The Life We Hide

When musicians bump into one another at shows or parties, we like to catch up on each other’s lives:

Musician #1: “Hey mate, how’s it goin’?”

Musician #2: “Amazing!  The Jerry Rigs just sold out The Turf last Saturday. Completely bonkers!  How ‘bout you?”

Musician #1: “Great! Zippers Down just won Manchester’s best new band contest at The Roadhouse!”

Musician #2: “Fantastic!  So it’s all brilliant then?”

Musician #1: “Yeah, and for you too!”

Sound familiar?  This kind of victory volley is customary between scenesters; it’s a friendly way for us promote our bands and ourselves.  We want our peers to know that we’re in demand, and we’re careful always to make the best pitch.

But even our most truthful pitch is a highly edited version of our actual life story, and there’s one chapter in particular that we almost always leave out: our day job.    

Musicians wear their day jobs like braces on their teeth – awkward, painful things they hide by keeping their mouth shut.  Our day job reminds us that we haven’t yet “made it.”  And we worry we’ll lose credibility with our peers if they find out how much time we spend behind a cash register.  So unless we’re scheduling rehearsals or recording sessions, we don’t talk about our day job.  We’d rather let the world believe that for us, every day is a boundless creative adventure, and that music is our only livelihood.

Day Jobs Are Like Bellybuttons

But why should the topic of day jobs be taboo?  Far from disgraceful things, day jobs are life-giving umbilical cords that nourish the nascent dreams of creative risk-takers.  The Wright Brothers had day jobs – bicycle repairmen – while they worked out their design for the world’s first airplane.  The American Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, Charles Ives, was a lifelong insurance salesman, writing all his masterpieces after five and on weekends.  The great Czech writer, Franz Kafka was an insurance man too.  Kafka was known to spend entire nights writing, and returning sleepless the next morning to what he derisively referred to as his brotberuf – a German word meaning “bread job.”

Artists are notoriously conflicted about their day jobs.  We know we need them in order to do the thing we love most, but we resent them all the same.  We dream of the day when we no longer need our brotberuf, when we can spend all our time doing only what we love.

In truth, however, that day rarely, if ever, comes.  Sure, we can get to a point in our artistic careers when we no longer have to flip burgers – and that’s a happy day, indeed!  But if “day job” is defined as the work we do for cash so we can afford to follow our bliss, then even the world’s most successful artists take on day jobs, and do so throughout their careers.

Professional artists always have made creative compromises in exchange for well paying work.  For centuries, artists like Michelangelo made their livings creating art for the Roman Catholic Church, which always had the final say over how the artist’s work should be presented.  Today, famous architects often are forced to cut corners in their precious designs in order to accommodate a building’s practical requirements, and top sculptors accept tasteless assignments from wealthy patrons.  Within the music industry, recording artists routinely sign contracts that give their labels the power to reject tracks that “don’t meet minimum standards of commercial viability,” and every day, big name producers make records with flash-in-the-pan groups they know are destined for the bargain bin.

Artists almost never get to the point where they can create whatever, however, and whenever they want.  In order to feed our families, we’re constantly balancing creative freedom with commercial compromise, and the situation is the same for professionals and non-professionals alike.

For musicians, day jobs are like belly buttons – we know everyone has one, even if we can’t see it through their trendy t-shirt.  Understanding this, it’s easier for us to feel ok about our own day job, and we can begin to appreciate the various ways our brotberuf benefits our creative life.

The Value Of A Day Job

Naturally, most of us would rather suffer the creative compromises that success brings than work the opening shift at Starbucks.  But there’s no shame in slinging coffee.  In fact, our day job, no matter how menial, enriches our creative lives in important ways.

First, our day job feeds our creative process.  Musicians are reclusive by nature, but our creative process craves real life experience to thrive.  Our day job ensures we stay connected with the living, breathing world.  We observe co-workers and customers, we see how they use language, how they dress, what’s they think is hip, what books they read, and what music they listen to.  Along the way we gain a wider perspective on life.  Our day job helps to make us a well-rounded person, which in turn helps to make us a well-rounded musician.

Our day job also injects much needed structure and discipline into our creative lives.  Musicians often complain that their day job interferes with their musical pursuits.  In fact, it usually has the opposite effect.  The regularity of our day job forces us to establish rigorous practice, rehearsal, and recording schedules. In order to work around our day job, we’re forced to learn how to focus and to manage our time, two essential skills for any player who hopes to make music their livelihood.

Finally, our day job tests our ability to persevere in a difficult industry like ours.  Fulfilling as it can be to be a full-time musician, there are days, weeks, and months when the work feels, well, a lot like a day job.  Muddling through layers and layers of record label bureaucracy, the tedium of promoting your group’s music and yourself, the endless hustle for gigs, changing tires on the tour van, coping with rejection – these are the situations in which you find yourself asking, “Is it all worth it?”  You can learn a lot about your capacity to overcome these inevitable frustrations simply by examining your attitude toward your current day job.  If you’re in the habit of showing up late to work and often have a negative attitude, you’ll bring the same defeatist approach to overcoming the challenges you face as a professional musician.  On the other hand, if you find that you’re able to sustain a positive mind-set while, say, cleaning septic tanks five days a week, you’ll probably do just fine in the this business.

Eyes On The Prize

Day jobs exist to help creative people realize their dream job.  This is a good thing to remember.  Sometimes musicians take on what they call a day job, but it’s actually a safety net, a plan-B if the music thing doesn’t work out.  If a player takes on a safety net job understanding full well that’s what it is, great.  But many times, musicians who are trying consciously to prioritize their creative career are drawn subconsciously to safety net jobs, because they’re so afraid of failing as an artist.

The problem with safety net jobs is that rather than facilitating an artist’s creative life, they compete with it.  Telltale signs that a job is a safety net are that it involves lots of responsibility, it has fixed hours, and it pays really well. These qualities don’t make for a good day job.  Musicians require flexibility in our work schedule, and the more money we make in our day job, the more likely we’ll be lured away from our long-term passion by a short-term reward.

So while the dullness of our day job embarrasses us in the eyes of other hipsters, that very quality is what makes our day job so compatible with our dream chasing.  The perfect day job is more of a life raft than a yacht – it ain’t stylish, and it may even leak a little, but it offers us all the support we need while we wait for our ship to come in.