Food Trucks and Rainy Days

If you open a food truck, you do it knowing that on rainy days people aren’t going to want to stand in line at your food truck. It’s part of the deal.

It doesn’t do a lot of good to start an advertising campaign trying to convince people that water on your clothes isn’t a big deal and you’ll dry off pretty quickly and if nothing else it’s easy to just pack an extra set of clothes in your car.

All of that is true but it is not useful.

Rainy days are bad for standing in lines outdoors. And standing in lines outdoors are what food trucks rely on for revenue (and for marketing).

More importantly, the rain will end and the sun will come out again…what are you going to do on the sunny days?

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Late Night Drives

When you’re touring in a van and trailer you have late night drives.

The show got done at midnight and the hotel is booked at the next tour stop so there’s a four hour drive about to happen. The driver has to stay awake, they co-captain has to stay awake to make sure the driver stays awake and anyone else who wants to pitch in with conversation is a welcome addition to the cause.

Late night drives with late night conversations. The best. No thought, topic, opinion, hypothetical, musing or question is off limits because the whole point is simply to keep talking so we don’t all fall asleep and run into a ditch. The point isn’t to actually save the world…no one is saving the world at 3am on I65 in the middle of Alabama…it’s to spin up adrenaline and excitement by making and arguing your point, which will help usher the caravan safely down the road.

When you’re talking to stay alive, no need to hold back. If there’s a lull, you fill that lull.

But if it isn’t 3am and you’re not talking in order to stay alive, embrace the lull, no need to rush. Consider what the conversation is for and respond in a way that best serves the desired outcome.

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

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