First Monday of the month, new Hum Love playlist on Spotify and Apple
We all just want to write a song that someone needs to hear.
We all just want to hear a song we need to hear again.
And we all just want to click play or click record and be taken out of our surroundings by being completely immersed in them.
I’ll use basketball as an example.
For the people playing in the pickup game down the street, there are two things that they’ve realized that are worth pointing out…
- They are never going play in the NBA. They are not on that trajectory. They are not playing the game in order to climb the ladder to one day be the next LeBron James.
- And this is the far more interesting one…there’s an understanding that the respect and admiration and name recognition of the people at the pickup game itself is enough to feel the buzz of status and value. They’re not concerned with worldwide fame but rather ‘their world’ fame.
In music there’s a lot of confusion around these ideas…
Everyone playing in the little club down the street hopes and dreams of being whisked away to Madison Square Garden.
And for all the admiration and hand clapping they receive, the recognition is never enough…it must always be expanding.
What does it mean to be famous? One definition might be to be known and respected the places you go. That said…one way to achieve fame is to simply limit (or be content with) the number of places you go. That’s what the pickup basketball players understand.
I made it
vs.
I am making it
It's not about have you made it, but rather are you making it.
The making is the becoming, the process, the evolving within the present while drawing you into the future.
If you’re goal is to be making it…you’ve made it. How ironic.
Stop trying to make it.
Always be making it.
In a lot of ways it was easier when all it took was a big record label to solve our problems.
It was harder to get studio time, harder to get an album made, harder to get music out to people, impossible to be heard by the masses…but the path was clear and simple…get on a big record label…that’s your job if you want this to be your job.
And then came complaining about the big record label for a handful of decades…and now things are different.
Big labels are A path but not THE path. Now there is more than one path to get to where you want to go. It’s a blessing and a headache.
‘Will someone just tell me what I need to do next?!’…The answer to the question isn’t clear cut anymore. The answer to the question forces creativity and vision and risk and a budget.
Maturity allows you to see what you can take from your old thing and apply it to your new thing.
And there’s a lot of overlap. More than we often realize.
I’ve had friends decide to leave the music business but get really worried because the music biz is ‘all they know’. It all translates. It all applies.
One of the reasons I started this blog years ago was to help people in the music business see and understand the layers beneath what’s going on so that whether someone is in the business for two weeks or twenty years it’s worthwhile…because the underlying principles and ideas can be applied almost anywhere in our culture.