Ten More Like This

When I got out of college and was really diving into a music career for the first time, I recorded a song I’d written and I emailed it to a guy I really respected in the music business. 

His reply was, ‘This is fantastic, do ten more like this and you’ll be all set’.

Ten more like this? Are you serious? I’m an artist, I want to go many directions. I follow the muse. I need freedom. I need to explore. Don’t put me in a box. 

I didn’t know any better. 

As fans of music when we find an artist with a song we like we hope that their other stuff sounds a lot like the stuff we like. Reputation is a powerful thing. And reputation is built (in part) by respecting the idea of familiarity and consistency.

Use the palette that’s creating magic. When you find your colors, keep painting with them.

 

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Having Fun

It’s not always going to be fun.

It’s what makes you a professional rather than a hobbyist.

Because you’re in it for more than just fun. If you’re going to have a set of problems, these are the problems you’ve chosen. It’s going to be hard. It isn’t always going to be fun. But the work that you’ve chosen will continue to be there. Ready for you to take another step forward.

If a hobby stops being fun, you should get a new hobby.

If your work isn’t fun for an hour or a day or a season, no need to worry. Keep going.

 

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Nightcap 27

It’s hard to look cool when the sun’s in your eyes.

The mattress pad companies gotta be begging the mattress companies to go a little thinner.

It’s no coincidence that our phones are just a little too uncomfortable to leave in our pockets while sitting down. You sit down, you have to take it out, it’s out so you get on it...

It’s funny to accuse someone of being a contrarian because you’ll always get to be right.

Everyone’s Britta filter is flashing red 

It’s always, ‘No we don’t have anymore in the back, everything we have is out on the floor’. Then what in the world do you keep back there???

»» Yes, this is the 27th installment. Twenty six have come before.

 

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Complaint Cards And The Suggestion Box

I doubt you have actual complaint cards or a suggestion box in your line of work but if you did…

If you’re going to fill out a complaint card, might as well think up a solution and fill out something for the suggestion box too.

But if the suggestion is something you can start carrying out yourself, why are you wasting time filling out paperwork?

 

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Over. Under. Free.

At the very beginning you under think it. You have to. You don’t know enough to do anything else. There’s a lovely naivety when you start. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Then you get into it. Here begins the over thinking. Drinking from a firehose. Sprinting the marathon. Seeing what you don’t know. Every detail seems worth taking an elongated detour for. Forcing ‘making it look natural’.

And then slowly, over time, you break free…having learned a lot from the over thinking but now free from it. You can see what you know and what you don’t…and you can ride that line with confidence…ever expanding it.

 

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple