop-punk critic who only listens to pop-punk your ability to denote the small differences between various artists will abound, but after several months or maybe even years you will find yourself becoming increasingly burnt out on the genre that once felt like your musical home. This is because all great writing, and by that I mean everything from criticism to novel writing, thrives on original ideas born from a variety of life experiences. Writing solely about pop-punk is perfectly acceptable, but if the only thing you’re putting into your ears is the sound of three chords and gang vocals your mind and body will begin to hate the idea of continuing to rely on that musical diet. You brain can only take so much of the same input before it stops responding as it typically would, and the only way to prevent that from happening is by diversifying your musical and/or entertainment palette.
It’s important to remember when you find yourself stuck on a creative plateau that literally every other person who has tried to create something from nothing has found themselves in the exact same place. Creativity stems from original thought, and those are born from your personal experiences, including all the media you consume throughout the day. Your creativity needs nourishment just like your body, and it can only survive on a single source for so long before it begins to breakdown. The responsibility to prevent that from happening rests entirely on your shoulders, and that is something you should never take for granted. We live in a big, beautiful world of creativity, and you owe it to your own career to experience as much of it as possible. So next time you’re feeling down, stuck, or otherwise lethargic toward your passion, step outside your comfort zone and take in something radically different. Truth be told you might not like what you find, but even if that is the case you will walk away with a new influence and a bevy of new ideas born out of what you have just experience. In those ideas you might find your next big move, and if not at least you’ll have a new story to share with those around you.
Life is short. Take my advice and experience as much of it as possible.
The following post is the latest in our ongoing content collaboration series with the fine folks at Sonicbids. Enjoy!
“Citing artistic differences, the band broke up in May,” sings songwriter/pianist Ben Folds. Then he recounts how the band reformed without him and changed their name. This event is far from extraordinary in the world of music and illustrates how far creative people will go just to avoid having confrontations with their bandmates. Bands are like families, but the love and comradeship between you and your musical friends can suddenly become a burden when things aren’t going well.
How do you proceed when you’ve got people with different ideas, and no middle ground presents itself? You don’t want to damage friendships or bruise people’s feelings. But there are ways to keep your artistic integrity and protect those critical relationships. By borrowing techniques from business managers, sports coaches, and psychologists, you can steer through artistic difficulties and come out stronger on the other side. Here are a few proven techniques.
1. Talk in an informal setting
The Boston Red Sox are not a band, but any band would love to parallel their success. Manager Terry Francona, now with the Cleveland Indians, won two World Series titles with the Sox, in large part because he managed the egos and big personalities in his dugout without contributing any additional drama. Francona famously eschewed calling formal team meetings to sort things out, believing that such measures put people on edge and made them defensive, shutting down meaningful dialogue. Instead, team members with grudges or problems would drop into Francona’s office and talk things out informally, one on one, often over a board game or a cup of tea.
Band problems deserve a similar airing. Band meetings should be reserved for figuring out who’s working what gig for the band or deciding on cover art for a new CD. It’s often more productive to sit down in a diner or talk in the car on a drive than to bring everyone together for a formal band meeting. After all, it’s most likely two individuals who are at the heart of the matter. Wouldn’t it be great if those two could be on the same page before bringing it up with the whole group?
2. Be willing to let problem songs go
Creative types are all familiar with the problem piece. It could be a book, a song, a poem, or a sculpture, but the common element is that this one just isn’t coming together. Sometimes it’s just time to set the work down and move on to another project. Writers call this piece a “trunk novel,” something that stopped being fun or just stopped progressing and got locked away in a trunk to be finished later… or never.
When two musicians can’t see a song in the same way, it’s a good time to play the trunk card. It’s not worth having a falling out over four minutes of music in a two-hour set, is it?
3. Pay close attention during the audition process
In business, you’ll often hear about the 80/20 rule. It comes up in all different contexts: 80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your clients. 80 percent of work is completed by 20 percent of your employees. And of course, 80 percent of problems are caused by 20 percent of the people in your organization. In any population, drama, backbiting, and resentment seem to emanate from the same handful of people, whether it be a middle school classroom, police barracks, or nuclear submarine. For this reason, it’s incredibly important to be really careful who gets into your band in the first place.
You can use a handful of interactions to extrapolate what someone’s actually like on a daily basis. For example, if someone’s late to the audition and the first two rehearsals, expect to be waiting around for that person on a consistent basis, even if (or especially if) he swears that he’s “not usually like this.” It’s amazing how often the always-late bandmate is also the one who starts arguments about songs and always asks people to buy him lunch. What if that guy just wasn’t in your band?
4. Recognize a “break”
You might be an amazing punk-rock drummer. You’re comfortable with metal and hard rock, too. Maybe you can even play a 6/8 blues. But what if somebody suddenly called a swing tune, or wanted a rockabilly beat? Everybody has something they don’t know how to play, or at least don’t know how yet. This often happens when a songwriter tries something new, when a band plays a radically different feel, or when somebody creates a part in a strange time signature. At these times, musicians often “break” and can’t seem to play the part with the appropriate feel, speed, or technique.
This might be a good time to see item number two on this list and let that song float away… or at least table it long enough for people to practice a little. It’s also good to understand that sometimes people just don’t have the feel to play certain material, and that’s totally okay.Nobody asks Ozzy Osborne to sing “Good Morning, Heartache.” Don’t show up your bandmates by giving them a hard time about it.
5. Find the win-win situation
Everybody says they’re willing to compromise. But are they? How many people view a compromise as giving up what they want? The fact that others also lost doesn’t make this pill any easier to swallow. When you’re an artist with a creative vision, something almost like the vision in your head may not feel good enough. The bandmate who’s standing in your way most likely feels the same.
But in music, anything is possible. Is there a way to let both people win, or to find another option that’s even better than what you both have in mind? After all, you must have moments when one musician expands on and advances the ideas of another, making the music better. Use that collective genius to try new things until everybody feels like they got the win. That magic solution is out there in the universe somewhere. Try to capture it.
6. Try not playing the role you’ve settled into
Psychologists note that family groups and other conglomerations of people tend to fall into established roles. In your band, maybe your bass player always complains about long road trips. Your guitarist always wants to stay at the club for one more drink, but the keyboard player works an early day job and always wants to take off immediately after the show. We all get locked into these roles. If there’s strife and drama in your band, try to identify your role, and stop playing it.
If you’re the one who always tries to mediate between people who argue, try stepping back and just letting them hash it out. If people unconsciously try to push you back into your usual box, that’s a good sign that the role you’re playing could be burdensome and unhelpful, meaning that you’re onto something!
In the end, nearly all of us got into music because it was fun. Let’s not allow creative differences to get in the way.
Jesse Sterling Harrison is an author, recording artist, and part-time farmer. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, three daughters, and a herd of ducks.
Anyone trying to make a living with their creativity, from music to marketing, will tell you there are few times in life more frustrating than those moments when you feel as if your inspiration has run dry. You know the feeling. It’s usually something that hits you settle into work on your passion project at night, or perhaps just after you have arrived at the office, and try as you might to get something meaningful accomplished you pretty much just spin your wheels until you feel comfortable excusing yourself in order to spend the rest of the day in a ball of self-loathing introversion on your living room floor, praying to any deity willing to listen that you have enough episode of The West Wing left to avoid you work for one more day. We’ve all been there, or at least those of us who have been working long enough to burn through the first 50 or 100 ideas that we had, and if you feel you’ve yet to reach that point then trust me – It’s on the horizon.
We don’t bring up those uncomfortable times in order to scare. We face the same thing on a fairly regular basis, and we like to refer to it as what author Steven Pressfield calls “Resistance.” That is, a universal force that works against human creativity on a daily basis. We all face it in our own ways, much like we all fight our own battles most the world never knows of. There are a million anecdotes and essays on overcoming Resistance, and we’ve offered several here on this blog. Whether or not it works for you can only be learned through application. Yes, good old fashioned trial and error.
The next time you’re confronted with a creative roadblock in your professional life, take time away from your forced search for inspiration and try losing yourself in an alternate path. Develop an alternative path for yourself, your music, your agency, your label, or that secret side business you always hope to one day attempt. These adventures can sometimes be the source of new real life paths, such is the case with many so-called ‘side projects’ in music. Artists from various genres take a break from their day-to-day career to pursue other creative avenues just like anyone else, and sometimes their efforts lead to new financial avenues that certainly don’t hurt their bottom line.
Developing alternative paths to success for yourself can allow your mind to relax and consider options you might not have been able to adequately access when attempting to force creativity. Let’s explore a few examples to better illustrate this point:
Musicians –
Let’s say you’re the lead guitarist and songwriter for an aspiring rock band. Your first demo went over well with local audiences, and the second was good enough to help you secure a few opening slots on national tours when they roll through your region’s bigger venues. You may have even been able to tour, albeit without the benefits of a bus or guaranteed sell out crowds. Still, you’re making progress and you can feel your dreams of stardom starting to come together.
As you find yourself beginning to thinking about your third release, which would probably be your first full length, you discover you have hit a creative wall. Writing riffs and lyrics was never something you found all the difficult before, but for whatever reason everything you’re coming up with at this current point in time is clearly not good enough to help you get you ahead.
To clear your head and relax your thoughts it might be wise to consider an alternative career in, say, top 40 radio pop. Ask yourself, “What would it take to make it in pop music today?” Think about the songs and artists topping the charts, the themes found in their music, and what it is about tracks like Bieber’s “What Do You Mean” or The Weeknd’s “I Can’t Feel My Face” that keeps people reaching for the repeat button again and again. Some answers will come fast, but others will take time. Think about what these artists do that you do not and ask yourself whether or not their approach to marketing or songwriting could aide your personal efforts. Heck, you may even try penning a song or two. Why not? Trial and error is part of any healthy exploration.
By the time you realize how lost in your pretend career you’ve become enough time should have passed for you to return to your real work with clear eyes and an open mind. Remember the things you learned about yourself and your peers during your brainstorming session and use it to influence your future work.
Industry professionals (label owners, site editors, publicists) –
Maybe you’re a label owner, struggling to keep your costs low while hustling around the clock to not only bring attention to the talent on your roster, but also to sell records. The grind required to keep a small business afloat, let alone build a new music empire, can be devastating on the mind of a creative person. One the one hand, your spirit and soul desire constant exercise and exploration. On the other hand, you need to find what works for your business and stick with it.
On those days when you cannot seem to focus on emails, accounting, marketing, or anything in between, it might be best to allow yourself to unwind with by exploring an alternate professional path. Just like the example for musicians above, you should stay within the realm of what you do (aka – running/building a business), but what it is your fake company does is entirely up to you.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s say your secret wish is to start a subscription box company that offers consumers the chance to receive 1 new album in the mail each month, along with an explanation for the record’s selection. The first thing you need for this business is a name. You decide ‘New Music Monthly’ is a good name and from there set to outlining what would be needed in order to get your business off the ground. You need a web host, a logo, and a cost estimate sheet. You know boxes can be bought in bulk, but you will have to contact the labels/artists you wish to work with in order to know if they would be willing to offer you a discount in order for buying X amount of records. You also need startup cash, which can be earned through launching pre-orders for your first box.
After the basic business details are ironed out, you should then turn your focus to understanding the type of customer who would want this product. Assume that your first few music shipments will be products from your own label, then outline what kind of music fan would be interested in whatever release you might choose. Be specific. Narrow down your fans to a specific age group (teens, young adults, adults 25-35, 35+, senior citizens, etc). Do (or did) these people go to secondary school? Do they attend a lot of concerts?
Once you figure this out you can begin to brainstorming how to accomplish the difficult task of targeting these consumers. Do they frequent Facebook? Twitter? Would placement in a magazine be a wise choice? Depending on which method of outreach you choose, how much will it cost? Can you advertise this way regularly, or do you only have the budget for a single campaign? Again, be specific.
Once you iron out your faux business plan you will not only have a potential new path to financial success, but you will have inadvertently developed marketing tools that could also be used for the real problems facing your actual business. The target market for your faux company will likely be the same, or close to the same, as your actual business. The plans you made to reach those made up customers can be applied in one way or another to the customers you are hoping to reach in with your label. You will have more or less done the work you needed to do in a way that tricked your mind into doing work it might not have wanted to do otherwise.
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There are a million potential paths through life available to all of us, but far too few ever make much, if any, effort to explore their options. We would never advise you to abandon your dream(s), but we do believe that exploring alternative career paths can lead to success in your current field. What matters most is that you keep an open mind and try as much as you are able without jeopardizing your current professional/financial situation. You can use the examples laid out in the post to get you started, but don’t hesitate to make up your own adventure whenever time allows.
James Shotwell is the Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. He is also a professional entertainment critic, covering both film and music, as well as the co-founder of Antique Records. Feel free to tell him you love or hate the article above by connecting with him on Twitter. Bonus points if you introduce yourself by sharing your favorite Simpsons character.
