Every artist has to make tough decisions throughout the course of his career. The world isn’t what it was even fifty years ago and though the opportunities are more plentiful than ever, the restrictions we take on for a multitude of reasons remain. One of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make was about The Day Job.
It’s such a cliche now. With the death of the system of patronage that Mozart lived with through the bohemian ideal and up to the artist as a Jack Keroac style wanderer there has been a thread that is tacitly accepted: the artist will take as given that his living will come from something other than his creative work.
In the 20th century, the academy took on the arts. An artist who wanted to eat was well advised to take up teaching. The success of this, with a good deal of time in the rear-view mirror, has been limited. Not all great artists are great teachers. And not all great teachers are great artists. If the aim of a university is to educate, then it might not be served by hiring a great artist who is a poor teacher. But if the aim is something deeper, such as the prestige that comes with housing a great artist and supporting the furthering of the work and research, well, that’s an entirely different story.
The time that I was making my decision about how I would feed and clothe myself was the dot com boom. I have a knack for coding and can translate from nerd to normal and back again. These are skills that were and still are in demand. Teaching was something that I truly enjoyed, but the politics surrounding something that I loved so dearly put me off. I decided to live a more explicitly dual life. I mean that in the sense that someone who is a professor and an artist is living a dual life but it doesn’t look like it. Teaching painting and painting are two different things. Someone who spends ten hours a day teaching studio classes probably isn’t making much headway with her own work. Very few people identify that split, so let’s be clear: teaching music isn’t composing in the same way that writing software isn’t composing. But at the end of the day, one of them pays better.
I enjoy software development. It tickles a part of my brain that needs attention. I really do love the challenges that come part and parcel with the industry. It’s fun, but it’s not music. It’s not love. It’s work. And it’s work in the same way that recording commercials was work and writing music for videos was work. It does pay. And it does further my goals of creating music. But why not something else? Why not suffer for my art? I mean, where’s that Byronic ideal?
I have a family.
My wife and children are my entire world. I have no idea how I lived without them and I can’t imagine doing anything that would get in the way of them having everything that they need to be happy and healthy. Are there days when I would rather be composing than sitting at work? Sure. But there are no days that I don’t want my kids to eat. There is never a time that I don’t want to have a roof over their heads. And I never want them to worry about the basics.
So how does that work? How do I satisfy the drive that I have to do something that I honestly believe I was put on the earth to do? One hour at a time.
8 PM to 9 PM is my time. I hide in my studio and record, arrange, and compose. Do I wish I had 5 or 6 hours? Of course! But there is a world of difference in the way I look at the world when I acknowledge what I have versus what I want. So I bust my butt to do as much as I can with that hour. I think about that hour in my spare cycles. On my commute. At lunch. I prepare for it so that when I get there I am all business. I set goals. I concentrate. I focus. I get things done! Amazing things can happen in sixty minutes. And instead of lamenting it as ONLY an hour I turn it around to having a WHOLE hour! The difference is staggering. For example, I wrote two songs tonight in less than an hour.
We live in a time when people are fractured. Our lives are compartmentalized and yet there is a continuity in who and what we want to be. Listening to my gut, keeping my mind on what I need, and accepting the fact that there will always be work has created a place for my music and dreams in my very real life.
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