Your Future Kid

In five years or ten or twenty years you’ll have a child old enough to understand a little bit about the world.

Enough for you to play them Hey Jude for the first time and they either fall in love or roll their eyes.

Along with Hey Jude you’ll show them your music too.  The best songs you ever worked on, some that never got released, some you wrote for your high school sweetheart.  

And you’ll tell the stories of how the songs came to be, the funny or weird things that happened when you were tracking them in the studio.

This will be magical.

You know what you will not show them?

You will not pull out your old catalog of Tweets or Instagram posts and show them “See, this one got 500 likes!…And this one got 525!!!….and THIS one almost got 600!!!!!!”

You won’t show them the magic of Hey Jude and then show them the really awesome Likes and Follows you had once.

Your music is a body of work you can (almost) always be proud of.  Both now and when you show your kid.

Keep making great music.  I hope you get the Likes and the Follows too, but keep making great music. 

Your (future) kid and I want to hear it.

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I’m always interested in your perspective, whether affirming or dissenting. Continue the conversation anytime: gabethebassplayer@gmail.com

You Work Hardest When It’s Your Project

You work hardest when it’s your project. 

When you have skin in the game. 

So leading a project, a business, a band, you can either work against that i.e. trying to get people to work hardest on a project that isn’t theirs…Or you can work on trying to let your project be their project too. 

Because then you don’t need to try so hard to get them to work their hardest.

If more than one person believes it’s their own project, that means there is more than one person giving their absolute best for the project.  And that’s better than it just being MY project (and discovering the loneliness that lies there).

But we forget that.

We often expect people to do things FOR us because ‘its their job to do this for me’: book a show, promote a record, play a session, etc.

But what if instead of trying to get someone to DO something for you out of duty, you could entice them to BELIEVE and thereby do something WITH you out of that belief?

Duty and obligation vs belief and community.

Yes, there is probably a time for all of those, but you get to decide what you spend your time building upon.

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I’m always interested in your perspective, whether affirming or dissenting. Continue the conversation anytime: gabethebassplayer@gmail.com

Pre Release Publicity

We’re getting smarter. 

We can sense if the publicity we’re encountering is before or after the thing (the music) has been released. 

And 99.9% of the time in the music biz, the publicity comes before the music.  And it’s crickets after it’s out.

It’s because when the music isn’t out yet, the artist PR reps can control the narrative!

Duh.

Once the music is out you can’t position and hype hype hype and tell everyone how good it’s GOING to be.  Once the music is out anyone who actually cares becomes aware of how good it IS.

The albums we hear about after they come out, those are usually the good ones.

But if you don’t hear anything after an album comes out, then you know that everything you heard about it before it came out was spoon fed to the outlets straight from the artists camp.  It was all smoke.  No follow through.

The music is the thing.  So what if you have a great review on whatever blog.  If there isn’t a link to the music so I can find out for myself, then I know it’s just noise, and you’re hiding behind pre-release publicity.

We all just want to hear a song we need to hear again.

If you have it, or a batch of them, then the release date will serve as the start date for publicity and promo, not the end date.

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I’m always interested in your perspective, whether affirming or dissenting. Continue the conversation anytime: gabethebassplayer@gmail.com

Artist And Audience Worrying

You’re worried about 

the notes

the tracks 

the chords

the words

the crowd size

the volume of the applause

the screw up the guitar player keeps making

and yet…

…the audience is worried about 

was I right in choosing to come here

do I have good taste in music and is it being affirmed

am I going to feel cool about telling my friends I was here


The audience doesn’t have the power to make an artists worries go away, but the artist has an unbelievable opportunity to do things, to act in a way, to lead, to put on a show that DOES cause the audiences worries to go away.

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I’m always interested in your perspective, whether affirming or dissenting. Continue the conversation anytime: gabethebassplayer@gmail.com

Triggering The Help

As an new-ish artist, if you’ve been working and writing and connecting and helping for a while but haven’t played a show for all these (industry) people to come out to, you might think about doing it.

People like going to shows of people they like.

So if you’ve been workin it for the last twelve months making good impressions everywhere you go…then that’s a lot of people walking around with a positive vibe about you.  And these people can help you (and you can help them).

A show is a great way to trigger the help.

You can get people to promise you a lot of favors in the moment if they come out to your gig and have a fun night.  The trick is making sure those promises come to fruition…which is an art unto itself.

But the show is a point of excitement.  It gets peoples brains vibrating at a higher rate on your behalf.

If you haven’t in a while…PLAY.  Good things will happen.

p.s. That last sentence “good things will happen”…as in: good things will be happening, and you must be disciplined to open your eyes, see, and keep paying attention, learn and take action.



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I’m always interested in your perspective, whether affirming or dissenting. Continue the conversation anytime: gabethebassplayer@gmail.com

Leaning On Traps

Rather than getting good at decision making we look for how we’re trapped so we can have our hand forced and then complain about it all.

We’d rather seek out a responsibility-bucking trap than a responsibility-full decision.

Probably none of us do this on purpose because in theory we value our freedom to make our own choices and claim to be beholden to no one.

But in practice it seems to be different.  As the complaining is rampant in this business.

As with anything, getting good at decision making (and therefore taking responsibility) takes time and you’re going to fail a lot along the way to getting good.  And the times you fail will really actually hurt.  Hurt you and the people you work with and live with.

That’s why it feels so much safer to sit in a trap instead: (in theory) you don’t risk hurting anyone by your poor decision making skills.

Make a decision to stop leaning on traps.

p.s. I’ve found that most traps in business are merely perceived and not real.  

p.p.s. Increasing your number of options or possible solutions is a great way to work yourself out of a trap if you want to be out of a trap.


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I’m always interested in your perspective, whether affirming or dissenting. Continue the conversation anytime: gabethebassplayer@gmail.com