Music Career

Everyone can release a song.

Not everyone can have a career in music.

If you want a career in music

you release songs consistently

you put on a great show even when you don’t feel like it

you have a keen eye for hiring people smarter than you

you get tired of showing up but continuously get re-energized

you love the work

you understand that the extra special magical (yet fleeting) music feeling is a blend of skill, consistency, chemistry and luck

and you understand that a huge measure of success is simply whether or not you get to keep going

oh and you must learn how to make real actual money…how much? Enough money to keep going.

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Crazy Train Tone

If you play the opening riff of Crazy Train on an acoustic guitar, it’s a totally different song than if you ride the lightning through a Marshall full stack.

It turns out tone matters.

How you communicate changes what you communicate.

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Telling Friends

You want them to tell their friends about you. So what are they going to tell them?

If there’s nothing to talk about they won’t.

If there’s something to talk about, turn it up.

When someone says to you to “My friends told me about you, they said…”, what follows should come as no surprise. Almost like you planned it.

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

En Route

The good thing about driving from Nashville to LA is that at every point on the journey that isn’t LA, it’s understood that the caravan is simply en route.

There isn’t confusion or worry about what role the other stops play in regards to the overall journey.

And you don’t blame Memphis or Oklahoma City for not being LA.

The problem we all run into sometimes is we forget we’re en route.

We think we’re stuck here forever and we blame Albuquerque for not being Hollywood.

But this isn’t forever. It never is. We’re moving. We are en route.

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Connecting Like You Hope You Will Have

When you go to sell something to your audience you’ll wish you had been more diligent and consistent with interacting with your audience starting a long time ago.

It’s a classic artist blunder. The artist ramps up audience interaction about two weeks before a big announcement and expects a huge conversion rate. And what’s more is that the audience is smart…they can tell what’s going on here.

So the future you hopes that the you right now will be more diligent and consistent with your audience. That you will care all the time, not just when you need clicks and sales.

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Remembering Quickly and Memorizing

Remembering quickly is different than memorizing.

Remembering quickly is what you do when you’re singing karaoke. It’s all there but you’ve got to remember it moment by moment. It’s a constant nano-second by nano-second version of ‘ok what’s next?…oh yeah I remember’.

Memorizing is different. When it’s memorized you can do something in addition to what you’ve memorized. You can build on it. You can sing the song AND perform it. You know the words so now you can choose what to emphasize.

(A student driver is constantly remembering how to drive. That’s why they have the sticker on the back and we give them extra room. But once it’s all memorized, it’s time to roll the windows down and enjoy the ride.)

If remembering quickly is all that is needed, there’s no need to memorize.

But some things are worth memorizing so we can do something with the new freedom that comes on the other side of the memorizing.

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple